A couple of days ago I came across a discarded Meridian PBX phone and naturally, took it apart. Among some of the more promising salvaged components was a 40 x 2 character LCD. There was a ribbon cable attached to the LCD with a 14 pin female connector. The pins were helpfully labeled on the front of the panel (from 1 to 14). On the back of the LCD I could see five KS00065B LCD Driver chips.
The next thing to find out was how to hook this up to my Arduino Uno. Continue reading
I’ve made some progress over the weekend.
Check it out…
This is the second part of the tutorial on how to program an AVR ATTiny85 chip with Arduino Uno. All the hard work has already been covered in Part 1, so make sure that you have completed the steps in that section before you continue!
By default, the ATtiny85 runs at 1 MHz. You need to do an extra step to configure the microcontroller to run at 8 MHz. This is a requirement for using some popular libraries (like Software Serial), as well as to take full advantage of your chip. Continue reading
I recently bought the OWI 3 in 1 ATR (all terrain robot) kit from Amazon. What got my attention was its potential for hacking and re-use of its components. In the “Rover” mode the unit is pretty tightly packed. There does not seem to be much space to add electronics, or batteries inside, but they can be added on top. The front of the robot seemed a good spot to put the extra stuff, so I taped a 4 full AA battery pack as a test. The results were pretty good – the motor handles the extra load without a problem and the additional weight at the front actually helps the bot to climb over fairly tall obstacles with a vertical wall:
Experimenting potential configurations for a mechanical arm.
Motor + screw as actuator.
To do:
- Stop motor when the clamp grabs something (without crushing it)
- Add servos for 2 axis movement
The planned steps for this project actually are:
- Define platform
- Locate the object
- Move towards it
- Collect
- Sort
- Locate dumping sites
- Unload cargo according to dumping site
This tutorial is based on the steps I took to program an ATTiny85 with my Arduino Uno and use the nifty little chip for a small line following robot. The idea for using the ATTiny came from the MAKE magazine and more specifically their “How-To: Shrinkify Your Arduino Projects” YouTube video.
The ATTiny libraries for the Arduino IDE come from the High-Low Tech group at the MIT Media Lab. They have some other interesting materials for Arduino on their site as well.