Recently a fairly sizable number of resistive touchscreens fell off the back of the e-waste truck and into my lap so it’s time to hit the shop and make something fun. My good friend Jill of blinky light love has recently started doing all manner of awesome things with RGB lights and, well… it looked like a lot of fun. Around the same time, Donut was putting in an order for some ShiftBrites so I jumped on that reduced-shipping bandwagon and got 10 of these things. They’re exactly what you would want if you have an arduino (or other microcontroller) and like pretty things that are fairly robust, well designed, and pretty easy to control.

Shiftbrite v2

First up was seeing if the touch sensors were even operational – I meant it when I said they fell off the back of the e-waste truck. If you’re wondering how to hook these up or how they work, you should check out the excellent writeup over at Sparkfun or the PDF put together by HanTouchUSA. In general, you power one line, ground one line, and read the resulting voltage out of a third to get the output from one axis. Swap everything around you get the other axis. Busted out a scope, a power supply, and made a little breakout board for the flex cables after a brief evaluation of my soldering skills and the flex terminals (conclusion: I don’t want to solder every one of these things if there’s a possibility that I’m going to have to search dozens to find one that works)

Touchscreen attached to an oscilloscope

Some quick experimenting later I had the lines out of the touch sensor identified and hooked up to an oscilloscope. Brilliant!   Wiggling a finger over one axis and then three taps.   Sensor away! Not 100% linear, and a bit wibbly wobbly around the edges, but I’m not doing surgery so I think it’ll be just fine.

Arduino time! I found a simple and extremely useful library written by Jonathan Oxer that flips around the inputs/outputs as necessary and allowed me to read from my little four-wire touchscreen. After a bit of code modification to dump out some more information to the serial terminal I had my controller!

Next up: blinkies. External power seems to be the way to go with these things, so out came an old 6V wall wart to save the day. Remember to hook your grounds together! A quick Jack-‘n-Hack, this time with Digger 450’s code, to get the ShiftBrite control on lock. Originally my plan had been to make the touchscreen some part of an HSV color picker. We only have two axes, so without more hardware we’re only getting HS or HV. My first implementation was for HS but, as it turns out, HV is much more useful and allows you to play with the intensity and not blind yourself during development. More Jack-and-Hack on Stewart Russell’s code got me a suitable HSV to RGB transformation method. Sure, it only goes to 255 on each channel and the ShiftBrites can do better, but I’m ok downgrading to 16 million colors from a billion+.

So how did it turn out? Here’s the video proof. Would like for the code to differentiate between dragging finger and tapping states but that isn’t critical and… well, we’ll see if I end up needing it.   The code is up on gitHub should you want to make your own blinkie light selection.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

If you’re really interested in the touchscreens hit me up on twitter and we’ll work something out. There’s no way I’m going to use all of these.

With that said:

Recently I’ve started looking at CNC machines with Kyle Marsh and Chris Gilmer (for a project that I’ll detail in a future post) and we found DIYLILCNC. Unfortunately they’re still in the “working the bugs out” phase and one major thing they were lacking was a 3D model (honestly, crazy engineering respect to the guys who did this using only illustrator and some WICKED spatial reasoning.)

But really… it’s 2010 and anything this complex should have a digital representation to facilitate redesign etc. To that end I threw down maybe 40ish hours of nights/weekend/lunch/dull meetings/etc to bring you this:

It’s a full build (minus the Dremel they use for a power plant) right down to accurately modeled machine screws and bolts.

Full CAD of the DIYLILCNC (JF Mark 10)

Improvements over the existing design/drawings include:

• Made walls square. Now with 90 degree power! (Note: this wasn’t a HUGE issue just a degree here and there)
• All hardware (bearings, bolts, washers, rods, etc) modeled off of McMaster drawings where available. Measured parts I had in the lab when I couldn’t find McMaster drawings.
• Fixed a flaw where the Y Drive Belt dragged against a misaligned hole when the gantry wasn’t working near the center of its range.
• With a fully-assembled model any gaps in the documentation can be referenced against the CAD

At some point I’d like to build one of these but I think I’ll hold off until Version 2.

The plans and model are controlled under the virus-like CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license and have been submitted back to the project as of this morning.

