One thing that I’m super excited about is FOOTBALL! Who doesn’t get excited about that? Lamers and Noobs, that’s who! So far the most awesome team in the whole league (Atlanta Falcons, of course) have played one preseason game against the Chiefs and whooped them good. Tonight is the second preseason game against the Pats. I went to the first game and I’ll be in attendance tonight as well. Lucky me!

As far as projects that I’ve been working on go:
I actually went to Home Depot and bought some hardware to make that silly rock tumbler that I told you all I might build. Well I started building it the other day. I have to say that I really need tools. Not wrenches and screwdrivers (I’ve got that stuff), I need drill presses, band saws, lathes, scroll saws, table saws, Router tables, orbital spindle sanders, etc. Basically I need a setup that would whip Norm’s setup on the “New Yankee Workshop”. Seeing as how I don’t have a couple hundred thousand laying around, I’ll have to get by with my crappy tool chest. I honestly believe that there isn’t anything I couldn’t build with wood if I had a workshop like Norm’s.

At any rate, I took a spare part of a sheet of plywood I had in the garage and am turning it into a rock tumbler. I mounted two “L” shaped brackets on the plywood, drilled holes in the brackets and mounted a 1-1/4″ wooden dowel in between the brackets. This allows the dowel to spin like a roller. I had a crappy old 7.4 V cordless drill laying around, so I decided to use it to drive the roller. I removed the battery and wired the motor directly to a 12V DC adapter. I have no idea how long this will last. Voltage is too high, and I feel pretty sure the motor in that drill isn’t rated for continuous operation. In order to tumble a set of rocks correctly, the drill will be required to work (under load) for about a month without stopping. Hmm, now that I look at that statement on paper (screen), I had probably better start thinking about alternatives to my current setup.

I also have (well the roommate has) a bench grinder. Through much research I’ve found that lots of people that are into the whole Lapidary gig turn these things into rock cutting wheels. This intrigues me so I may hack my roommates grinder into a diamond wheeled rock cutting device. That way I can cut custom shapes into the rock before tumbling them. I am thinking of the countless awesome paperweights I could make with such a cutting/tumbling setup. I’m actually sorta excited about this one. I’m imagining a shiny, glistening skull and crossbones granite paperweight in my future.

Haven’t done too many electronics projects lately. I did order a green led matrix from Sure Electronics. I stole some code from the web and got it up and running fairly easily. I have installed that in my cubicle at work so everyone who passes by can know immediately that I’m a nerd.

I’ll give you all a writeup on that project as I find the time.

Later

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I’ve been doing just the bare minimum for the last couple of months. Now if they would come through and pay a brother what he’s worth, I might consider getting down and dirty again. But man, how long can they jerk me around? I suppose the real question is, how long will I allow them to jerk me around?

I don’t ask for much. Just a competitive salary for the responsibilities that I have. That’s all. Sorry, ranting now.

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Oh, and if they say we want a store/flash anything, make sure you let them know that it’ll cost a LOT more.

Rant done.

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I’ve already got a few motors laying around (I’ll prolly use the one that’s in the old cordless drill I took apart), and I can pick up some empty paint cans at the local Sherwin Williams for the drums. Now all I need is some rollers and a little elbow grease. The only down side is that it takes weeks and weeks to tumble raw rock into polished beauties. Maybe I’ll use multiple drums to speed things along between grit stages (rough to polish). I’ll keep you posted if I’m not too lazy. Got a busy weekend.

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Now I remember a few months ago I saw that same RFID reader in a package with no price on it. I asked the dude at the desk to price check it for me, and it was just as I thought, 50 bucks. Well there was no way I was gonna pay that, so I left it alone.

Well today that same item rang up for $9.97. Yes, ten bucks! Needless to say I bought all of them that they had remaining in stock (and I might even trawl a couple of other close by Shacks to buy them out as well).

