I dragged out the Arduino last night. It had been some time since I’d set up any circuits, and I wanted to get back in the game, so to speak, before going to Maker Faire.
I have an abbreviated set of electronics kit with me, and so there are pieces and parts that I can’t exactly use until I get back to a real workbench.
Among things that I think I have enough parts to drive:
– 20×4 LCD (I have the whole 2-wire LCD circuit set up on a breadboard)
– 3 servo motors
– ultrasonic distance sensor
– passive IR motion detector
– speaker
– Wii nunchuck
– BlinkM
I have 2 Arduinos (one Duemilanove and one Boarduino), and several shields:
– data logger
– motor shield
– LoL shield
– 2 protoshields
I couldn’t get the LCD working because I’d scrounged parts off of the circuit, including the all-important contrast pot. For some reason, pots don’t work in my life. I tried out the only one I could find in my kit, and it isn’t breadboard compatible. grr.
Would have been nice to have some textual output. Serial monitor it is.
I then tried out the BlinkM and the Wiichuck. There was a sample sketch online that got those working together, kinda cool.
Then I went back to an old nemesis, controlling servos with the Wiichuck. I eventually got it pretty stable with a single servo, but when I added the second one, things got a little twitchy. I am not exactly sure why it’s so twitchy, but it’s very irritating. I got it kind of working and it got late so I went to bed. I’ll look at it some more later.
I don’t know that I necessarily pushed the pickle forward very much. It was good to get back in the swing, but I didn’t really make anything awesome yet.
I am thinking that a basic GPS/datalogger could be handy. keep track of the position once per minute or so, have a button to set a memory point, maybe have a “go to memory point” mode (“go such and such distance in this and so direction”). I don’t know if it can be done with a single arduino, but I’m willing to try.