For those interested the package can be downloaded here (again, in the grips of CC A-SA so make sure you post that if you use em)

Oh heated seats… I will miss you so…

Moving on! Soooo in getting it whipped into shape (No computer? Take the car apart!) it turned out that I needed a couple of new window motors (yes I took them apart down to the BONE but, alas, the gears are destroyed and you can’t just buy the damn gears) and a new warp coil.

Warp coil? You had no idea that that the reason pimps used caddies was due to their faster-than-light travel but I assure you: it is simply a fact. Ever want to backhand someone so hard they ended up in the middle of last week? Yeah, I thought so.

How else would you explain this part?

The warp coil

Ahhh a nerd can dream. Actually that’s a rather expensive stepper motor with semi-digital control and a TON(foot*) of torque. What does it do? It blows air. Why is this important? Because in LA you can literally, as well as figuratively, die without AC and cars without some good cold air sell for as much as cars without transmissions (I’m not joking)

Not to worry though! I new one shall be found! Thanks to this crazy guy… he has 16 acres (yeah…) of NOTHING but Cadillacs! LA is good for some things I guess :)

You can check out the madness from SPACE!

Ok well it’s 8pm and time to go home (I’m writing from work because, you see, my computer caught fire last week and seems to have harmed itself in the process… go figure. Not much fire! Just a little bit. There was some melting… and some smoke… The bird was not pleased. I’ll post pictures of the melted component etc later.)

And now to close with a couple more pictures!

Trust me sir... it was like that when I got here... those cables LIKE doing that...

GRRRR! I'm an engineer!

* torque is measured as a force at a moment arm and so ton would not, in fact, be a torque. 2000 lb(Force) * 1foot satisfies this engineer as a very large amount of torque.  If a blower motor had this it would not blow air… it would rip your car in half when you turned it on…

You wanted to know where the heat sinks went? THIS is where the heat sinks went!

These heat sink pictures are some of my favorites. SO nice and orderly. Just LOOK at that brushed aluminum!

Heat sink city!

Badier is laying tile??? In a box? With a cardboard floor???? WHAT IS GOING ON???

Badier is thinking about the most amazing tile in the world...

Well folks… your wait is over… here is what we put our blood, sweat, and tears (in decending order of volume) into all this time….

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Our baby. Standing proud in the shop sans gearboxes and stage.

“What the hell?”

I can hear you say it now… Well let me explain: This device is a convention-ready representation of the product that Badier’s company is going to bring to market.

“… What the hell?”

Yeah, continuing on. It’s a solar collector. You see there are these new solar elements (think tiny solar panels) that are REALLY good at collecting energy but they’re also REALLY EXPENSIVE. One of the cool things about these elements is that they will turn an (almost) set percentage of any light energy that falls on them into electrical energy. So if you put it out in the sun you’ll get some juice; put it out in sun that’s twice as intense, you’ll get almost twice the juice.

Those clear “tiles” are actually Fresnel lenses that take all the solar energy that falls on them and condenses it down onto a TINY piece of the really-expensive-yet-awesome solar panel. This way you get to harness all the light energy that falls on that huge thing we’ve made and channel it into a few square inches of your awesome solar element. If it goes off as planned this device can be mass manufactured to be 20% cheaper (watt-for-watt) than traditional solar panels. Talk about cool!

So now you know. Following are a few more shots of us screwing around with our new creation and transporting it to San Diego for the Solar Power International 08 show.

We are ze proud papa!

If you stand back it magnifies the active element. Note: there are 30 in there. 6 of them make up the image you see in this shot...

Oh we're feeling goooooooood.

Damn Badier, lookin manly! I look like a squirrel with an overinflated ego... You have to understand that we haven't slept for over 24 hours at this point and are higher than kites on the adrenaline rush that comes with finishing off a large project.

We both hurt our backs putting this thing up. We are old men...

And now… the end of our long journey… we have to take the damn thing apart and bring it to San Diego…

Boxin' her up.... You wondered what that box in my living room was for (you and ALL my neighbors) well this is it! (Notice my sexy break-away walls that are ROCK solid after being assembled... mmmmm design)

The entire project ready to ship!