Well I got them home and tore into one right away. The device is pretty slick, compact and easy to use and comes with two pre-programmed tags. It has a built in bi-color LED to display the status of the reader (red or green for enabled or disabled). Only four connections too (Vcc or +5 volts, Ground, Serial Out and Enable). The output pins on the reader are males, and they are breadboard compatible (which is how I hooked mine up).

Here’s the pin connections:

Vcc on Reader to +5volts on Arduino
Enable on Reader to digital pin 2 on Arduino
Serial Out on Reader to RX on Arduino
Ground on Reader to Ground on Arduino

Easy as that (though remember, you’ll have to disconnect the RX pin from Arduino when it’s time to upload your sketch, or you’ll get errors and no action).

Well a quick search through the Arduino playground netted me a pretty damn simple sketch that reads the card (if one is close by) and displays the card code in the Serial Monitor. Here’s the link to that tutorial. Had it up and running in less than 10 minutes. Now if I can only figure out what to do with this new technology (well, it’s new to me at least).

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Here’s a few items I’m planning/working on:

• I recently got my Wii Numchuck breakout board in the mail. This might be cool if I can figure out how to hook it up to some servos and make my old PHP controled web cam into a joystick controlled version
• I’ve got an Arcade cabinet or two that are just aching to become full-fledged MAME cabinets. Combine that with a few old PC’s I have laying around, and the only missing element is some dough (for parts) and elbow grease
• I’d like to build a physical page view counter – Meaning that I’d like a device that alters a physical apparatus in my living room to reflect the hits I get on my websites in real time.

If you’ve got some ideas of what you’d like to see here, drop me a line! If it’s within my skill set, I’ll make it happen!
That is all

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The Visual Studio IDE gives novice programmers a leg up in the coding world.  It isn’t as strict as some other languages.  It will allow you to use undeclared variables, it’ll fix case-sensitive issues for you, and you can basically ‘draw’ controls on the screen with your mouse (as opposed to Java, where – at least the last time I encountered it – you had to write the X/Y coordinates explicitly in code).

I can’t lie.  I kinda love VB6.  For me, there’s no easier/quicker solution to get a desktop coding project up and running.  For example, I was kicking around ideas for my next Arduino project, and thought “Hey, I could probably use VB6 to send serial data to the Arduino and make magic happen”.

So my next step was to Google “VB6, Arduino”.  I quickly learned that there is a VB component called MsComm that can be added to your Visual Studio environment to make serial communication a breeze.

I threw together a simple sketch on my Duemilanove that had a switch statement to check incoming serial bytes, and then either set a LED pin to HIGH or LOW depending on what the incoming byte was (in this case I used ASCII ‘a’ or ASCII ‘b’ because I’ve used them in previous projects).

Then I cranked up Visual Studio and wrote some VB6 code.  I wanted two Command buttons to exist on my main form (each one responsible for sending either an ASCII ‘a’ or ‘b’ via serial port.  Took me approximately 3 minutes to make my little LED to switch on or off depending on which Command button I clicked.

Now, my next project will include a common anode RGB LED that I’ll control via PWM on the Arduino, and via scroll bars in VB.  Should be pretty simple.  I’ll need a few transistors, a few resistors and a little patience writing the code.

I hope to have a working prototype for you all by this weekend (2-27-10).

Stay tuned!

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This step will cover the physical hardware build and give some insight and tips to think about when (if) you build one of these.

I personally like to build things.  I like getting my hands dirty, and coming up with clever ways to solve problems.  Perhaps I missed my calling?  I should have been an engineer or something.  Nah, I use rubber bands and scotch tape too often as can be witnessed in the pics below.  First a pic of the whole project:

The pics will all be crappy and blurred because I used my iPhone to take them (and it isn’t suited very well for close up pics… My digital camera is on the blink).

