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Spencers Blog

Arduino Control Room

| Filed under Arduino Control Room Xino

I’ve been working on a few Arduino projects recently that will hopefully result in varying levels of home automation.  The effect so far has  been to stick a box here, plug this in there, and dangle a wire from over there, with a general haphazard (with emphasis on the ‘hazard’ bit in some places!) outcome.

If this is to work with any degree of success, it needs some more permanent infrastructure.  It needs power.  It needs internet connectivity.  It needs to be centralised.  It needs easy access to things I want to monitor and/or control.  It needs to be tidy and out of the way, but easily accessible.  There’s a shelf in my cloak room that meets most of those criteria, so this weekend I started getting it prepared;

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Modern Twist on Analog Dials

| Filed under Arduino testing Xino

These days displays are all digital readouts or multifunction LCD screens that give you indications of pretty much everything that’s going on.  What seems to be lacking though is a good old fashioned analog dial with a needle pointing at a number.  Of course, a dial is normally limited to a single use, but I wanted to see if I could make something that’s the best of both worlds.

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Arduino Powered Ikea Xmas Lights

| Filed under Arduino

As regular followers of the blog will know, I love Arduinos and all the stuff they can do. Those that know me will also know that I don’t love Christmas, particularly the seasonal decoration stuff. So this project was a nice mix of the two!

I decided to make myself some Arduino powered Xmas lights that vary their ‘chase’ speed based upon how close people are to my house.

Intrigued? Read on…

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Xino Basic Build

| Filed under Arduino Xino

This week I… Built a Xino Basic for Atmel as sold on http://shop.ciseco.co.uk

This is sold as a kit that anyone with even the most basic of soldering skills can put together. This is just about the cheapest way to get an Arduino compatible board that fits the standard Arduino shields. It also boasts a nice little prototyping area at the top which will mean that a lot of smaller projects can be completed without the need for additional shields. (See my Xino Dice post for an example of how the prototyping area can be used)The main kit comprises of the PCB, processor socket, connector headers and some resistors, capacitors and an LED

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An aDventure in to aProtocol (or LLAP)

| Filed under aProtocol Arduino testing Xino

I’ve been messing about with Arduino derived micro controllers, and have been looking for a way to get them to send simple messages to and from each other. Something simpler than TCP/IP (which requires special hardware and relatively large libraries to run it), but more generic and flexible than just connecting an output pin on one device to the input pin on another.

aProtocol (or LLAP as it’s also known) as defined on OpenKontrol seems to fill that gap just nicely. So, in 16 lines of code, I got a simple acknowledgement working;

String msg;
String reply;
void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600);
Serial.print("aDDSTARTED--");
}
void loop(){
if (Serial.available() >= 12){
if (Serial.read() == 'a') {
if (Serial.read() == 'D' && Serial.read() == 'D'){
msg = "";
for (byte i=0; i<9; i++) msg += Serial.read();
if (msg.compareTo("HELLO----")) reply = "aDDHELLO----";
// else if ...
Serial.print(reply);
} } } }
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Xino Dice

| Filed under Arduino Xino YouTube

A couple of days ago I got a Xino board like this one. Not is this about the cheapest way to get an Ardunio compatible microprocessor, but it has the benefit of a nice little prototype area on board too. So, although it fits standard Arduino shields, many simple projects can be completed on just the one board.

I wanted to do something simple and nice with it, and with components and hardware I had to hand. I realised the prototype area would be great for mounting LEDs, and so the idea of a digital dice was born. I gathered a few bits and bobs and got the soldering iron out.

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£1 Logic Probe

| Filed under Arduino Uncategorized

A decent multimeter is great, but there’s times when you just want to have a quick check to see what signals are high, low or neither. A logic probe is ideal for this, but the cheap ones are about £15+, so I decided to build my own. For less than a quid!

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30 Second Nanode Build

| Filed under Arduino YouTube

A couple of months ago I bought a Nanode, which required self assembly. Whilst I was building it, I thought it would have been nice to get a photo of each stage of the build. Well, when I bought my second Nanode, I decided not only to photograph it, but to make a little animated video of the build. Enjoy!

