Getting ready for Maker Fair Detroit, Part 1

Nothing like a deadline for motivation to complete a project, and I NOW have a deadline - the Detroit Maker Fair on July 31-August 1 at Henry Ford Museum. My main goal is to get some more booth space for the Frog Force exhibit, but I'd like to get some of my own stuff out of the notebook and into hardware and software.

First up is the Coasterbot, which has a couple of improvements since the last post.

The chassis is completely new to allow for thru bolts to hold the top and bottom coasters together. Lego plates are not the most robust connectors. The hacked mouse encoders are working nicely with the PID code on the motor control Arduino. The Coasterbot can now talk to the outside world without wires using the XBee module mounted over the left wheel (right side of robot in the picture). And buried under the wires on the main controller breadboard is an HMC6352 I2C Compass. Between the mouse encoders and the compass, I have the basis for a rudimentary navigation system. For Maker Fair, the idea is to write a Processing or .NET app to display the robot's position as reported over the XBee link on a PC (or Mac or Linux box if I use Processing) as the robot drives around avoiding objects. And there's still some room on the chassis that is just asking to be filled with some interesting bit of hardware.

Next up is an Arduino based LED clock - 60 x 3 color LEDs arranged in a circle, red indicates hours, green is minutes, blue is seconds. I've got the electronics and code prototyped, now it's more of a woodworking project. More info later as that project gets under way.

Last up (and I probably won't get to the in the next 5 weeks before Maker Fair) is an Arduino controller wireless lawn sprinkler system control to replace the hopelessly bad (at least from a user interface point of view) Toro controllers we have now. This will be a plumbing project too, since on of the main water lines out to a valve box cracked and turning on the water now results in a muddy fountain in the back yard.     

Brian
The Black Dog