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Guitar Hero 3 Boarduino-bot

Fabien Royer has a strange project up his sleeve…

“What’s got 6 eyes, 6 fingers, 6 brains and plays Guitar Hero III? If you answered ‘The Beast’, you’re close. It’s actually the Guitar Hero ‘bot’ that I’ve been building around 6 Arduino cores (Boarduinos actually). It uses 6 photodiodes mounted on a LEGO rig to ‘see’ the notes on the screen and drives a wireless XBOX 360 controller through a series of 6 Reed relays in real time. So how does it perform? Right now, with some quick and dirty code to decode and play the notes, it’s tuned to play Medium-difficulty songs with a hit ratio between 80% and 90%. The bot also controls ‘Star Power’ by itself when it’s charged enough. I have high hopes that with some more work, it will be able to handle Expert-level songs with good results. I’ll post a demo video of the bot playing GH 3 later this week. ”

Read about it at his website

Filed under: arduino,projects — by ladyada, posted January 31, 2008 at 8:01 pm

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Hack a MiniPOV3 to capture IR codes

oPossom totally rocked my socks with a simple hack to turn a Minipov3 kit into an IR code receiver. The kit is modified to store incoming

IR signal into the EEPROM which is then spit out via the serial port to a custom program that then translates it directly into a code for TV-B-Gone kits.

ASquare bought an Arduino starter pack before christmas and has wasted no time becoming a hardware-hacking geek.
Not only is his new blog totally awesome but he’s also got an impressive initial project!

RGB button pad demo from JMG on Vimeo.

The monome is a gorgeous, minimalist, open-source light-and-button pad used primarily by musicians as a controller. The folks over at SparkFun Electronics, inspired by the monome, released their own button pads and circuit boards, only they designed theirs to be able to hold RGB LEDs. They made this nifty Tetris game with their parts. Looking at it, though, I noticed something: they only seemed to use a limited palette, in particular, they only appeared to have red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white, corresponding to channels being fully on or fully off. I wanted to see if I could get colour mixing, wherein channels were on partially in order to blend colours smoothly.

not sure you’re up to all this? you can always buy Monome kits direct from the ethereal source!

Filed under: EE,projects — by ladyada, posted January 21, 2008 at 12:46 pm

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Motor Party!

it is like -19213 degrees outside, so i spent the day workin’ on my motor shield design and then had a MOTOR PARTY!

Click To Play

Here is a preview of the motor shield for Arduino that I’m workin’ on…it can drive 2 hobby servos as well as up to 2 steppers or 4 bidirectional DC motors.

  servo_init();
  servo1_enable();
  servo2_enable();
  motor_init();
  stepper1_enable();
  motor4_enable();

  while(1) {
    servo_setpos(1, -2000);
    servo_setpos(2, -2000);
    motor(4, FORWARD);
    for (i=0; i< 250; i++) {
      stepper(1, FORWARD, SINGLE);
      motor_setspeed(4,i);
      _delay_ms(5);
    }
    motor(4, BACKWARD);
    servo_setpos(1, 2000);
    servo_setpos(2, 2000);
    for (i=0; i< 250; i++) {
      stepper(1, BACKWARD, SINGLE);
      motor_setspeed(4,i);
      _delay_ms(5);
    }
  }

Filed under: arduino,kits,random — by ladyada, posted January 20, 2008 at 11:47 pm

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WinAVR/avrdude now support USBtinyISP!

First the good news!

WinAVR release 2007/12/21 includes the latest avrdude (5.5) which now supports USBtinyISP! This means you dont have to patch any code or replace binaries to use the USBtinyISP programmer.

However, there is some bad news…

WinAVR was compiled with a 2 year old version of libusb (v0.1.10) instead of the most recent version (v0.1.12), which means that it is incompatible with the original driver that I posted up on the USBtinyISP download page. Thus if you want to use the latest WinAVR, you must uninstall the driver and then reinstall the older (v0.1.10) version which is now available on the download page.
Otherwise, youll get a nasty surprise:

as the device seems to be working, but avrdude can’t “find” it!

