RAREblog

Make your own Arduino clone I've just come back from a Shrimping workshop at the /dev/winter conference in Cambridge. I've run quite a few of these workshops now, and they have all been fun. Participants build the Shrimp , a low-cost Arduino clone on a breadboard, and start learning to program it using the Arduino IDE. The Shrimp was developed by the Makers of Morecambe. The Morecambe Maker I've met is Cefn Hoile; he maintains the website and provides kits at an unbeatable price. ...and what to do next Several of the workshop participants asked for advice about what to do next. There's a huge amount of information about Arduino techniques, libraries, shields and projects, but that's a problem in itself. Where do you start? One option is to take the free Life After Blink e-course I put together for people who'd attended my Shrimping It! workshops. It's a series of online lessons, along with a google groups support group. At some stage I wil...

I took C3Pi to the Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire a few days ago, but had to leave early since he suddenly stopped working. At the time I blamed a loss of battery power, and thought that he'd wiped the file system on his SD card. Various holdups meant that I have only just been able to try to fix the problem which turns out to be rather simpler. C3Pi has two controllers on board: a Raspberry Pi model B+ does the thinking, and a Teensy 3.1 controls his motors. The Pi B+ uses a micro SD card but when I removed it the card was even more micro than usual: half the card had been broken off! I have no idea how this happened but poor old C3PI is off the hook. He's now back in action with a newly-flashed SD card and will soon be getting the first of a series of upgrades. I mentioned that I had only just been able to get around to investigating the problem. I spend several days after the Faire learning about wearable electronics. I'd been asked if I could help with a weara...

From Wembley to Southend Adafruit Gemma This evening I'm off to Createspace in Wembley to work on some wearable electronics. I'm helping with a wearable electronics workshop at this weekend's Southend Raspberry Jam , and I need to practice! I've been to several Raspberry Jams at Southend, and thoroughly enjoyed them. There's always a strong local presence as well as a group of regular visitors from further away. Great talks and workshops - whether you're an beginner at making things or an old hand, you'll find interesting and helpful people. Createspace Createspace is my nearest maker space. I've been to the London Hackspace, which is awesome, but it takes me a while to get there from home. Createspace has an impressive collection of facilities and is much easier for me to get to. They have open nights, and there's a regular meetup for electronic hackers. Gemma and Flora Tonight I'll be experimenting with Adafruit's Gemma and F...

C3Pi from above I went along this morning to the Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire to introduce C3Pi to some of my fellow makers. The event was extremely well organised and I had no problem finding my desk and setting up. Before long C3Pi was running through his paces - fairly limited at the moment, as he still has no sensors and is controlled by a very simple command line interface. That's about to change, thanks to Joe Walnes' brilliant websocketd - more details below. In spite of his limited repertoire C3Pi soon made new friends and performed admirably. It's always a little nerve-wracking when he runs on a desktop. He has been known to get over-excited and career off in unexpected directions, but this morning he behaved himself... Power problems ... until just before lunchtime, that is. I'm still not certain what happened, but I think C3Pi's batteries ran low. What I know is that the ssh session connecting my laptop to the Pi suddenly starte...

Pegasus, courtesy Wikipedia Is this the longest-running debugging session of all time? Back in 1958 I wrote a little program in Pegasus Autocode. The Ferranti Pegasus was an early (and very successful) UK computer, and as an 11-year old I was lucky enough to borrow a manual and have my program run. The kind person who ran my program fixed a couple of problems for me, but I've never been quite sure what they were. Today I found out, and finally got to fix the program myself. PEGEM to the rescue I've known for a while about Chris Burton's wonderful PEGEM Pegasus Emulator. This is a DOS program which provides a pretty complete simulation of the Pegasus. You control the program via the switches on the operator's console. The drum is loaded with the Initial Orders (the Pegasus Operating System), and you can create your own five-track punched paper tapes which you use to program the computer and provide data. A missed excursion and a loose end tidied Yes...

C3Pi Teensy 3.0 and Motor Driver At the end of the previous post I let myself get a bit carried away! C3Pi has always used a Solarbotics motor driver. In the past it's been controlled by an Arduino Pro Mini. While the software for the Teensy is very similar, I needed to make a couple of changes to the code and more significant changes to the pinout. Slow and steady So my rush to solder up some stripbaord was premature. I've breadboarded the circuit instead. I've now got the Teesny 3.0 controlling it, and the Teensy is controlled by serial input. Since I've already checked that the Pi can drive the Teensy's serial port, I'm ready to go. Tomorrow's plan Tomorrow I will prepare the stripboard, connect the motors and take C3PI for his first outing. Initially I will control C3Pi via ssh over wifi. Come back tomorrow to find out how the project is going. If you want to meet C3Pi in person, come along to this Saturday's Southend Raspberry J...

The Pi and the Teensy are talking. The Teensy is running the fortune cookie sketch. I've been using pyserial on the Pi, and using interactive python. Here's a screenshot of an ssh session on the Pi: Next Step Next I'm going to solder up a mini-stripboard for the Teensy.