Monday, March 23, 2009

My Girls with an accelerometer


Last week, I finally got to play with an accelerometer for the first time. This accelerometer will tell the system when it's upright, and help it balance, or at least that's the plan. I need to spend more time with it, and with sequencing the reading and writing from the accelerometer and to the motor transistors, but so far I had some fun rigging it up with a Pd patch, using the new USB BUB board and latest BareBonesBoard, both from moderndevice.com.
ps. - I'm glad the USB BUB board exists now, for a nice easy way to get the USB connectivity I like for Arduino-Pd stuff, using a cable people could buy off the shelf, not like the old solution for BBBs, a TTY USB adapting cable that was sort of expensive and easy to hook up backwards.


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Anyway, this video is what I did. Thanks for the code:
http://antipastohw.blogspot.com/2007/12/arduino-with-radio-shack-parallax.html
I changed it a little to give Pd messages I'm used to working with (I'm sure there are better ways to send this information serially, but this seems fast enough) and rigged it up to control the volume and playback speed of a loop of Animal Collective's "My Girls." Fun Fun : )



Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Bike chain

I wanted to attach a bike gear to the main driving motor of the robot ball, and have it drive against a bike chain mounted around the inside of the ball. I learned about bike chain tools - used to break and mend bike chains to adjust their lengths and remove or replace bike chains - and took apart my old bike.

thanks: http://www.laseralignment.net/lasertips.html

I took it all apart, almost broke my dad's tool from using it incorrectly, and found the chain to be just what I need, although heavy. I may end up buying a plastic one, should this one be very much too heavy.

So, next I took apart the back wheel to try to separate the smallest gear from the rest, and found I should have done a little more research before so completely disassembling the back wheel. The gears aren't put together in a way that will facilitate my taking a single one very easily, so I'm going to just buy one, probably from smallparts.com *shrug*