Category: Dorkbot

For all of my talk of the Arduino being to expensive to deploy I have yet to find its older brother priced anywhere near the $60 that the wiring folks talk about. Until now. I wish this had gone on sale when I was still employed. I bought one anyways.

http://www.maximumrobotics.com/store/p/881-Wiring-I-O-Board.aspx

Until November 30th there are about 20 some odd harmonicas being played prosthetically. There is no intelligence behind them but it looks like most of the the mechanism was custom machined and it is worth seeing because it is well done.

http://www.portlandart.org/newsite/

I was looking at the new arduino and the api and noticing a few things that should have been implemented a long time in the new board. Not the least of which is the reset being hooked up to the fdti chip so that you dont have to intervene to download your code. There are still a few things that I am missing. Not the least of which is the necessity of using a serial boot loader. If the boot loader uses the stk500 then you would be best off with a cheep clone like one of these.

• http://www.serasidis.gr/circuits/avr_isp/avr_isp.htm
• (reference on work computer and not yet on my del.icio.us)

This would pull the expenses off of the board while achieving the same convenience of not needing to reset the board every time you needed to download. I am looking at adding this to my usb serial serial thingy. Its like a 1.25 part. There are a couple of single sided board designs which use the ftdi 232RL chip. I will have some sketches up soon.

…. to be continued …

SEE: http:http://www.chriscoledesigns.com/

While I did not get to first thursday due to band practice I did run across some amazing sculpture in the perl at an eye glasses shop calledvisage. I encouraged you to see it if possible.

This just went into a second rev so the initial boards are going for super cheep. I plan to buy some on monday.

http://www.nkcelectronics.com/arduino-runtime-board-pcb-.html

I have been working on stripping the arduino down to something that should cost about $6 by pulling the power and the serial off of the board.
The pic above is a dip version. If I went to olimex I could probably get the board cost to about 6 bucks for the board. So I thought about smt and eliminating the headers (which cost about a buck all told) This is where I am heading but it is not quite done.

This would be an 1″x1″ square with stk500 compatible ports on their sides like a card edge. You could solder directly or you could solder the headers on them. The power and the serial are consolidated into a header along with the reset. This will probably wind up reworked slightly.

If you want to monkey with it or finish the routing the eagle files are at.
http://www.digithink.com/embedded/hardware/gen-z/smt.brd
http://www.digithink.com/embedded/hardware/gen-z/smt.sch

void setup(void)
{
...
TCCR1A = 0×00; // sets timer control bits to PWM Phase and Frequency Correct mode
TCCR1B = 0×12; // sets timer control bits to Prescaler N = 8
ICR1 = 0×07d0; // Upper Timer Limit = 2000 (in hex) equals 2ms
}

//after which you can analogWrite to pins 9 and 10

Amazing link.

windcatcher http://www.answers.com/topic/windcatcher via alexis turner

Not sure how to comment.
(still Not entirely sold on the delic.i.urwierdness.)

Feeling those doubles today.

Links from conversations:

open JTAG: http://openocd.berlios.de/web/

LED BALL: http://ledeffects.net/pages/?id=16

HArd DRive Speakers: http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm
, http://home.insightbb.com/~stephenwmoore/Speakers/Hard_Drive_Speaker.htm

There is something perverse about creating an event and then winning it.
It seems as thought Thomas, Jason, and I along with a few other dorks put in more hours in meetings, creating art and preparing for pdxbot.07 than pretty much any of our personal projects let alone anything that we could have brought to it.

In addition to representing dorkbot at the event and sponsoring the artbot competition Jason did the logo design and we collectively then created the awards and tee shirt designs for this year. The parts people seemed to be happy but I think it wore us a bit thin.
Two weeks before the actual event I lost a production server at work and wound up pulling an 80 hour week. Even so I started a framework for what will eventually be my virtual drummer.

I was going to try to get it to paint with a brush but work ate the time I would have needed to get a functioning wrist and elbow.

With 3 days to go I pulled a project from out of my drawing arm series and armed with 3 servos a chunk of brass and about $30 bucks worth of carbon rods I managed to have the hardware done the morning of the pdxbot.

On little sleep and with my son I made it to the ‘bot with a tarp in case of real entrants to the artbot competition, and of course my drawing arm. Many calls were made to Jason and Thomas for coffee and thanks to them there was coffee. When we got there Steve (where the hell is … HEY STEVE!!! ) Davee had already arrived with boxes of junk for kids to make art bot’s.

We set up and I wired my arduino up to my bot. After an hour or two of futzing I finally had motion. Which of course brought the usb powered board to its knees. Fortunately for us thomas was prepared with his network slug and soldering iron but unprepared to be off of the net and loaned us it’s 1 amp 5v power supply. With steves wire and thomas’s soldering iron and power supply I had sustainable motion from the bot. But my brain was fried.

Fortunately again Jason was not prepared either.

Jason fried at least two transistors on what is one of the coolest robots I have seen in a long time.

The upside is that he was able to help me code. Within an hour of the event we had a basic drawing machine. Fortunately for me. There were only 3 adult entrants.