Posts in arduino

so I’m working on this cloud project with a co-worker and trying to get a capacitive switch to work with it. If you have ever worked with capacitive switches you know how tedious this can be. Now imagine you have no way to monitor output, well that is what I was running into. Problem is you can never know what the output is with stock settings of an attiny. So my solution comes from the good boys/gals of MIT.

Lets set up a little basic “hello world” type example.

So as a fun learning project I made a mouse scroll wheel. Except instead of a traditional one I used hand tracking via proximity sensor. fun stuff, I even made an instructable for it so you can make your own!

check out the prototype I first built as a proof of concept:

Fun little side project with coworker Kevin. He made a fantastic video showing off the current progress of the cloud. Working on making it sensitive to touch right now. We’ll see how that goes, so far it’s been a challenge to get it on the IC I’m working with, but have had no problems prototyping […]

EDIT: I merged this with GRMakers, they were already doing a better job at organizing smart faces. no sense in reinventing the wheel 🙂 Check it out: http://ifelseifelse.com  can come with any level of expertise. So if you want to come just to learn, then we would love to have you. Going to focus on things like […]

ATM, this only works for OSX, however it shouldn’t be too hard to port it over to windows. I will do writeup on it soon.

A few days ago I posted about a Processing dark theme hack I did, it generated some interests so I did one for arduino too. Had a few ask how it was done, so here you go!

wow… well that was a workout.

seems that you have to have very specific way of organizing an imported library. Here are some steps I took to get it into the newly released processing 2.0:

1. make sure you rename twitter4j-core-2.2.6.jar to: twitter4j226.jar
2. make sure you rename the lib folder to: library
3. rename twitter4j-2.2.6 to twitter4j226

Here is a screen grab of my structure

then you just go to: sketch > import library. it should be in there, it will add the following lines of code:

So I started diving into the land of Arduino and went with the Arduino Duemilanove. It doesn’t have sexy branding like the Uno, but seems to be exactly the same. I cannot tell the difference, so I did a little digging and found this:

The main difference is the substitution of the Atmel ATmega8u2 in place of the older FTDI chip. The ‘8u2 has been programmed to act like a USB-serial converter. The second difference is the new bootloader which takes up only 512b compared to the original 2k, and is faster. Other than that they aren’t notable differences.

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Ok so that told me all of nothing, might as well have tried to explain some quantum physics to me. Only thing I can guess is that I don’t need drivers for Uno and do need to install drivers for Duemilanove(more on this later). so I looked some more and found a less esoteric explanation of the perks of the Uno:

Better:

• 150mA 3.3v Voltage Regulator
• Smaller, faster Bootloader
• More flexible USB Chip
• A 4th mounting hole

Worse:

• Replaced crystal with lower accuracy ceramic oscillator

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