The company that is currently distributing Arduino in Spain, Libelium, organized 2 months ago an Arduino Contest. And I force myself to compete with something. I decided to improve my first MrPotato Robot adding voice, led eyes a thermometer, and of course using the new MrPotato Maximus Prime. It took a great effort, I finished the hardware stage, but I couldn’t end the software one. Anyway, I sent it to the contest, competing in the Art Hack section. more »
Back again with Arduino. This post will be extremely short, because getting a temperature value with +-1ºC is extremely easy and already done. Take a look at this portuguese blog entry. Using an LM35, a device that outputs a linear voltage of 10mV/ºC. more »
I’m starting to think that I’m a bit obsessed with Arduino. Anyway, after several nights testing and reading about Arduino I found an interesting link to a Breadboard Shield Design. Just to keep in context I will say that Arduino solution, has also a nice way to be upgraded using shields, or I will say layers. The Arduino board is been designed to be able to connect boards on top of it where you can place your favorite components such us motor drivers, temperature sensors, etc… more »
Since I received my brand new Arduino boards I´ve been migrating my electronics projects from PICAXE to Arduinio. The first step was to be able to control a servo using the Arduino board. more »
I´ve purchased a new laptop to replace my old computer and I realized that it has no serial ports, so I lost the way to program my PICAXE microcontrollers. (Yeap I can buy the USB cable, but that means to invert more money).
There is no way to reuse the programming cable of the PICAXE to send/receive data from the PC. I usually need this feature when I play with microcontrollers and if I need two cables, one for programming and another to communicate, it sucks.
Serial communication routines are pretty slow on PICAXE microcontrollers and the speeds supported aren´t too high.
You need batteries to provide power to the PICAXE board, that sucks. I´m usually going to use the microcontroller as an interface to the world for my PC, so I would rather the PC to provide the power to the PICAXE board.
El miercoles 5 de Abril, después de recopilar toda la información y de recibir el destornillador triwing, me puse con mi hermano y chipeamos la Wiiiiiiii.
But the beam of light to gave me the idea to start this project was an article in MAKE magazine, Creepy doll robot. After reading that article, I stare at my Darth Tater, and every thing started to make sense.
I visited a hobby shop and get 3 futaba S3003 servos for 14€. And bought the PICAXE servo controller board AXE024 for £7.64. I widened the Mr.Potato’s holes for the arms to be able to set the servo axis, and did the same with the Mr.Potato’s feet. I used 4 screws for each servo to fix them to the Mr.Potato body. And that´s all.
I´m not a microcontroller user newbie. I started with PICs 6 years ago. But I only have my spare time to play with them. This means that I make some stuff during a month, and two months later something comes to my mind that can be done using a microcontroller and then is when I face the big trouble: it usually takes me a whole week to remember all things about PIC assembler, registers, how programmer works and bla bla bla. That´s why I started to look into those solutions like BasicStamp that gives you all the infrastructure that you need to play with electronics without requiring to be a mega master.
What are the advantages of that? Well, you get lots of documentation, a full development environment and a high level language to program your microcontroller. What´s the drawback? , the microcontroller gets to expensive. You can buy a PIC 16F876 for 6€ or less, a BasicStamp cost you 60€. Too much for me. So I continued searching and I found the BasicX-24 something more powerful than the BasicStamp and a bit cheaper, 50€. The BasicX is still too expensive for me although it comes with floating point unit and a great development board, but it´s too much money for something that I can break messing with the polarity.
When I thought everything was lost I came across the PICAXE. This guys give me what I need: Cheap PICs preprogrammed (it´s almost the prices of a raw PIC), a simple development environment, and Basic language to program the PIC. The language have high level instructions like servo, pause, etc… And they offer an extremely cheap servo controller board, AXE024.
