May 2008
5 posts
Totally forgot to post any up the stuff relating to the automated whiteboard drawer/dancing Beaker project. I was going to do that know, but got locked out of my apartment and can’t get in until tomorrow (day of commencement…great timing).
Circuit diagrams, pictures, video (maybe), and post-mortem shall appear tomorrow.
Processing ported to Javascript →
You can easily halve the number of pins being used for an H-bridge control and get some added safety using an inverter.
Usually you’ll want to avoid having both legs of the h-bridge set the same. So just run 1 line from the board to the input1 and run that line’s inverted value to input2.
So all in all for 2 motors and 1 H-bridge you only need 4 wires. 1 for turning the motor...
April 2008
9 posts
Servos
For the whiteboard drawing project I’m going to need 2 servos. I have an old printer that I’m going to disassemble and hopefully salvage some useable servos. I need to do that quickly in case I need to go buy/order servos.
Some information on the HiTec HS-311’s from class:
DataSheet
I’m controlling it with an Arduino Servo Library which allows such nice calls as...
WatchWiiWhorld
Ties together GlovePie (bluetooth), Whorld (open-source visualizer for sacred geometry), and a Wiimote, all through a Virtual MIDI port.
Invisibility Hoodie
Spent some hours in the lab wiring the hoodie up. Started by transfering all of the wiring over from the breadboard to a perfboard. Unfortunately it looks like the heat from soldering fried the two 555 timers.
I’m gonna spend time going through with the Multimeter more to see if I can find anything wrong, but so far everything looks fine, so probably my horrid soldering.
As for the...
LM555 Timer Circuits →
Diagrams and Calculators Galore for the McGuyver 555 Timer.
Soldering a Perf Board →
Nice little guide for how to solder on perfboards.
One thing, if you plan on putting it all in a project box, make sure the board will fit before you soldering.
Stupidity Loves Company
So, after way too much wiring, rewiring, and sketching of schematics I realize that all of my problems were related to not remembering how a breadboard works. *smacks head* I forgot that the long lines on the edges are split in the middle, as marked by a W. 2 tiny jumpers and its all golden.
This is what I get for trying to have a nicely laid out breadboard
WHITEVOID →
Amazing website design aside, these guys have some great projects.
Don’t miss the contortionist on the toneladder or the midi gun
LED Series/Parallel Array Wizard →
Figures out resistors and various configurations of LEDs.
Really useful for designing arrays of the same type of LEDs.
March 2008
11 posts
Electric Origami →
Take some paper, cut out circuit traces from tin foil, attach the tin foil to paper, and fold it up like origami, and you get a papercraft circuit.
Just imagine a bowl full of these things in different colors.
Processing and Arduino
Arduino Processing Interface Library
Sweet find, for using Arduino from within Processing. Rather than just relying on the Serial Events to get data in, using this library you can directly call analogRead, digitalWrite, and lots of others.
Which makes me wonder, would it be possible to just completely merge Processing and Arduino together?
Graph 3 Values (as from an Accelerometer)
I threw together something for graphing the X Y Z values from the accelerometers, assuming we ever get them wired up correctly. My partner has the accelerometer right now, so I can’t test with it, so I’m just using input from the mouse for the 3 graphs.
This is based on the Processing MouseSignals example and the Sensors Tutorial I mentioned previously.
Code:
/**
* 3 Val Graph
*
*...
Working with Analog Input →
Wiki’d Tutorial on Analog Input, has code examples for Processing and Flash to display input.
Scaling and Smoothing
This was brought up during the display of our blink projects. Since the board’s ADC represents 0-1023 for the AnalogIn’s it would be useful to scale between ranges of values.
On a related note analog tends to be a bit noisy, so smoothing out sensor jitter is helpful. The Arduino Code Playground has 2 useful smoothing functions and 2 mapping functions.
Blink Project
For our first project we were supposed to combine analog & digital leading to some kind of LED blinking. I have a simple On/Off switch, a flex sensor, and 3 LEDs. When the flex sensor is at rest (straight) the yellow LED blinks, bend it forward and it flashes green, bend it back and it flashes red. This also takes (via serial) to a Processing script which has a small rectangle that changes...
Wallet Destructive Tendancies
Browsing through Sparkfun its really tempting to just start wantonly buying items. Things I really want to play with, but probably shouldn’t yet: 20 Channel GS405 Helical GPS Receiver Active Matrix OLED 2.83” with Touchscreen Color Light SensorThe color light sensor is only $10, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be ordering that. Just need to do a little homework this weekend to...
Project 1
Make an LED do some sort of blinking involving analog and digital inputs. Things I grabbed from the lab: switch flex sensor some LEDsNothing too fancy as of yet.
Up and Running (on Vista)
On Vista (just like with Processing) the Arduino environment forces out Aero which is a bit annoying. However Vista found drivers for the FTDI USB chipset as soon as I plugged in the board, so I never had to manually point to the drivers from the Arduino download. Using the LED blink example sketch I have a nice blinking LED. The Diecimila board has an LED on the board, right above the TX/RX...
