DorkbotPDX people doing strange things with electricity

Getting things ready for the DorkbotPDX exhibit at Maker Faire.....

This blog entry is sort-of placeholder page, to be updated with photos and more info during or shorly after Maker Faire.

Click "Read more" for more pictures, source code and other stuff.

The Arduino IDE editor's lack of support for X11's select-paste mechanism has always annoyed me.  Well, I finally got around to adding it.  Especially for helping people with their Arduino troubles (which I do every day), it's so very nice to finally be able to quickly select-paste between Arduino and forum messages, email, terminal windows, etc.

This is a Unix/X11 feature.  Mac & Windows do not have anything similar.  But on Linux it's so very fast and convenient.  This tiny little feature really makes me happy.  :-)

Update: it's been accepted and will become part of Arduino 1.0.5.  Anyone using 1.0.4 who wants this feature now can install Teensyduino 1.0.4 release candidate #1 to get this feature without having to recompile the entire Arduino IDE.

Over the last couple weeks I've been working on a automated test system for Teensyduino, which someday will verify nearly all the Arduino functionality on every board and also test most of the Arduino libraries.  Here's what my first try looks like.

Click "Read more" for another photo, a bit of discussion about how this works (and what doesn't work so well), and a peek at what will be my second attempt.

Thanks to everyone that presented (especially the new folks during OpenDork) and to thanks to everyone that came out! 

Glenn Phillips, Self Balancing Robots (http://glennselectric.blogspot.com/):

Church of Robotron (http://churchofrobotron.com)

Slides

Video from the Open Mic Surgery Event.

These videos never made it to the site, I'm fixing that now!  Thanks to everyone that came out!  (Mouse over blank area below to trigger video loads.)

Use MAME's debugger to reverse engineer and extend old games

For the Church of Robotron's installation at Toorcamp 2012, we needed to be able to trigger physical events when game events happened in Robotron 2084. A quick summary for context:

• We had an Altar that contained a Linux box that ran MAME and Robotron 2084
• We had joysticks that acted as HID devices
• Player would kneal down and play the game. As events happened in the game (player death, human death, lasers firing), we would trigger physical events.

We choose to use MAME's debugger to detect game events and notify other pieces of software when they happened. This is a quick tutorial for others (and a reminder to ourselves) if you're interested in doing similar things. We're going to find out how to detect player death!

A few months ago I was feeling inspired to create a nice countdown timer.  With the next Dorkbot open mic only days away, I finally had the motivation to actually put it together...

Click "Read more" for photos, source code, schematic and other info.

• When: March 25th, 2013 - 8pm
• Where: Backspace (map)
• Who: All ages -- open to the public
• Cost: Free!

Self Balancing Robots 101

Glenn Phillips

Glenn's presentation will cover the basics of self balancing robots:

• Overview of accelerometers and gyroscopes
• Control software
• Motor controllers
• Battery and electric motor selection

Glenn Phillips got into the computer business around the era of the Mac Plus. Glenn's last job was the owner of Gorge Networks Inc. a rural Internet provider using fixed wireless and dsl. The business was sold in 2010 and Glenn has been on the Obama plan ever since.

Glenn became interested in the Arduino a couple years ago, but he had no programming experience. At some point in the process Glenn began to control servos and motors from his old RC collection. Computer control of motors was fun, interesting and possibly a job in the future.

Self balancing robots seemed to be the holy grail of motor control! Constant feedback from sensors is processed and translated to power and direction of the motor. Any issue with any component of the system is immediately apparent.

Glenn is also a cheap Yankee so his creations use salvaged parts from electric bikes, scooters, wheelchairs, laser printers and computers.

The Church of Robotron

Learn about the mutant savior and our efforts to save the last human family.  

CoR H264 half from Libbey White on Vimeo.

Opendork

You!

An open-mic session for those looking to show off a project, ask a question, solicit help, or incite collaboration.

The Bus Pirate came up as a topic on the mailing list a few days ago, and I realized I hadn't yet shared the slides from my presentation (a year ago now!) on how to use the Bus Pirate to poke and prod I2C devices like sensors and EEPROMs. So for those of you not on the mailing list, here you go:

Dorkbot PDX 0x08 - Sailing the I2Cs with the Bus Pirate

Last night I released OctoWS2811 ... after spending pretty much all Sunday making this 3 minute video:

Everyone at the meetup a couple weeks ago saw this right when it was first showing video.  Since then, pretty much all the work has been on the documentation and minor code improvements.