Here is the full project.  You can see the web cam assembly to the left (mounted to that small wooden box) and the breadboard to the bottom right, and of course the Arduino to the top right.  I most likely could have skipped the breadboard altogether, but I’m a fanatic about building things w/ a breadboard.  I don’t know why, I just like the flexibility that they offer.

Also, you might be able to see the resistors I have on the breadboard.  These are the components that I used to disable the automatic reset on the Arduino.  It calls for a 120 Ohm resistor (which I didn’t have) so I wired a 100 and two 10 Ohm resistors in series to get the same effect.

The above pic is the Pan servo.  I had a small wooden craft box laying around so I decided to use it as the base for my web cam.  I cut a slot into the box using my Dremel to house the pan servo.  I shoved it into the slot and screwed it down with the mounting screws that came w/ the servos.  I’m using some small 9 gram servos here.  I bought them online for around 3 bucks each.

It’s blurry, but you can kinda see how I mounted the tilt servo directly on to the arm of the pan servo.  I didn’t wanna permanently attach anything (because I plan on using these servos for other future projects).  So I used a rubber band and tightly wrapped it to attach these servos together.

I promptly voided the warranty on this web cam.  I took it apart to remove the mounting bracket that it shipped with.  It was large and in the way, so I simply took it off.  I mounted this camera directly to the tilt servo arm by means of …..  Scotch tape.  Worked like a charm, and didn’t have to drill any holes or hot glue anything.

That just about wraps it up.  Here are some considerations for you:

When I got all the wiring done, I launched the PHP app and started panning and tilting like  a madman.  However, I happened to mix up the servos during build time, and the commands from PHP were all backwards and mixed up.  For example, when I hit the Pan Left link, the camera would tilt down (and other such trickery).  Well I quickly realized what I did and changed the PHP code to reflect the appropriate movements.

Make sure your base for the camera assembly is stable.  The little servos move quickly, and will jerk the whole device off the edge of your desk if you aren’t careful.  A heavy base will solve this.

You may not want the range of view that I employed here.  The camera is able to pan and tilt across 100 degrees in each direction.  I quickly learned that 100 degrees of tilt was too much (as no one is interested in what’s happening on the ceiling).  Your numbers in the Arduino sketch may vary slightly if you want to change the field of view.

Also, I eventually changed the degrees of change from 10 to 5 (for more subtle control, and more overall steps in the field of vision).  This is just aesthetics though.

If you plan on disabling the reset feature on Arduino frequently, I recommend that you add a switch to your schematic to do this quickly and easily.  You cannot upload sketches to Arduino with the reset disabled.  It’s highly likely that you’ll be constantly tweaking your sketches until you get it just right, and constantly unplugging wires from your breadboard and uploading and replugging wires gets tedious and nerve-wracking.  Just use any old toggle type switch.  Should work fine.

I hope this helps you all, and I hope you enjoyed seeing this project.  Unfortunately, I can’t let any of you see the end results with my working web cam, because it appears that I don’t have a static IP at home (which I’m prolly gonna get eventually) and I don’t want to worry about using one of those online services to emulate one.  Also, I’m not really sure I feel comfortable with people logging in and watching me as I mill about my work space.

Hit me up, I’ll be happy to answer any questions I can!

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This is the part of the project that took me the longest to figure out.  It isn’t because I’m some sort of slacker when it comes to PHP, it’s just that I was unaware that each time a connection to the serial port of the Arduino is made (or broken) it resets the device.  I’ll go into this more in a moment, but for now let’s look at the full PHP code used to talk to the Arduino:

This script works basically like the inverse of the Arduino sketch we showed you in our previous post.  Instead of listening on the serial port for incoming bytes, this PHP will send bytes to the serial port based on what HTML link is clicked.  Let’s analyze it in sections:

This part is pretty simple.  The code checks if the user has clicked any links on the page.

This is where the action happens.  This is basically a switch statement that checks what ‘action’ link was clicked.  The first switch is commented.  If you use this script, you’ll need to change the COM7 portion to whatever COM port your Arduino is using.

