brainwagon

Okay, our Replicator 2 went back online this week, and I decided to give printing my Arduino bumper another try. Since the last time, I have revised the program and code a couple of times. I was concerned that the various bits of solder protruding from the bottom of the board would need extra relief [...]

Earlier this week, I tried to print out the first version of my Arduino bumper. Sadly, our Replicator 2 had a malfunction mid print, and it’s still offline (a problem with the temp sensor) but that doesn’t mean I’ve been entirely stationary. I mentioned on twitter that I was having trouble using the minkowski operator [...]

Last week, I got a chance to experiment with a Replicator 2, and printed some brackets for my robot project. I designed them using OpenSCAD, which is kind of a scripting language for solid shapes. It can export in STL format, which I then used MakerWare to drive the Replicator 2. The picture at the [...]

A few days ago, I heard that Jayson Tautic (@tautic), manufacturer and purveyor of a interesting electronic prototyping goodies, had put up an interesting offering: a small PIR (passive infra red) motion detector. I’m always up for a new sensor to play with, so I ordered a pair for fun, and they arrived on Friday. [...]

Last year, I spent a little bit of time to create a set of blinking Christmas lights that I could mount in a hat. It was powered by an ATtiny13 and mounted in an Altoids tin. While setting up my Christmas tree last weekend, I found them, and they still work. In case you missed [...]

Just a quickie Arduino project that I ran across this morning: Sudoku on the Arduino. It’s pretty cute, since it uses the Arduino tvout library to generate video, meaning that you can display and play on your TV set. Neat! The only real description of the project is inside the zip file which you can [...]

Last night, I met with Nanode creator Ken Boak and Chris Jefferies from tinajalabs.com at Cafe Actual in Berkeley for the inaugural IoTBayArea meetup. IoT groups are already going strong in many cities like London, Amsterdam, and NYC, but now that Ken is operating here in the SF Bay Area, he wanted to get a [...]

I’ve been kind of busy and distracted lately, so I haven’t had much time to get any embedded microcontrollers. I did dust off an Arduino FIO that I never played with, and charged up a 1000maH LiPo battery to power it. While it was blinking, I dug out my Xbees and started thinking of a [...]

The microcontrollers of today are in many ways superior to the simple eight bit computers that I learned to program as a teenager, but one way in which most of them are decidedly inferior is that they have only a very limited number of actual peripherals. After all, even my simplest Atari 400 back in [...]

Yesterday I was looking (sadly unsuccessfully) for some BPW32 photodiodes that I know I have somewhere, when I ran across some of 434 Mhz transmitter modules from Sparkfun (now a retired part) that I had never used. These little $4 transmitters are commonly used for remote-keyless access or similar applications. They have just four pins: [...]

Roger, G3XBM built a simple beacon for light communication using a K1EL beacon keyer chip and a handful of other components. I didn’t have any of those chips around, but I did have some Atmel ATtiny13s lying around. I hacked this simple program together to send Morse code in two different ways: on pin PB1 [...]

Last night’s hacking adventure was inspired by a couple of recent posts from Roger, G3XBM having to do with light based communication. The first was his simple beacon design: it’s just a keyer chip, a MOSFET, a voltage regulator, and some (beefy) current limiting resistors. Roger used this beacon to do some non-line-of-sight communications via [...]

Okay, I finally got some time to record a video about a simple little webserver project I hacked together earlier this week. My wife Carmen got me a Nanode kit from Wicked Device around Christmas. These are Arduino compatible development boards which include a Microchip ENC28J60 Ethernet device to enable web connectivity. One slight drawback [...]

Ken Boak was nice enough to gift me with a pair of Nanodes when he was out visiting last month. Much to my embarrassment, I haven’t had much time to play with them, so tonight I tried to do a bit more research to figure out how I could use them in some more advanced [...]

A couple of my projects have used the tiniest of the Atmel ATtiny chips: the ATtiny13. I have written one or two programs in assembler for these chips, but I prefer to work with avr-gcc whenever possible. What’s amazing is that you actually can use a sophisticated C compiler to generate code for such a [...]