Driving 2 hours on 0 hours of sleep? San Diego here we come!!

As we pulled up we were surrounded by no fewer than six men on forklifts. They are the Forkmasters. You don't mess with them... It was like watching bees. Really big bees dancing with forklifts...

Our packages make it to the convention hall. Thank you Forkmasters!

Unpacking in the convention hall.

Our baby makes her debut at the solar show!

... shop is cleaned and we

Done! And still friends too! Notice it is dark out. This is the same day I previously mentioned that we hadn't slept before... We did catch an hour or two in the van. Only half an hour with the driver asleep...

Oh not only are we done we did such a good job we made it into CNET’s slide show! (The have 17 images from the entire SD Convention Center and our model was one of them! Hell yeah!)

And so it ends. It was a hell of a ride and some of the more extreme engineering I’ve done in a LONG time.

And after it’s all said and done I have but one thing to say:

Anyone else’s company need frackin’ amazing work done on insane time scheduals and is willing to pay through the nose for it? I know some guys who are really good…

<end autofellation>

PS. Unlike Fry in Futurama I finished my caffeine regimin (40 cups of coffee 24 diet cokes) and failed to run around the room in a blur fixing the ills of the world… I feel somehow cheated… Maybe next time if I hit 50 cups….

Like a damn surgeon I tell ya!

Kids: this is NOT the way to use safety glasses…

Rivet rivet rivet! Like a frog of awesome!

Stage? I’m a carpet man!

Innards!

o shiny!

Polishin’ Eyes!

WHAT ARE SUCH THINGS FOR??

Parts start arriving!

What are we making? Tune in next post!

Warning: this post deals primarily with subjects that by all rights can be called ‘Nerdy as hell.’ Should such material be known to you as dull, boring, somnolent etc. stop now; It’s not worth it.

Onwards!

So recently I’ve been toying around with the idea of physical computing and trying to figure out something to do as a sort of introduction to the whole field before I begin my fully-functional-hexapod-computer-case-mod project (more details see here) There are quite literally hundreds of ways to start out but quite a few of them involve large-ish sums of money up front which doesn’t sound like my kind of dabbling… then: Lo! The Arduino came unto me and bestowed tidings of great joy which shall be to all people!

The Arduino is an open-source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Best of all you can have one and start playing with it for as little as $11.50 (although I opted for the pre-built version with a bit more functionality for $33.00 from my new friends at Sparkfun.) For a dabbler like me it’s perfect :)

Arduino Diecimila in hand I needed a project. Although I had originally aspired to replace the brain in my lovely roomba with the arduino it turns out my roomba was made 6 days BEFORE the i-robot folks implemented their current control scheme. Well boooo (all is not lost though, I have a hardware upgrade for it in the mail which will unlock all of the ROI goodness)

Having previously been a software guy my first idea was to make it say “hello world!”

For those of you who are not “software guys” the FIRST thing that every programmer does in ANY language when they start is make it print out “hello world!” If you want to have good crops and win your wars you offer up a slaughtered goat or virgin. If you want to learn a programming language you make it say “hello world!” This is the way things have been, are, and will always be, as they have been handed down from the ancients and we are not worthy enough to contest these points. Deal.

But here’s the first problem: physical computing doesn’t have a screen… there are no pop-up windows… no command line… just a bunch of pins that can can read inputs or give outputs… so a blinking or PWM fading LED it is .

So that’s done.

Well that’s damn boring… and I still have a MIGHTY need for “hello world” if only somebody had made up a form of communication that relied on a blinking thing… and MonkeyMorse was born. Quite a simple and not terribly well written program it takes in a string and translates it to morse code and blinks it out. NOW we’re getting somewhere :) (Code Here) First string up: hello world!

So after an implementation of serial communications hello world (Walkthough here) I figured it was time to do something from scratch… the only problem is that I still only had LEDs lying around… and other than making a Knight Rider mod for my car there didn’t seem to be a lot to do with them… until I found PoV.

The basic idea for this project is that if you take an array of LEDs (I have 10 of them) and make them blink while waving them back and forth it will produce an image in the viewer’s eye for a split second. Should that image be the long desired “hello world” so much the better.

