This week, I have been mostly working on…
Taking things apart, and sometimes putting them back together again.
Want to make your own laser harp?
Full plans, schematics and source code are available here...
Or the WiiMote Theremin?
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Nicolas has been working diligently on getting his version of the laser running.
I’m pleased to say that he’s succeeded – well done!
(It looks so much neater than mine!)
Just got the Dalek dome reassembled before the weekend runs out.
It’s a royal pain in the butt to put everything together and takes at least two people to do it.
Uses C#, Xbee, Arduino, and Sabertooth motor controller.
Someone emailed me to ask if that picture in the header is me…
It’s actually this guy:
He’s a character called Jesse, and every week on The Fast Show he would report on what he’d been eating (Jesse’s Diets), or later on, what he’d been wearing (Jesse’s Fashion Tips).
…and yes, that is the actor that plays Ron Weasley’s Dad.
Click the image for the big picture
…using magnets.
I ordered 2-3 of these the other day. I thought that they might come in handy for the Dalek. Essentially the chip can tell the orientation of a magnetic field placed underneath it (ie. a magnet).
So add a motor, arduino and motor controller, and hey presto – one seriously powerful continuous rotation servo motor.
The prospect of all surface mount components put me off at first, and the chip was really fiddly to get seated correctly, but it looks like it’s working OK.
Now I just have to build another one and install them both in the Dalek dome…
Oh yes, don’t do what I did with the cable, first off I forgot to loop it back, and secondly the red edge is on the wrong side – 5v and Gnd run down the left hand side of the cable…
As if the Arduino and all it’s clones weren’t enough I recently received a ‘Sanguino’ - based around the larger ATMega644P processor.
It took a little longer than expected to assemble, for some reason the solder did not want to flow onto the pads on the reverse side of the board.
For a while I couldn’t get the auto reset on upload function of the dev environment to work either. It turned out that I had the ‘Set RTS on Close’ flag in the COM port settings disabled. Turning this on fixed it.
The Sanguino has two hardware serial ports, more IO pins, much larger program space, and additional analog inputs/ PWM outputs. There is no built in FTDI chip so you need a programming cable or adapter.
Kinda like an Arduino, only more so…
OK well not quite…
But this is a really neat site -
It lets you see how any given URL looks on many different browser platforms. This is invaluable when you are trying a new site layout (like me)…
I’ve been meaning to update my blog for a long time now. The old theme was getting a bit tired, and this new corporate theme looked nice and clean.
I need to make a few tweaks here and there, but it’s not too bad at the moment.
I’m currently working on putting a Dalek together – like so many things it’s taking much longer than I thought. When it’s finished I’ll be documenting a new Laser Harp build for 2009, including some of the lessons learned from the construction of the prototype last year.
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