It’s official, I will be presenting at FITC ’08. This will be a great opportunity to show off the work we have been doing at VFS with multi-touch interfaces (Being in April we will even have some stuff to show). I have been silent about the multi-touch lately, not because it isn’t progressing, but I want to have a great update when I do post more info. Also on the radar is the possibility of doing a multi-touch wall which would be kick ass. My goal is to post a large update over the holidays.

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.

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.

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

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