As the Arduino has limited processing ability and I wanted the program to switch on and off the LEDs as fast as possible I opted to encode the message BEFORE uploading it to the chip. A decent bit of Matlabbing later and voila! a program to do just that (windows32 standalone program download here) You simply give it a bit of text, point it at a character set (just a bunch of BMPs) and hit go and it does all the work. Additionally: if needed it can be pointed at a bitmap file and instead of doing text it’ll convert the image into code for the MPoV system. Here it is in action:

Moving on: the chip code simply runs though the sequence of bits sent by the converter program and displays them on the LEDs much the same way the signal gets to your TV screen (except that it is essentially sideways and the motion of the board is the major scan direction) The hardware code is also available: MPoV Hardware Code

And the big finish!

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Awwwwww…. not as big as I had hoped….

Of note when working with chips and such with on-board hardware: You have VERY limited resources. I’m talking VERY limited. So limited in fact that my lovely 1100 1s and 0s do not actually fit into the memory space. So it can’t be loaded into memory all at one time. A handful of options exist:

1. lower the resolution – Fewer bits = smaller message.
2. Stream the data and get into memory management – Smaller chunks at a time streamed into the processor over a serial connection.
3. Load smaller pieces of the data and possibly make them off of other memory locations – There is a bit of system memory “off to the side” that I might be able to use but this is a little more extreme than I had planned.
4. Just deal with “HiWld!” – Can do RIGHT now.

As you may well have guessed, I went with option 4.

Unfortunately in my glee over a (mostly) working hello world program I failed to actually capture an image of the working final project (and as “Hello World” is supposed to be a quick exercise I’m not going to re-wire it) However I do have this one from a test I ran:

So there you have it. Four ways to hello world and a good deal of fun for an inexpensive-get-your-toes-wet-weekend project. Stay tuned for more madness!

I have seen the light. It was amazing. It never went over 88mph but that’s ok by me. I like it here in this time.

Now to explain the crazy…

Sooo Megan and I are driving back from dinner with Chris and his Megan last night when it happens. The following dialog is completely true and I can only hope to blame it on the immense surge of adrenaline and nerdenaline (yeah, what it sounds like) at the time…

Megan: ::talking while driving::
Jacques: ::looking out the window as 5 lbs of mexican food and a margarita slouch towards Bethlehem::
Jacques: OH MY GOD! CAR! THE CAR!
Megan: Should I turn around?
Jacques: U-turn. U-TURN!!!! BACK THE WAY WE CAME! U-TURN!
Megan: ::Hauls on the wheel. The car hurtles back up the street. ::
Jacques: THERE IT IS! 88 MILES AN HOUR! 88 MILES AN HOUR!!!!

I will now share with you the sight that apparently claimed my adrenal gland, my sense of self-preservation, and my ability to articulate my feelings in full sentences.

The images aren’t great, but you try to get a shot of something so amazing it rips the very fabric of time and metaphor… from a recklessly driven car… at night… with a phone… uphill both ways.

The car from the side. You can see the engine and fission core in the back. The blue glow is a nice touch. That’s right ladies and gents, we’re tailing the time machine from Back to the Future. And it’s amazing.

You can see my shaking hands in the mirror. While you can not tell it from these pictures, I am yelling. I don’t remember what. I’m sure it had 88 miles an hour in it.

I understand it’s hard to see but the little yellow squiggle that you can see through the windshield? Oh yeah, that’s a fully articulated flux capacitor. Streaming little lights and everything.

You can start to see the detail in this car. We followed this guy for 15 minutes. Waaay out of our way. It was totally worth it. This thing had it all. The reactor (old version, not the Mr. Fusion from II and III) the electronics (you could see the date box through the window for setting your “destination”) the blinking lights. It has it ALL.

While the movie car had “OUTATIME” for a license plate, you can’t actually register that as California only lets you have 7 characters. FLUXED is pretty damn good if you ask me. You can also see the fission reactor on the back.

The detail was truly amazing. We ended up losing him right next to universal studios so who knows if it was the real deal but it sure as hell made my night.

Megan and I went joyriding with Doc and Marty :)

88 MILES AN HOUR!

Edit: Sigh… yes, it’s a fission reactor.