Strobotics

As one does while in bed at 3am and unable to sleep, I was thinking of the Strobit Triggr (which is probably why I couldn’t get to sleep in the first place) an idea presented itself for Arduino type shields (in particular Strobit Triggr personality boards) where they could be given some real personality.

Currently Arduino shields provide the hardware interface to the world for the base Arduino board.  On the Arduino resides the code that provide the functionality i.e the personality, in the form of a sketch.  The sketch and the shield have a one to one mapping, i.e. a sketch for one shield will not work with another shield type and visa-a-versa.  So whenever a shield is changed, the base Arduino boards needs re-programming with a new sketch to give it it’s personality from the host PC/MAC this provides the new functionality associated with the shield.

The idea is for the shields to have onboard flash memory that contains the actual Arduino sketch associated with it.  When the Arduino is powered up, it then checks for this flash first, if present then it proceeds to load  from here, reprogramming itself with the new code, reboots and now has the functionality associated with the shield.  If there is no flash available (a shield with no personality e.g. current shields) then the Arduino proceeds to load as per normal.

This way you could easily swap a shield/personality board without having to reprogram the Arduino, it keeps the functionality of the shield with the shield, thus giving shields a personality.

After getting back into photography after many many years (and because Digital SLRs are so much cheaper)  I’ve been an avid follower of the stobist website (www.strobist.com) for off camera lighting.  To do this off camera lighting you need a way of triggering the remote stobes, some are wired, some are wireless either RF or Infrared, but obviously the easiest is via wireless.  Well there are many solutions, some cheap (ebay triggers) some expensive (Pocket wizards) and you get what you pay for, the cheaper ones (of which I one a couple) are notorious for false triggers, while the Pocket wizards are way out of my price range.

So in the true spirit of Open Source, of which I’m a huge fan, I’ve proposed an open source wireless trigger for the strobist community.  Initial thread found here – www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157602088957861/  So far the response has been great fantastic.

 I’ve now setup a wiki for a brain dump of ideas http://wiki.everythingrobotics.com and will shortly have a mailing list up and running.

 forums are now also up and running http://forums.everythingrobotics.com  hopefully these will eventually fall under the strobist.com domain

I came across an interesting article yesterday on Hack-A-Day about using a LED as a Photo Sensor and cheap communictaion device.  This is achieved by using some physical properties of the LED for both Transmit and Receive.  The article also links to a cool video clip demonstrating this. Original Article can be found here http://www.hackaday.com/entry/1234000873073550/

Anyway this sparked my interest and I soon had a PICAXE-08M hooked up to test if it-in fact it works (I also made sure that the date was not 1st April LOL).  After about an hour I had it working, this code requires 3 LEDs, One acts as the Light Source and is always on (not really necessary, you can use anything as a light source, the brighter the better), the Second LED acts as the Sensor and is connected to two outputs along with the current limiting resistor, this is really the heart of the concept.  The third LED is a status Indicator and gets switched on and off depending on the reading of the LED Sensor.  

This idea, as simple as it is, makes for some interesting sensor ideas.

Here’s the PICAXE code - LEDSwitch.zip

After lots of research I’ve started to put some ideas to paper for the MK1 CNC Machine.  

Yes I know I could probably jump right in and start putting together bit and pieces, but I really want to learn to use some 3-D Modelling CAD Packages for future Robotics projects and since I will eventually need to model components so they can be exported to the CNC machine for milling, I thought it might be a good exercise by modelling the MK1 itself.

So here is the start of the X-Axis Linear Bearings