Arduino anyone?

[LoKiT]

Got myself an Arduino Uno to play with. The idea was to be able to use the Board as an interface via Codetrixxx. You setup the a bespoke Arduino program and then control the I/O pins from software. The idea is to be able to do some clever software control of toy and triggers to make play easy to program without reflashing the Arduino.

If anyone is interested in a separate test program for windows to be able control the Ardinuo I/O from a windows program please let me know which variant of Arduino you have.

Another idea I have is using the Lillypad variant which can be sown into garments with conductive thread. I can think of a lot of kinky fun with sensors and mini button vibes under remote control

[jason88888]

Hey!

After reading your post I started to think about what could be done without too much effort for the user, googled for the board and such - plan for now would be 4 vibrators attached to a sleeve, maybe a fifth for a vib-plug.
Today I've started to do some working. Already drilled holes in 2 vibrators above the motor to solder wires to it, attached 1,5 - 2 meters of wire, tested with a laboratory power supply, will order some more vibrators tomorrow, cheap ones, 0,47 € for one.
Anyway, I will try to get a Arduino Uno at the start of the next month, for this month my wallet is stressed enough.

Best greetings!

[Crowley]

Another thing to note with the Arduino is that the full sized boards are great for development but if you want to deploy something and size is a concern, it isn't too hard to strip it down to the bare bones of the ATMega chip and some supporting circuitry.

You can get to get a core circuit board about the size of your finger (you could go a lot smaller but SMT (surface mount) components are a fair bit harder to work with without professional equipment - it is possible though)

See http://uk.farnell.com/arduino/a000048/m ... dp/1848694 or http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10524

If anyone wants help with this, shout out here or drop me a PM

[LoKiT]

Crowley thanks for the links. Check out http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/
I did find this, a flexible version called seeedunio...

This apparently can be folded, chained together or cut into sections.

Following up on your idea on just using the chip with bootloader in a circuit I found some good blogs with the bare 5 components to add with a chip to make a custom board. I found an excellent free program called "Fritzing" at http://fritzing.org/ avaible for all OS formats. It you have ever thought of turning an experiment into a real tidy job this method is really easy to use. You can draw Breadboard layouts, schematics or PCBs of any electronic design or Arduino setup. As you add items to the schematic or teak the breadboard or PCB so all three automatically update. Add the components and hook it up. Then check out the schematic and look at the PCB proposal. If you like the PCB layout you can click the order the button and they will post you your custom PCB by post. And for a professionally made one off PCB I thought the prices were very good. However these are made in Berlin Germany so how that compares as a service outside the European union I have no idea? If nothing else its really easy way to storing your designs, exprements or layouts on computer to be repeated later.

The Arduino that really gets my attention is the "Lillypad" variant. People are sewing these things into clothing and toys for cool interactive effects. Besides the bewildering array of sensors that can be connected to it there is a nice little vibe that appears to be able to be directly driven. Shall have to get my hands on one to see how useful it is. But it looks small enough to be sewn into, glued or hidden into most objects and hooked up with some conductive thread

lillpad.jpg (13.91 KiB) Viewed 4132 times

vibe.jpg (9.26 KiB) Viewed 4132 times

Apparently its all washable provided you remove the power supply and dry well.

[Audrey_CD]

Hi Lokit,

If you are integrating an external interface card to Codetrixx, can I suggest adding a common access method so that other cards beside Arduino can be used from the same command set? Each make of card would need a specific library to receive the Codetrixxx commands and generate the appropriate action from the card.

Hope that makes sense.

Audrey.

[LoKiT]

Hi Aud, what a brilliant suggestion.

common access method so that other cards beside Arduino can be used from the same command set?

What other cads did you have in mind? And do they have a serial or USB interface?

I have not decided on the Codetrixxx command names yet. But I will tell you how I'm doing it as you be able to write the equilant for any other cards that you have.

When I installed Arduino it installed a driver for the SER/USB comms, comes out as COM3: in windows and /dev/ttyACM0 in linux. Anyway, using a standard serial library I send commands down the serial. Then I drop a program into the arduino to listen for the commands.