And of course, the final HTML part of the script to display the links and give the user a way to interface w/ the code:

This is basically 4 links, each with their own action (panleft, panright, tiltup, tiltdown).  The switch statement looks at the ‘action’ and sends the appropriate ASCII letter to the Arduino.  Pretty simple.

Now this seems like it should work right off the bat.  If you’ve already got your servos hooked up to the Arduino, and you open the serial monitor in the Arduino IDE, you will notice that when you send the letters ‘a’, ‘b’, ‘c’ or ‘d’, the correct servo will move as expected.  But for some damn reason, the PHP sending the exact same code to the Arduino won’t work.

After many hours of scratching my head and whining, I finally found out that each time Arduino senses the opening or the closing of the Serial port, it resets.  The PHP code above is doing this each time it sends data:

Open the port – send the ASCII data – Close the port

It does these three steps almost instantaneously.  So as soon as the open port happens, the Arduino resets, and the rest of the actions get lost.

I found that this auto reset feature can be disabled in hardware by simply connecting the 5v pin on the Arduino to the reset pin through a 120 Ohm resistor.  You can find more information about this here.

So here’s the steps I needed to take to make this a reality:

1: Upload the pan/tilt sketch to the Arduino

2: Connect your resistor to disable the reset function

3: Open the Serial Monitor in Arduino to test the sketch

4: Open your PHP script on your local machine to make it run.

This works all the way, and exactly as expected.  Next I took a look at the Yawcam details and found a way to create a webpage that existed in my Apache server space that would display the camera stream.  I created a simple Frameset in HTML and put the webcam stream in the top frame and the PHP script to run the camera in the bottom one.  It’s sloppy and Frames are an outdated technology, but it was the quickest and easiest method I could come up with.  I might clean it up later on.  But for now it works.  That covers all of the software side of the equation.  Next up, the hardware build.

Stay tuned!

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So by now, you should have your web server and PHP up and running.  Oh and you should be able to log on to your web cam (if you’re using Yawcam) and see what’s going on in your house/room via the web.

I’m really gonna stress that you use Yawcam.  It’s very easy and it’s the only method that I’ll describe here to get this running!

Let’s start with Arduino.  Once again, if you’re reading this blog, you shouldn’t need instructions on how to install the Arduino ide, or how to get your Arduino running.  These should be done already at this point.  So plug in your Arduino and let’s code:

First, the whole shebang:

This is a pretty simple sketch.  First we make sure to include the Servo library before we begin anything.  Then we declare two servo objects (one for the pan servo and one for the tilt).  I recommend that you run through the Servo examples that are included in the Arduino ide before beginning this project.  It’ll give you a lot of insight on how this whole process works.  That’s what I did, and didn’t have any experience w/ servos prior.

Now the serial communication part:

This is the setup portion of the sketch.  All we do here is initialize the serial communication (at 9600 baud) and attach the servos to pins 9 and 10.

Next comes the meat and potato portion, the loop section:

The code here basically checks the serial buffer to see if there is a byte available.  Once it determines that there is data in the buffer, it writes that data to the variable ‘inByte’.  Then, the code uses a switch statement to determine what byte was sent.  It’s pretty easy to tell what happens in the switch:

If the incoming serial byte is ‘a’, the camera pans (that is, if the camera hasn’t reached the maximum pan value of 100 degrees).

Same goes for ‘b’, ‘c’, and ‘d’.  First the switch statement checks if the appropriate servo has reached its predefined top/bottom range and moves accordingly by 10 degrees.

Could I package this whole script (and the accompanying files) into a neat zip file for you to download?  Sure!  But I won’t.  Just cut and past the first code block into your Arduino IDE and compile/upload it.  Then save it if you find that to be important.

Next time we’ll tackle the PHP code you’ll need to communicate w/ Arduino

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