arduino, robots, cameras, and life

Sparkfun, Ponoko, and Geek dad from wired have all teamed up to create a contest for us makers. The rules are simple: design something that uses sparkfun’s parts and Ponoko’s cutting services. The top ten coolest designs get picked by a panel and then the best one gets picked by an online vote! I have submitted two ideas and I really hope at least one of them makes it into one of them made it into the the top ten! I was surprised by how few people entered, but I guess the whole line about…

Submit a photo, render, sketch or scribble on a napkin to the GeekDad pool on Flickr (and tag it ‘ponoko’) or leave a description of it in a comment below before the end of the weekend

…was too daunting for some people! Regardless, I put two entries into the contest. One is a laser cut beer vending machine that is designed to retrofit an old dorm mini-fridge into a beer vending machine(!), and the other is a physical progress bar.

Here are pictures of the (very) rough prototypes. The beer vending machine should be pretty self explanatory.


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I just got back from the Sparkfun AVC. It was a blast! I shot a lot of video, but that will take a while to get processed edited and uploaded. In the meantime here are the things I thought were cool on the ‘factory tour’ with a few AVC shots thrown in.

This pond instill fear in a lot of AVC owner/operators. Strangely enough the airborne division didn’t seem to mind the water as much as the trees.

This lil guy broke down the day before the big race. Sigh. It’s not easy being autonomous.

Known for it’s blazing speed, Bluebot held it’s own. It eventually claimed first place in the DNF division!

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Introduction - just in case you haven’t renewed your geek card for the past year (decade?) Arduino is a term that refers to a microcontroller on a board that has certain hardware and software ‘shortcuts’ figured out. It was designed to be as plug and play as possible, and to lower the barrier to entry for people who want to let their computer interact with the physical world. The programming language is fairly simple and very well documented, and it is a matter of minutes between installing the software and uploading your first program! Like I usually do, there is an amazon store here in case you don’t want to read my witty banter.

arduino – the meat and potatoes of this whole shebang.
The cool thing about arduinos are that even if you already have one, you canalways find a use for another! You can set them up to ‘talk’ to each other. You can leave a project set up after finishing it, or be able to prototype multiple projects at the same time. Also, there are a wide array of shapes and sizes (and prices) of arduinos, and each one is suited for a different application.

You can start out with the ‘classic’ Duemilanove. It is the original form factor, and most of the shields are built to fit this one. This is a great one to use for prototyping, and if need be you can use a smaller board in your finished project. If this is your first arduino I would recommend getting the kit which includes jumper wires, a breadboard, some LEDs, resistors and a pushbutton. That way you can start making things blink as soon as you get it out of the box!

MEGA - The arduino mega is just like the Duemilanove except that it uses a bigger chip, is a bigger board, and has more inputs and outputs. Most of the code is portable across the two. If you have a project that needs more i/o’s than the smaller chips, then this is right up your alley!

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This is one of those projects I’ve been working on for quite a while now, but never well enough to actually put it in a box! Well.. it still has no box, but it’s much closer to a boxable form.

It is a RBBB arduino clone (but any arduino
will
work) with an ir led, a potentiometer, a resistor, and some perfboard. The perfboard is as much there to help provide a little bit of wire strain relief as it is to provide a place to mount the pot. The code simply reads the pot input and converts it into a delay() function. Then it fires the IR led with the nikon-specific magic to tell my d40 to shoot.

Here is an example of one of the timelapses I have shot.

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So this post is a big shout out to Sparkfun Electronics. Not only are they an interesting shop that has tons of stuff I would love to tinker with, but they give really good customer service as well!

Recently I ordered a bunch of stuff from them, including a few temperature sensors, thermistors, and an rf transmitter/receiver pair. I ordered, they shipped, and then fedex delivered it to my front porch where it was promptly stolen. I was super bummed to come home and find nothing. I had the whole afternoon off and I was planning on putting in some serious geek time in the basement. Needless to say, fedex dropped the ball by leaving it at my front door (on a busy street, less that 3 feet away from the sidewalk) and some jerk ended up with an envelope full of stuff they probably promptly threw away.

I left a message on Sparkfun’s site and filed a claim with fedex. Paul Robinson from sparkfun got back to me fairly quickly (he even tried to call(!), but I wasn’t around) and they shipped out a replacement order.

I was initially really down about not having anything to play with over the weekend, but this is honestly the best-case-scenario considering it wasn’t sparkfun’s fault that the package was stolen from my porch.

So thanks, sparkfun. I appreciate it, and keep up the good work!

UPDATE
Two more things for icing on the cake, my package arrived today(YES!), and I asked Paul a question about hackerspaces in boulder during our emails about the stolen package. He said he didn’t know of any but would pass it on to someone who would. Yesterday I received an email from Nathan Seidle, the CEO. I love the fact that their customer service provides service, I love the fact that they wanted to make it right, and I love the fact that their ceo took time to answer my question.