Posts tagged with “projects”
Robot progress
I haven’t really played with any of my robotics projects lately (read: in the past year) and recently I just decided to stop delaying and make it happen.
The idea is to use have some electronics (initially just a micro-controller, but eventually a small computer) control an autonomous robot which uses a remote control car as its base. This isn’t your little toy car, this is a standard model RC car that you get at a hobby shop - components based, all wheel drive, servo controlled steering and motor controller. It’s also really, really, really fast; while it is a little too fast for an indoor robot, if I ever want the speed, at least I’ll have it.
I’ve thrown out the car body since it isn’t really required and besides, it wouldn’t fit after all the electronics I want to add. I’ve built an aluminum bracket and bolted it to the plastic frame and all my electronics are being mounted to this frame. For now, I’ve just attached some aluminum stock as cross-members to mount hardware on, but that may change in the future.
So enough about ideas and back to the progress.
What you get from a little bit of initiative, knowledge, and a few hours is a (mostly) working demo of software controlling hardware. As the video shows, my bench-top power supply just can’t give the kind if inrush current the motor requires so it creates this jerky, start/stop annoyance.
I plan to get a couple new RC car batteries, which should take care of the immediate issues of my power supply.
11:04 AM | Tags: arduino, projects, electronicsTwitter Search API in PHP
The SCCC sent out an email to all the campus leaders encouraging them to use twitter for their campuses. The email also mentioned that state level twitter accounts were being created. It occurred to me that it would be cool to be able to have multiple people posting to a central account without passing around passwords.
I realized that having a script find tweets from certain users with specific hash tags, and then retweeting them as original content would be the perfect way to do this. Tweeting from PHP is pretty well understood. There are numerous libraries and classes to help you do just that, but I haven’t really seen very many PHP libraries for searching twitter.
So I wrote one.
It implements the entire search API as it exists today. And was fun to write too! I got to play with method chaining, something that I haven’t really gotten into before. Surprisingly simple to implement.
If you’re code inclined, feel free to check it out at the twitter search api page here on my very own site.
02:26 AM | Tags: php, twitter, projectsFrom Knight Rider to DDR
With my knight rider lights complete, some have been asking me what’s next. While a few parts of the project were rather frustrating - overall, I rather enjoyed myself.
Another one of the things that has been thrown around is the fact that DDR pads that you purchase tend to die within about six months; and that we probably could do better. We always talk about crazy methods to detect steps - capacitive, lights, lasers, audio, magneto (just to name a few).
As you may have guessed, since I’ve mentioned it that means something has been done on it. How right you are! I picked up some carpet, padding, metal screen, and a few other items at the hardware store today. I intend to get started with them within the next few days. I am still working up a technique for reliably attaching wire to the screen panels I’ll be using.
02:17 AM | Tags: projects, electronicsMy knight rider lights are complete!
09:04 PM | Tags: avr, electronics, projects, knight rider, videoMy knight rider lights temporarily mounted, at night, with the headlights on.
08:53 AM | Tags: car, projects, electronics, avr, knight riderMy lights mounted temporarily mounted to my car with duct tape.
08:52 AM | Tags: projects, electronics, car, avr, knight rider
The light panel portion of my Knight Rider lights project is nearing completion.
11:05 PM | Tags: electronics, projects, car