If you don’t want to reinstall the driver, you’ll have to replace the avrdude.exe and libusb0.dll with the modified versions (also available and described in detail on the download page).

The other bad news is that I made some mistakes in the code that make it incompatible with 64-bit. Hopefully I will get that tested/fixed for the next revision…not having a 64 bit machine makes it a bit annoying to debug!

Filed under: kits — by ladyada, posted January 17, 2008 at 1:45 pm

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Makin’ more room for your Boarduino hacking

I’ve got some comments that the Boarduino kit is too wide and thus crowds out space on a breadboard…
Here’s an example of how to use 2 halfsized breadboards to make a nice workspace.

First, get 2 halfsized breadboards (this will work with fullsized ones too, of course, but itll be huge!)

Slice the backing of one of the power rails and pull it off

Snap together the two pieces

Plug in your boarduino, now you have tons of workspace!

You can peel off the backing and stick the breadboards (and extra rail) onto a piece of cardboard (or anything really) to give it more support.

Filed under: arduino,projects — by ladyada, posted January 16, 2008 at 11:23 am

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Using terminal blocks w/Boarduino

Thinking about the Arducopter project I posted about yesterday, as well as the RepRap project…I thought how useful it would be to be able to wire up a Boarduino without any soldering or breadboard. Then I remembered the terminal blocks I used for MidiSense!

Terminal screw-blocks allow lightweight ultra-quick prototyping: just tighten the little screws to add or remove components! Use Phoenix brand 0.1″ terminal blocks, part 1725672 (4-position), 1725698 (6-position), 1725711 (8-position), 1725724 (9-position)

Here’s an example I soldered up. You cant use huge wires, but for most small projects with 20-ish gauge wire it should be just fine!

Here is a ‘standalone’ light sensor (CdS cell, pullup resistor to Analog In 0, VRef tied to 5V)

Filed under: arduino,boarduino,kits — by ladyada, posted January 15, 2008 at 12:26 pm

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Arducopter (featuring Boarduino!)

One of the reasons I designed my own Arduino clone is so that people who wanted to design wearable or portable (ie small/lightweight) projects would have a nice and slender alternative.
jordi’s original helicopter used an Arduino Diecimilla, but for weight reasons he decided to go with a Boarduino for rev 2, but even that didn’t get away without a lot of hacking….

Check out his YouTube videos for progress reports…

(via hackzine)

Filed under: arduino,kits,projects — by ladyada, posted January 14, 2008 at 11:21 pm

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x0x515′s custom acrylic case

Not much more I can add to this incredible hand-built clear case…Keith S. is quite a perfectionist! (Or maybe he also has a laser cutter?)

Check out high-res versions of these photos, as well as gawk at the other mods people have done, at the x0xb0x gallery page!

Filed under: x0xb0x — by ladyada, posted January 13, 2008 at 12:35 pm

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TTTT-TamponToteTurnsoffTVs

Becky Stern is today’s hero for putting her TV-B-Gone kit in a tampon-tote, thus creating the ultimate in “geek girls are hot/gross” dichotomies! Full documentation at her flickr set

Filed under: random,tvbgone — by ladyada, posted January 12, 2008 at 12:02 pm

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x0xb0x demo #69

Here is a nice-n-easy x0xb0x demo video with good sound (yay), thanks to Booster69
It’s to celebrate that I’ve finally gotten off my ass and am finishing off run #7 after a vacation-y november and retail-rushed december

Filed under: x0xb0x — by ladyada, posted January 11, 2008 at 12:47 pm

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Arduino tilt-mouse

Magician13134 got an Arduino starter pack and has been going all out with hacking! He designed this Arduino 3-axis tilt-mouse using an accelerometer breakout from Parallax (now available from Radio Shack) and some windows programming skills. Then he etched his own PCB, doing the layout in MSPAINT! How hardcore is THAT?

Check out the project as it unfolds, at the ladyada.net forums