The Stem » arduino

Flashduino at FITC Toronto 09

Brettf — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 20:26:45 +0000

I have been working hard on creating some interesting stuff for the Flashduino talk I am giving at FITC this year. Below is the first video made using a prototype circuit and Flash code for time-lapse photography. By the time of the presentation this will be refined into an open source DIY Arduino shield. Who knows I might build a couple extra and give them away at the presentation.

Time-lapse created with Arduino and Flash from Brett Forsyth on Vimeo.

Arduino Servo Control… Screw It, I am Going To Learn Some Assembly

Brettf — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:08:58 +0000

Controlling a servo with Arduino is easy, as shown in a previous post. What I have found difficult is getting multiple servos and serial data processing to play nice together. Processing serial data is screwing up the timing of the software PWMs. There are several libraries written for Arduino to control servos, check them out here and here. The first library looks great as it is a hardware based solution that changes the arduino PWMs to be servo friendly but is limited to two servos. My plan is to learn some AVR assembly so that I can extend that library for more then 2 servos. My goal is to create a complete servo control system for Arduino which will include a shield and control software written in flash.

Arduino Servo Control take 2

Brettf — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 05:05:20 +0000

Controlling 11 servos via the digital ports on Arduino turns out to be foolish. In the process I learned a bit more about Arduino but now I am going to concentrate on a hardware solution.

Flashduino!

Brettf — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 03:29:02 +0000

I have been working with Arduino lately. I must say it has made me really excited about technology again. There is something about creating physical devices that is more rewarding then always working on virtual projects. Having said that, ever since I started working with Arduino I have wanted to make interfaces for it with Flash. The tutorials I have found for connecting the two all exploited the XMLSocket object in AS2. Using the XMLSocket has some small issues to it, namely it needs a null byte on the end of each message. ActionScript 3 fixes this little speed bump by including a binary socket that does not need a null byte to end a message. I had to try it out for myself so I put together a small demo of serial communication between Flash and Arduino using the TinkerProxy.

Get it here

Arduino Servo Control for Beginners

Brettf — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 17:43:07 +0000

I managed to get my servo working with Arduino today using this tutorial. Nothing to special. The first time I tried nothing happened because I had the min/max pulse time setup wrong for the hitec servo. With the hitec servos the min pulse is 900µsec and the max is 2100µsec. Once I changed that it worked and should work for all hitec servos. I have looked at the Arduino servo libraries and they all seem unfinished or limited in one way or another. I am currently working on a sketch that will allow the control of up to 11 servos with analog inputs or serial commands. Also in the works is an Aduino servo shield.

Arduino Servo Sketch for analog control of a hitec servo

Piranha Zygote

Brettf — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 18:20:53 +0000

Nothing better then some blurry iPhone photo’s to show off new tech. Now people can analyze them to figure out if they are fake of not. Shown in the photos are a prototype board, code named Piranha, for the Zygote interactive ball. It is a really slick board with surface mounted everything. A lot of work has gone into the software controlling the Zygote. It now has ability to be controlled by music, generate music and on board behaviors.

In other news. Chemical Brothers concert (more to follow soon).

mmmm…Arduino

Brettf — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 16:15:27 +0000

Arduino is a great electronics prototyping platform I am currently working with. I have never really talked about it here but I have been teaching another prototyping platform at Digital Design called Teleo. Unfortunately, Teleo is no longer being developed and has transformed into the make controller. I say unfortunately because Teleo was amazingly simple to connect to flash and this made teaching it easy.

But back to Arduino. Arduino seems to be really picking up. It is more complicated to program for as you have to reprogram the ATmega chip at the heart of Arduino to make it do anything. There is some good reference martieral on the Arduino site for those just starting out. I wouldn’t mind switching over to Arduino from Teleo but there are a couple of other things that make this hard. First, is there isn’t a super simple way to connect it to Flash. It needs a serial proxy for this to happen and a great one doesn’t exist yet. Second, is even if there was a proxy a simple API for working with it in Flash doesn’t exist either. These are the two things that Teleo still has that make it so easy to teach. I still think Arduino is a great platform if you don’t need to teach it to a room full of designers.

Soon to come are project photos and sample code.