arduino, robots, cameras, and life

This is a super easy hack, but I decided to post it because I think that it could benefit a lot of makers out there. Anything that makes documenting your work easier is a good thing in my book

So this could be so much more(-or less) depending on how you use it, but I don’t have a remote for my camera and I wanted one. I always want to set up a camera on a tripod and shoot pics while I am soldering a kit or working on something in my shop. Ideally it would be something that I could use hands-free. I racked my brain for a bit and eventually came up with this solution:

Part 1- Camera connected to laptop via usb

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I have always been interested in Lego NXT. It seems like a really easy way to get into robotics, and programming. I have never really figured out how functional it is in the “real world” (whatever that means)
The other day a coworker was really pushing the idea on me telling me I needed to buy a kit because it was so easy to build things. Now I really struggle with the arduino most of the time, but I enjoy the struggle, and I know that if I ultimately build something then I can replicate it fairly cheaply. That is my issue with NXT. It is REALLY expensive. It is expensive for legos, it is expensive for a microprocessor, and it is expensive for the peripherals. I think I’m past the target age of these things, but regardless, I priced out how much it would cost for me to “replicate” an NXT kit with and arduino.

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After taking receipt of my arduino kit from adafruit industries I have been looking for cool projects to make. There is so much cool stuff out there! The first and most exciting one is from a youtube video.

I love the whole idea of this. Creating your own type of bell tower (or orchestra) controlled by a computer is beyond awesome.

The second project is from here It is a gmail notifier based on python and arduino. I’m gonna try to massage it so it works with my email server, but other than that, it looks like it should be pretty simple!

In the last week, i’ve gotten into processing and puredata and started to learn arduino code. So much to learn… So fun to learn…

I’ll update once I actually do something!

hello everybody!
I read a few posts mentioning you have to wait a certain number of posts till you can post live links, and a few more till you can post images. I know that when asking questions about drivers, pictures are important, so…luckily I have a blog to put it up on!

Here’s the deal; I bought and received a sony diode and axis module from stonetek. I built the driver in anticipation, but I’m a bit hesitant to “just plug it in”

Here are a few questions:
1)what is the intended input voltage (when using this with a sony 16x diode)
2)I have heard i should set the Ma to between 160 and 250, with the lower settings being safer for diode life
3)My capacitor doesn’t look like anyone else’s How do I determine the correct polarity of it?
4)after testing the setup for a while, what is the proper procedure to discharge the capacitor?

Here is an overview of the breadboard

here is a closeup

here is a closeup of the capacitor

Thanks a lot guys! I’m really excited to have yet another geeky, expensive, hobby that’s difficult to explain to women!