Oops

Wow forgot about this blog...
Finally Fall session is over and now I'm on winter break~
Then school starts in 2 weeks...
Black Friday was kinda fun, didn't wait in line since there were many online sales :P
I was lucky enough to get chosen for Amazon Vote thing and got myself a Asus EEE PC 900 for $129 ;)
Also got a new desktop: Specs here <- $696 after cash back, took like 5 hours of nonstop refreshing to get thru to order -_-
Been playing several games during these few days: Runes of Magic (Pretty good, kinda like a WoW clone), Maple Story (for the lulz, was testing it on my EEE PC :D), Rappelz (boring), Cabal Online (mega addicting...got level 30 in 2 days @_@)

Gonna continue with my board prototyping very soon :)

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Woot!

The headers and housing came yesterday!




While waiting for the stuff to come over the weekend...

-Bought Left 4 Dead at Circuit City for $39.99
One of the achievement is to kill the witch with 1 headshot...tried it few times but it doesn't work...(click the picture if you want it bigger)


-Played some Fallout 3
Didn't know it was like Oblivion...but with guns and modern stuff
It's kind of like Tengan Toppa and Oblivion combined :o




Will update more later~

Zzz

Found out I need some male and female headers. Ordered them yesterday, hope they come this weekend. No updates until then :(

Mmm...

Didn't update because I was lazy and tired yesterday...
The Tamiya Chassis Kit was awesome! The motor was easy to assemble, tracks took a while because I made several mistakes...
Right now it can only go forward and backward by itself (without using the switch from the kit) I'm still trying to find a way to wire the ultrasonic range finder...probably won't get much done today.
Here are the contents in the box!




Finished product with Arduino+motor shield+battery pack on it!


Really cool feature from the battery holder! You can actually make it go forward or backward :O

UPS guy...

Where are you...

EDIT: YES! Time to play with my fancy stuff :D

SRF05 Ultrasonic Ranger


Tamiya COOL TRACKS


Tamiya Twin Motor

Mmm...solder

Went to Hobby People to get a servo Hitec HS-311 because apparently I didn't read carefully on the Adafruit site...
Kit comes with all parts necessary, unassembled. Instructions, examples, and other documentation is available on the website
Motors and Arduino are not included.

At first soldering was hard and confusing since it's my first time. I google'd and youtube'd soldering videos.

For those who don't know what this is...

Arduino is a great starting point for electronics, and with a motor shield it can also be a nice tidy platform for robotics and mechatronics. Here is a design for a full-featured motor shield that will be able to power many simple to medium-complexity projects.

• 2 connections for 5V ‘hobby’ servos with high-resolution dedicated timer - no jitter!
• Up to 4 bi-directional DC motors with individual 8-bit speed selection (so, about 0.5% resolution)
• Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil or interleaved stepping.
• 4 H-Bridges: L293D chipset provides 0.6A per bridge (1.2A peak) with thermal shutdown protection, 4.5V to 36V
• Pull down resistors keep motors disabled during power-up
• Big terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (10-22AWG) and power
• Arduino reset button brought up top (Diecimila only)
• 2-pin terminal block to connect external power, for seperate logic/motor supplies
• Tested compatible with Diecimila (NG is next!)

BEFORE




















AFTER




Total time to complete: ~5-6 Hours (...)
Note to self: Don't be too hasty. There was a tutorial with PICTURES on the ladyada site but I was soldering by looking at the finished picture. Made 3 mistakes and it took forever to desolder without tools ¬¬

It..it's alive!

The Arduino was really easy to setup. The codes were very easy to understand since they're similar to C++. I was confused with how the circuits work but it didn't take a long time to learn. I made the Arduino play sound because I have an old phone speaker lying around, decided to make it play Jingle Bells because of the CVS ads :P

Here's a video of it playing parts of Jingle Bells

Ta-da

I finally decide to start on my robot project! I ordered the Arduino Duemilanove, Motor Shield kit, breadboard and usb cable from Adafruit for $67.45 (shipping kills ¬¬) I also ordered awesome wheel tracks, SRF05 Range finder, and Tamiya twin motor (It reminds me of Twin Drive from Gundam 00 :) ) from SuperDroid Robots for $65.74. I'll post some pictures when the package arrive! Still waiting for the UPS guy to come...can't believe USPS arrive faster they were ordered on the same day...
For those who don't know...

Overview

The Arduino Duemilanove ("2009") is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega168 (datasheet). It has 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started.

"Duemilanove" means 2009 in Italian and is named after the year of its release. The Duemilanove is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards; for a comparison with previous versions, see the index of Arduino boards.

Here's the Arduino Duemilanove

And the Motor Shield Kit

^Note to self: READ THE DESCRIPTIONS! Now I have to solder the thing -_-
Time to play around with tutorials!