Tuesday, August 27, 2013

3CH RC Servo Multiplexer for Sale

My 3 Channel R/C (Servo) Multiplexer is now available for pre-order on Tindie for $12. [Buy]


Are you building a self-driving, robot rover? What if it is heading straight for a curb? Or my ankle? With this RC Multiplexer you can take control quickly and hopefully avoid harm. Here are the features...

Friday, August 23, 2013

AVR Code Size Reduction

Atmel AVR035 (pdf)) has some tips on code size reduction. Here's what I learned in the real world, reducing my flash-constrained A2D code from 4k down to 1.4k, great because the onboard ATtiny44As only have 4K of flash.

Side note: My A2D boards convert Sharp Rangers or other analog signals to digital -- I2C, and soon SPI and Serial, with oversampling, decimation, and filtering to reduce noise and increase resolution.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Geek Destinations: Micro Center, DTC

Micro Center in the DTC is quite the maker oasis with gear from Arduino, Sparkfun, Adafruit, Parallax, Karlsson Robotics, Digispark, Velleman, Raspberry Pi, and more. 

This is just one wall.
In this age of internet shopping, you may not know that browsing through many shelves of geekware in person is very fun. You pass by rows of products, imagination spinning out of control, dreaming of all the miraculously cool things you could do...

Monday, August 12, 2013

Robot Club Line Following

Congratulations to Ted who kicked all our respective butts in line following at this month's SHARC meeting. He completed the short course in only 5 seconds, less than half of most everyone.

Except me--I had an embarrassing 30 second time. Hey I'm just happy mine worked at all, given the failure rate of everything else I've touched the last few days.

SHARC meeting, my 3pi on the left, RPi telerover on the right
He and I were both running Pololu 3pi robots. His was nearly maxed on speed but perfectly tuned. I have my work cut out for me if I want to compete next month!

Thursday, August 8, 2013

3-State Jumper


Up to 27 A2D adapters can live on the same I2C bus. The address is configured with 3 jumpers, each with 3 states: soldered high, soldered low, and unsoldered. Pull-down and pull-up resistors are the key to detecting all three states.

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Building a Pseudo Theremin


Here's how I built a simple musical instrument with Sharp IR Rangers to demo my A2D boards.

Monday, August 5, 2013

Denver Mini Maker Faire

Sat Aug 10, Denver Mini Maker Faire + Maker Swap. 8am-5pm at Club Workshop, 999 Vallejo St., Denver, CO 80204

If you're in/near Denver come on by. I'll have a table set up and would love to meet you! :)

More details at clubworkshop.com