Christmas is coming closer, so here is my contribution to put you in the right mood.
It is a blog hitcounter, that rings a bell. Literally. It puts a smile on your face, every time someone hits your blog. And it is a great way to annoy your colleages or your girl friend.
It consists of an Arduino board, a bell, a servo and a couple of lines of code in c, python and php.
Back in March I published my first instructable called Programmable LED. The idea was simple, have a device that is able to record and play back light sequences. Light sequences are recorded with an LDR, a light dependent resistor and played back with an LED.
After a while some users at Instructables began to rebuild, modify and improve the Programmable LED. Ok, that’s what Instructables is all about, to share and to distribute, but it was astonishing to me, how it worked.
This is a gallery of these derived and improved versions. Kudos to all the builders.
I just finished the tengu clone on a prototype board. Here are some pictures.
This time no hardware hacks. At least no selfmade hardware.
Lately I saw websites that used Adobe flash to get access to my local webcam. I thought it would be fun to have someone take a snapshot of himself and post it on my site.
And it is a fun project to learn some Adobe flex.
When I first saw Crispin Jones Tengu, I was sure, I must have one. If you don’t know tengu and don’t want to follow the link, it’s a small face, made of LEDs, that reacts to music and sound.
It did not take long until I decided to clone this funny little device. All it needs is a microcontroller, an LED matrix and a sound sensor.
Today I was looking for an easy way to improve my photos: a light box. A quick google search reveals many helpful resources. Yery inspiring is the post at Strobist: How To: DIY $10 Macro Photo Studio and this one at Evil Mad Scientist: Lamdshade Light Tent.
I played around with a small box, paper and scissors, only to realize that I am missing the required lighting equipement. My small lamps simply aren’t bright enough.
Sitting in the sun, sipping on my coffee, I came up with this micro light box. Actually it’s a tube. What would you need to build one?
I recently switched from Windows to OS X. I bought a MacBook and I already love it.
The downside is, that I have to build up the complete environment to program AVR microcontrollers again.
This is a write up of things to install and confiure to get the tool chain up and running.
Some weeks ago I met Thilo and he showed me twibble, his GPS enabled twitter client for the N95. Nice little and smart application. It sends messages with geo positions to twitter. The postion can then be tracked and viewed within Google Maps.
I was impressed and decided immediately to try to post the same messages with my mobile tracker and use the same, twitter, twibble and GM, to track my positions.
After some trouble with my SMS sending routine I am finally able to show some working code.
Features so far
If the circuit is powered on, the following sequence will be executed:
Rebuilding it
Well, now you have all information and sources to rebuild and program this device, at least you should. If not, please tell me, what is missing.
But I had some hints in the comments that this can be done easier with the built-in Python. There also other very promissing sources and that is definetely the next thing, that I want to try out. If that works fine, which is not really doubtful to me, I could drop nearly all the external components. That would make it cheaper, easier and smaller.
Nevertheless, the firmware can be useful, if you would like to see, which commands to use to talk to the Telit module.
Links
Downloads
If you followed my previous post on how to use the famous Eclipse IDE to program AVR microcontrollers, you may have noticed, that there are some shortcomings. Especially the creation of a new project is cumbersome, as you have to change the compiler settings from gcc to avr-gcc over and over again.
But there two small nifty plugins, called AVR Plugins for Eclipse, written by Matthew R. McDougal, to help us out.
asdf says: asdf