Commands are... ( Pin number, command I, O, P or A, value. All commands send back the work ACK or value)

13O1 = pin 13, O for set output, set 1 or high or 0 for low. ie; 13 - O - 1 or Pin - Command - Value -> returns an "ACK" or Value like '234'
06P127 = pin 6, P for PWM, then the value.
09I = sends back one or zero as I is the command input value of pin 09
03A = sends back value of A/D port 3

And thats it. serial is 9600 N 8 1

If you can make any card obey these four simple serial commands if will work
But its not set in stone so I'm open to ideas.
One idea someone suggested was a watchdog timer so if the card is losses coms for any reason it will after a set time power off or sleep mode to power down the outputs to free the victim.

[Audrey_CD]

Hi Lokit,

I have a Vellman K8055 USB card. It has commands implemented through function calls in a provided DLL.
It can control 8 digital outputs (on/off), two analogue outputs (0 to 255 or 0 to 100% PWM); 5 digital inputs and 2 analogue inputs. The analogue outputs are PWM selectable via hard wiring to different connections.

Details here: [url]http://www.velleman.eu/products/view/?c ... &id=351346[/url]

My thought was to create a standard header, with a set of functions that can be implemented through card specific DLLs. It may be that a subset of all available commands is necessary to make the command set universal.

Aud.

[LoKiT]

Hi Aud, its a nice looking card. Yeah sounds like a good idea. I think I'm going to move this to "Software" to if anyone else has any I/O card requests or Arduino ideas.

[PiJoy]

Got myself an Arduino Uno to play with. The idea was to be able to use the Board as an interface via Codetrixxx. You setup the a bespoke Arduino program and then control the I/O pins from software. The idea is to be able to do some clever software control of toy and triggers to make play easy to program without reflashing the Arduino.

If anyone is interested in a separate test program for windows to be able control the Ardinuo I/O from a windows program please let me know which variant of Arduino you have.

LoKiT,

I have a motley collection of Arduino clones and work-alikes:

The RBBB from http://shop.moderndevice.com/products/rbbb-kit

A couple Sanguinos: http://sanguino.cc/

and newest and most powerful: leaflab's Maple Mini:http://leaflabs.com/devices/

The Maple mini has a (32-bit!) cpu, more memory, and clocks at 72 MHz. Very capable.

Regardless of which Arduino, they all should support sigificant numbers of the Arduino's libraries. That's a big win for compatibility. Of particular note is the Firmata protocol See http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Interfacing/Firmata Firmata http://firmata.org/wiki/Main_Page
is a generic protocol for communicating with and controlling outputs of an arduino, remotely over a serial (or USB) link, from a number of high-level languages. I think this could be useful common ground (ready to use) for enabling PC software to control *interesting* hardware. Check it out!

[nitro]

Another thing to note with the Arduino is that the full sized boards are great for development but if you want to deploy something and size is a concern, it isn't too hard to strip it down to the bare bones of the ATMega chip and some supporting circuitry.

You can get to get a core circuit board about the size of your finger (you could go a lot smaller but SMT (surface mount) components are a fair bit harder to work with without professional equipment - it is possible though)

See http://uk.farnell.com/arduino/a000048/m ... dp/1848694 or http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10524

If anyone wants help with this, shout out here or drop me a PM

If you are looking for really small I would suggest looking at a small 6 pin PIC in a SOT23-6 package.
They are not bad to program, but you do need an inexpensive programmer to load them (you can build your own if you are handy with electronics)

Here is an example of a 10F222 (has a built in ADC) 6 pin (2 power, 1 I and 3 I/O) A little bigger than a grain of rice. About $0.80 each (or get a free sample )
The 10F202 is pin compatible without the adc inputs.
http://www.microchip.com/wwwproducts/De ... e=en023672

Here is an image to show the relative size (from hack-a-day)
http://hackaday.com/tag/10f222/