It’s alive!

Just got the motor shield today, soldered it up and wired it into the chassis. A couple tweaks to the code and I have USB control.

Now, to strap my airsoft gun to it and go into mass production.

Robot updated again

I have the code written for the motor shield that I am using. It is completely untested as the shield is still in America someplace. LadyAda did some fantastic work with the shield and the library for it. Makes it so simple to control motors.

Version 3 of the code here.

Robot Progress

I have the motors moving on my robot chassis. Granted, it is me giving the motors power directly and not using any form of computer control but at least i know the motors work. My earlier hypothesis about the motor control circuitry was false. The switching part of the original circuit doesn’t make any sense to me (though my electronics-fu is poor) so I decided to probe the motors themselves. Switching direction is as simple as switching polarity. This makes my homebrew controller more difficult to create so I have decided to use the motor controller shield for the arduino. Yeah, its not as hacky as I would have liked but it is better than me accidently frying something.

Robot updated

Just a quick post to say that my robot code has been updated to communicate with my arduino. Learned some more about Python as well, mostly relating to how badly I suck at it. Can’t get object orientation to work with modules but objects are not necessary for this. Straight procedural code is all that is required, for the moment.

Download robot code

Download arduino code

Tv-B-Gone glove

I have had a great idea (by my standards anyway). Those in the geek world should know about the tv-b-gone created by Mitch Aldman. It is designed to turn off about 90% of televisions with a single button press. My plan is to take that idea and turn it into a glove for fun and games.

Implementation

Take a glove, preferably fabric and one that you do not mind potentially destroying. Push the legs of an infrared LED through the tip of the index finger. Sew/solder some conductive thread to it and thread through the glove to the back of the palm. Do the same with a micro switch on the thumb. Hook the threads into a Lilypad Arduino and secure the Lilypad to the back of the glove.

Usage

Wear some sort of cloak to make yourself look like a monk or a Bedouin. Walk into a store that has a wall of TVs. Point at the TV wall with your index finger, say something about TVs being evil and covertly press your thumb against your index finger. TVs should turn off and send people running scared due to the scary cloaked figure manipulating technology in an unknown way.

The only difficulties I foresee is getting the codes to turn off televisions and getting arrested. Aside from that, I figure this should be very fun and educational.

First draft motor control

Just made an initial stab at some arduino software to control the motors of the tank thing. Nothing fancy, just some functions that move forward, back and do turning. I haven’t coded reverse turning yet, didn’t occur to me until now.

The syntax of the code is C style so those who can code in C, C++, Java etc should be able to read and understand this no problem.

There is no real code that does anything at the moment. I plan to add serial communication to the code so it can interface with the python code I wrote a while ago. Lacking an arduino makes development difficult and the kit I want is out of stock.