First 77 Days of Arduino Enlightenment In Photos

| Filed under Arduino

Less than 3 months ago I didn’t even know what an Arduino was. A couple of times I had stumbled upon them with various web searches, but quickly dismissed them as well beyond me even if interesting. Then a few coincidences consipred to make me sit up and take note. The first being the Nottinghack Openday. This didn’t actually promote Arduinos, in fact, I can’t even remember them even being mentioned. But the were there. Several of them. And that must have got in to my subconsious. A few days later was a discussion at work about how to read the switch status of many switches via the network and log them on a database. I had found a device for about £120 that could read 8 switches, but with the ~100 we were looking at it would be expensive. Multiplexing (MUX) was mentioned and I started to Google…

3 days later and a package arrives on my desk. Inside is an Arduino Uno, a beginners kit (consisting of LEDs, resistors, breadboards and a few other bits), an ethernet shield and a MUX shield. My professional and personal Arduino adventure had started

14/6/11 – First Arduino arrives at work. Go beyond Blinky to 3 LED traffic lights

16/6/11 – Use ethernet shield and MUX shield to display analog inputs on a web page (Note the two shields are not compattable with each other)

24/6/11 – Use ethernet shield to connect Arduino to Twitter. Tweets whenever a button is pushed

26/6/11 – Parts have arrived to start work on custom MUX shield that will be integrated to ethernet shield. This will be part of a work project to detect the status of multiple switches in welding bays

2/7/11 – First Nanode arrives. 16:59 start work on building it.

2/7/11 – 18:10 Nanode working and Blinky runs

3/7/11 – GPS unit tested with DFRduino

8/7/11 – Hello World displayed on LCD screen

9/7/11 – Custom MUX shield soldered up and tested

19/7/11 – Breadboard based GPS Datalogger (DFRduino + GPS + SD Card Reader) logs drive home from Hackspace

31/7/11 – LCD Screen added to GPS Datalogger

4/8/11 – Prototype for factory sounder project built (Arduino + Ethernet Shield + LCD Screen + Battery Backup Real Time Clock)

12/8/11 – After custom shield made for RTC, the Factory Sounder hardware is finished

13/8/11 – GPS Datalogger moved to veroboard for semi-permanent mounting in custom case (VHS cassette box!)

14/8/11 – “Spencer” scrolling marquee on 8×32 LED display

15/8/11 – Trying some custom graphics on 8×32 display

19/8/11 – Welders Switch project finally mounted in suitable box. The scope has been revised to cater for 10 bays (30 switches) not the 32 bays (96 switches) the hardware had been planned for, so a lot of the hardware is redundant

20/8/11 – First AVR built on breadboard (bare processor only version of Arduino). Tested with 8×32 display

20/8/11 – First PCB based AVR. Designed to be powered from a battery and run the 8×32 display as an animated name badge for upcoming Hackspace party

In this short time I’ve gone from making an LED flash to creating commercial solutions for problems that didn’t have a (affordable) solution to, to building devices the size of VHS cassettes that do a small subset of what most modern mobile phones do, to designing old school style 8 bit animated graphics.

I’ve bought 4 Arduinos for use at work and 3 clones for home use plus components for a couple of AVRs. As well as several shields and prebuilt hardware modules I’ve got back in electronics at a component level and have started soldering resistors and capacitors for the first time in 21 years.

It’s been a steep learning curve in the first 77 days. I’ve got an inkling where the next 77 days will take me, but the one thing I do know… it’ll be fun!

by Spencer | tags : | 0

Monsal Trail Unicycle Ride

| Filed under Uncategorized

Last weekend 8 of us (John, Gary, Kate, James, Andy, Another Gary, Mark and myself) set off from Hassop Station and headed north on the newly opened Monsal Trail.  This is a 7½ mile cycle and walking path in the Peak District that used to form part of the Midland Railway route from the Midlands to Manchester.  The line was closed down after the Beeching cuts in 1968, and despite being bought by the Peak District National Park, parts of it have been cut off for the public for over 40 years.

Being an ex-railway line, the route is very strait and flat. Due to the very unflat nature of the Peak District there are long tunnels and fantastic viaducts which offer either no views or fantastic vistas of the surrounding land. All in all, it was a great day out and much fun was had by all.


View Monsal Trail 5-6-11 in a larger map

Thanks James for sorting out a very fine video archive of the day.