#“Makey Makey - You will soooooo Wanty Wanty”
In the middle of the Sparkfun video about Maker Faire, I learned about the Makey Makey. It’s stuff like this that made me want to be an engineer as a kid. It’s just fricking amazing (in my best attempt at a US accent). I’ll be ordering one as soon as they are available.
#“Mini Maker Faire in Dublin, Saturday 14th July, Science Gallery”
After reading tons of posts and watching lots of videos of the most recent Maker Faire in San Mateo in the US, I wondered if anyone had ever organised one here. So I was more than a little happy to see there is a mini-one happening in Dublin in 3 weeks time. If you don’t know what a Maker Faire is, watch this:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54kdHtY9gEc
I might see you there. Some day I need to get to one in the US.
#“Bandon Flood Data (FEWS) now available on Cosm/Pachube”
When I announced the availablity of Open Data on Google Fusion Tables for the Bandon Flood Early Warning System (FEWS) last year, one suggestion that was made to me by Imogen Bertin was to put it up on Pachube (now renamed to the slightly less obscure Cosm). I gave it a go but couldn’t figure it out. Despite providing it with the CSV link to the Fusion Table, it never did anything with the data. So I gave up due to busyness.
This evening, I had another go. This time it was worse. Anything I tried on the data feed resulted in both Chrome and Firefox hanging. I decided to bite the bullet and figure out how to post data directly rather than having them poll. Turns out it’s pretty easy.
Now I know this isn’t exactly the model that people have in mind for the Open Internet of Things but it works:
I’m still waiting for someone to do a mashup with that data, rainfall data at Cork Airport and tidal data. I would but I’m having too much fun playing with Raspberry Pi and Arduino. Eventually I may join the dots and create a little Arduino+RPi weather station out in the garden which reports directly to Cosm using wifi to my house.
In the meantime, enjoy!
#“Finally I’m a real boy”
Conor’s First Dremel.
Turns out that applying a carbide disk, rotating at 10k RPM, to a plastic case doesn’t so much cut as melt. Ah well, I’m happy.
#“Yep, there’s method in my Dadness, I think. Thanks @sugru!”
A lovely film for Father’s Day from Jane and the Sugru team. It was a real pleasure having Julian, John and Ben visit us in Bandon.
Sibal will be delighted to see her Raspberry Pi Lego case getting a great look in.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0g3_NLeEVs
Tomorrow we’re doing more digging into Arduino with her, Oscar and maybe Oisn. First, the treadmill :-)
#“I think I’ve found the ultimate alarm clock project”
As part of the kids and I playing around with Arduino, Sibal thought that we should try and find an alarm clock project for her to build. I’ve found some amazing ones with features like Vacuum Flourescent Tubes but they are a very pricey and the mechanical learning ones on Amazon don’t really keep time
Then today I found this, The Acoustic Alarm. I have no idea how the designer made it but it’s just beautiful. I think we would just need to add a real-time clock to our basic Arduino kit with the servo to do the movement piece. Then Sibal could throw her 8 y/o artistic brain at doing the physical casing etc. If we make any progress I’ll let you know.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMA1P-kNZ2I
#“5th Avenue Frogger - Some day all games will be made this way”
Fan-bloody-tastic idea. My only disappointment is that you are not controlling real robotic squishy frogs but I guess that would be illegal. And a bit too close to Ender’s Game.
5th Ave Frogger from Tyler DeAngelo on Vimeo.
#“Two tutorials later and the kids are liking the Arduino a lot”
I sat down with 8 y/o daughter and 10 y/o son this afternoon to try out our ARDX starter kit for Arduino. The first tutorial is a simple single LED which you flash on/off in software. But I was horrified to find myself stumped!
Yes, I may have a Masters in Electronic Engineering from UCD but, as anyone who did Electronics there prior to the mid-90s knows, a certain lecturer ensured that we all left completely clueless in basic circuit cop-on.
The ARDX kit on the surface has a lovely introductory booklet but it really misses the mark on practical instructions. So they tell you what every component does which is good but nowhere does it explain how the holes in a breadboard are connected. Are they long columns of commonality or short rows? Do the power lines go from top to bottom or only in small blocks? Kind of important information!
Add to that a completely indecipheral diagram for where the components should go plus several connections which were totally unnecessary and I ended up totally flustered with the two kids getting bored.
Finally I threw away the instructions, thought about it for a second and realised it was dead easy. Some trial/error figured out the breadboard layout and hurrah, a blinking LED! We played a bit with on/off timings and we were immediately ready for more.
This time we did 8 LEDs which worked right first time and we loved the default on/off pattern. One thing we realised was that a magnifying glass is a big help when trying to see the individual breadboard holes.
And that’s as far as we got. They both want to try some more interesting LED patterns and then move on to the motors, servos and sensors. The long term plan is to build something “robotic”.
More on that next weekend.
Then of course I found this site called DIYDrones about UAVs………
#“The Sweet Sound of #EURO2012 Silence”
This simple Tweetdeck filter is doing a pretty decent job so far. No need for dilithium crystals. I’ll tweak it as the volume increases over the next few days. But at this stage I don’t even know if the thing has started yet or not.
If I had any interest I’d probably look up what coybig means. Is it pornographic?
coybig, poznan, poland, ukraine, euro12, euro2012, euro 2012, football, footie, referee, score, goal, footy, ireland, irish team, sport, sports, kick off, final whistle, sea of green, shay given, robbie keane, brian kerr, trapattoni, damien duff, game, match, ref#“Learn electronics with an Arduino and @Raspberry_Pi on an old Philips TV”
Been slammed with work for two weeks (will never complain about that!) which means blogging has been a bit light. But the big excitement yesterday was my ARDX Arduino Starter Kit arriving from Seeedstudio.
If you are not familair with Arduino, it is an OpenSource hardware platform forelectronicsprojects, tinkering, robotics, home automation etc etc etc. The blue board above is the heart of it.
The Starter Kit makes it possible for anyone, even with zero electronics knowledge to assemble simple circuits with no soldering and then run code on the Arduino microcontroller to do “things”. In this kit it ranges from blinking an LED to controlling a motor. Once you get the hang of it, a whole world of experimentation awaits you. There are also tons of add-on boards called Shields to do everything from advanced motor control to LCD and GPS.
I haven’t had a chance to try anything on the Arduino yet except run a simple program to flash the on-board LED.
But I was over the moon to discover that that Raspbian distribution for Raspberry Pi has a working copy of the Arduino IDE which is what you use to write your programs, upload them to the Arduino and run them. A few minutes later, I had everything working.
Then for kicks and giggles I connected the RPi up to a 12 yo Philips portable telly. And it works too! Massive massive flashbacks to the ZX Spectrum days.
This is more amazing than it first might seem. Think about it - A computer for $25 connected to an electronics learning kit for $79 connected to an old telly. Everything you need to becomecompetentwith both computers and electronics. And you don’t even need the internet at home.
Get a wifi dongle for 6 and borrow a mobile phone charger. Then spend anhour a week in school or Coder Dojo or somewhere offering free Wifi (Mahon Point!) to grab any software updates you need and to download any webpages, manuals, example code etc. And you can do the rest at home.
Old school!
I’ll do a video and proper post on the Arduuino kit once I’ve assembled it and tried out a few of the projects over the weekend.