A visit to Maker Faire
Last weekend we went to Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science. This was a repeat visit for us, and I wondered if we would see anything new or just a repeat of last year. Good news: lots of new things and we all had a great time.
The Faire has gotten a lot [...]
Expanding the Arduino: cheap ways to add output pins and power
For the LED stairs, I need to control 14 LED lamps and 2 sensors. From the beginning, I had in mind an Arduino as the microcontroller for this project. Although it is possible to do a primitive version of these stairs without a microcontroller, having a brain at the center gives many more options. And [...]
Coasterbot gets a pair of eyes
I was featured in MAKE Robot Dispatch #7 — thanks guys! Hard to believe that there is less than a week left in the contest.
One of the requirements of the contest is for the robot to do some obstacle avoidance. The Jameco bundle came with some switches to do bump sensing. While this might be [...]
Ardweeny adventures, part two
I have a working Ardweeny!
The Solarbotics replacement kit arrived this afternoon. I assembled it as before, with a few differences. The male programming headers were put in with the proper orientation. And I decided to test the Ardweeny without soldering the chip in at first — the pressure of the outer pins holds it pretty [...]
Ardweeny adventures, part one
The parts bundle for the coasterbot includes a microcontroller to act as the brain of the robot. It is an Ardweeny, made by Solarbotics. Billed as the “smallest, handiest, bread-board friendly Arduino-compatible”, it literally fits on the back of the ATMega328 chip. It’s a pretty cool design, and incredibly small, as you can see in the [...]
Constructing the Speed Vest circuit board
The electronic circuitry for the Speed Vest is fairly simple. A high-voltage, low ampere power supply lights up strands of electroluminescent (EL) wire. Each wire corresponds to a digit on either the left or right side of the vest. We use a microcontroller, the Arduino Duemilanove, to read input from the wired wheel sensor, calculate [...]