Multi proyectos 0063

Once the project began design stage we realized that focusing on making it easy for others to reproduce was a good idea. Therefore we choose to use nothing but standard components. Nema 23 stepper motors and drivers are standard, cheap and common due to the increase in DIY CNC and Reprap manufacturing. The Arduino Uno is available across the world. We also only use metric standard components (sorry about that US) such as M5 threaded rods and M4, M3 screws for the smaller components.

Omnidirection wheels however are not exactly standard components, but given the simplicity of the drive mechanism it would be very easy to adapt the design for other wheels and shafts of a similar size. We have also made sure it is easy to re-design the drawings to account for other types of motors and bearings and we’ve left significant space (length-wise) for larger motors and gearboxes.

(c) 2011 courtesy of Forsknings Avdelningen

(c) 2011 Courtesy of D. Palacios

WhH is a machine which creates growth rings in a section of virgin wood, so that we may be part of a process which we believed before to be foreign to us, because we weren’t capable of perceiving it.

The machine engraves concentric rings in the wood surface by laser, so that the result is closer to reality than a computer-generated graphic. It is just as important that the graphic is realised slowly over time, involving external factors which could affect the process, separating us from the instantaneousness of a printer in order to understand the process that it is giving at that exact instant, while confronting the vision we are accustomed to, because we will always be able to make a comparison with the rings that it already drew at the moment of our visit.

Every day the machine begins drawing a new ring, taking as a reference point the shape of the previous one from the day before. However, the distance of this and variation of its perimeter with be directly tied to the number of people in the hall and their movements; this will also affect the number of passes the machine makes over the ring throughout the day, thus influencing its thickness and depth.

(c) 2011 Courtesy of D. Palacios

(c) 2011 LiveMint, picture courtesy of LiveMint.com

Nandeep Mali, Harry Samson, Priya Kuber and Pronoy Chopra are the founders of 9 Circuits, an online store that hopes to kickstart the country’s fledgling do-it-yourself (DIY) hardware community. Hardware engineering includes everything from building prototype vehicles to experimental gadgets. The store sells an entire range of programmable Arduino Boards (the engineering foundation for everything from a robot to a GPS module), hardware components, sensors and spare parts.

It operates out of a single room on the first floor of a shopping complex in east Delhi’s Mayur Vihar. Their unlikely neighbours include a detective agency called Omniscient Detectives. Inside the 9 Circuits office are four desks arranged haphazardly, stacked with miniature mountains of electronic components. “Everything is about software here, so the hardware hobbyists in India are largely fragmented. There’s lots of knowledge but very little networking,” says Mali, rooting through a box of touch screens. “The entry barriers become very heavy.”

“When you study abroad, every student is exposed to some broader arm of DIY culture,” Kuber says. “We want to recreate that atmosphere. Create documentation and videos that can be replicated locally.” While detailed instructions exist on the Internet for just about every conceivable engineering conundrum, many of these assume that you’re living in a society with easy access to specific components. “Try going to a hardware store and asking for an M3 screw,” Kuber says. “They’ll blink.”

Kuber conducts workshops on DIY at engineering colleges around north India, and wants to encourage more women to take up hardware engineering. “The problem here is that there are middlemen and organizations willing to sell you complete college projects, so a lot of people don’t have to solder a thing to get through the system.”

LUFA powers the HIDUINO project in that it handles most of the low-level USB-HID implementation while exposing an API for developing other HID-compliant devices like MIDI.

The USB-HID specification has a specific type for MIDI input and MIDI output, which nearly all commercial musical controllers on the market use for class-compliant (driverless!) MIDI I/O.

In this instructable you will learn how to connect to your arduino and control it over the net, set up a video stream, and how to control stuff with your arduino all in realtime. I’ll try to show you on a concrete example how this could be done, but the code I used and wrote is going to be generic so you can use it for your projects. Note that I haven’t discovered anything new but rather used code that I found lying around the net, built from it and changed it fit my needs.

(…) So how should it work? The idea is that there is a Flash AIR app on my home computer that when a remote client connects to it starts the video broadcast. The communication between the client and the AIR app would be through a PHP socket because it can instantly push messages from one to the other. The socket will handle all the clients and the queuing. The Red5 server is used to handle the video broadcast, stream the video and send the arduino commands from the client that is first in the queue to the AIR app (although it could do so much more… we’ll talk about that in a later step). Finally TinkerProxy is used to send commands from the AIR app to the arduino that is connected to the same computer.

SAMSA is based on the Wiring board, with an ATmega128 microcontroller, and SAMSA II on the Arduino Mega, with an ATmega1280. Both are pretty similar, tough the ATmega1280 has 8 KB SRAM, twice the ATmega128. For SAMSA II the Arduino IDE was not used. The software was written directly in C++, using some libraries from both Arduino and Wiring.

SAMSA II has also two additional microcontrollers. One is an old Arduino Mini(ATmega168) located in the head, tasked with handling the sensors. The other is an ATmega8 and is integrated in the display. The firmware in the display was replaced with another one, freeing the main microcontroller from handling the display pixel by pixel, storing the frame buffer, etc.

The head’s microcontroller is responsible for sampling, filtering and processing sensor’s data. The data from the Sharp distance sensor and the lateral IR sensors are combined in a single “super smart distance sensor”. This microcontroller also decodes the data coming from the 38 KHz IR receiver, used for the Remote Control.

These two additional microcontrollers further reduce the load on the main microcontroller, allowing for more sophisticated behaviours.