Coming Soon: A New Domain, a New Build
Holy crap! It has been a long time since I posted. I have been sort of all over the place with my Arduino stuff lately so I think it is about time for a bit of a recap to get me back on track with the old robot blog! More after the break!
New Domain Coming Soon!
I loved the new name for my robot so much that I bought Derpbot.com! It is still just parked, but in the next few weeks, I will be moving the whole kit and caboodle over there.
New Skillzors!
I have been practicing a few electrical engineering basics, most notably the shift register, which I have grown quite fond of. What a sweet way to control a ton of digital pins! So far, I have set up my 74HC595 shift register to control a 10 segment led and a standard LCD display as well. Cool stuff! If anyone is interested in the code, I would be happy to provide it. The LCD code might be useful, as I took the standard Arduino 3Wire Example and modified it to work with a 7HC595 chip. I have also been practicing using Fritzing a bit, so here are both of the aforementioned projects as Fritzing drawings:
10 Segment Display + 74HC595
LCD + 74HC595
Lilypad
I have been messing around with my Lilypad stuff lately, just kind of trying to figure out a nice way to work with it that does not involve sewing and unsewing things over and over&ellipsis; Currently, I have just left it at an Open Heart kit sewn to a Lilypad with a felt between the two, lol. That is good enough for me, and it gives me a portable Arduino, which is always nice.
TouchOSC
Possibly the coolest thing I have played with was OSC. I got the TouchOSC app on my iPhone, and so far it seems like a great way to pass commands to my Arduinos. I was able to have toggle and pushbuttons turning LEDs on and off, plus fade an LED using PWM. All just reading OSC events in Processing, then passing bytes to Arduino over serial. That last part is exactly like my current robot controller. In fact, I have a TouchOSC controller set up on my iPad, just waiting to assume control of the Derpbot!
#1 Coolest thing EVER!
I got me a 3D printer coming soon! I have been spending a lot of time trying out different 3d modelling software, everything from OpenSCAD to Sketchup to AutoCAD. Currently I think I like AutoCAD the best, although I am really digging OpenSCAD since you can make shapes using only maths, instead of fiddling about with a 3D interface. I think I am going to be sticking to AutoDesk at first, just because it is so polished and has a really killer feature set. If you have any tips for me on 3D modeling for printing, I would love to hear about it in the comments!
#1 Most annoying thing
I have been trying to wrap my head around what the changes in Arduino 1.0 mean for my own Arduino works. The biggest thing is the changes to Serial – practically everything that makes the Derpbot work in the first place is the fact that I am transmitting bytes. Soon I will face the task of changing all of my stuff so that it works correctly in 1.0. For now I am going to stay with 0023 until I can make sure that all my code (libraries especially) will run in 1.0. I wish they had done things a bit differently, but I suppose that they must have a good reason for doing what they did. Hopefully there won’t be many more modifications to code in the upcoming versions.
More soon!
I am in the process of tearing down the current Derpbot to make way for a new, even sleeker version, so expect a nice update on him soon. I will also try to control him using TouchOSC between now and then.
Cheers!
A
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