More new stuff! I love new stuff. Don’t you?
5V 0.3a Brushless DC motor, perfect for your HOG drive or a really fast vehicle.
1.5m USB male/male A to B cable, just what you need to connect your Arduino to your computer.
Spool of 500ft white thread. Why go to two stores for string and robot parts when you should be able to get it all in one place? Use this to string up your Skycam or Makelangelo.
I didn’t have any plans to bring this robot to the store but if customers ask, customers get. Varun wrote to me all the way from India after finding this robot of mine on a completely different website. Wow! That’s serious interest.
I’ve cut a few Tamiya 70171 links in half and laser cut some pieces to make this very tiny Stewart platform. Sometime next week when the chaos of shipping these Makelangelo 2s dies down I’ll pull out the two year old code and get it working again. (Two years already? Time flies like a banana…)
Speaking of adding things to the store, I’m thinking of adding Shapelock and maybe Sugru to the menu. What would you like to see in the store? Make requests! We looooove feedback.
Every mistake is a lesson in disguise. Recently I’ve noticed:
These things are in conflict with each other. My solution has been to write down every step of a task that repeats. Now I don’t have to try and hold it all in my head. When I need to do a job, I look it up. If I can’t find it, I create a new list.
…which works fine if there’s two or three lists. I quickly realized I was going to need a LOT more lists. Writing it on paper was crash-proof (yay) and hard to edit (boo). Solution? A MediaWiki set up on the LAN is now going to serve up all the documents office-wide. MediaWiki is the same software used for Wikipedia, so I know it’s been well tested.
I hope with this I’ll be able to refine my process and build a kind of “Choose your own adventure” for new employees. Need to know how to do something? Look it up!
The next big challenge will be predicting when I need to order parts so that they arrive just before I run out of that part. I couldn’t do that before I started ordering and making sales but as the data builds up I should be able to plan ahead very nicely. I’m not even going to bother looking for an open source solution – to work right it’s got to be completely integrated into my store. I don’t want to have to copy data back and forth, I just want a notice saying “it’s time to order [number] units more of [part x]”.
Do you have a favorite way to stay organized? Share! It pleases my OCD.
I’ve got a lot of EL wire and it’s time I get rid of it to make room for more robot stuff. From now until April 14, 2013 I’m offering all 5m EL Wire at 17% off. Every kit includes a driver. All you have to add are two AA batteries. Perfect for decorating your bike or your person. If you come up with something creative, let us know! We love to share pictures. When they’re gone, they’re gone – I’m probably not going to restock them in the near future.
My line following/maze-solving robot has been bust for too damn long. I just spent two weeks staring at this circuit, unable to figure out why it doesn’t work. Can you see it?
Neither could I, at first. I thought maybe the QRD1114s had been assembled backwards, but that couldn’t be right, could it? It wasn’t until I took a break and restarted from square 1 that I spotted the error, which – I’m sorry – is not in this photo. I the + and – lines connected to the breadboard were reversed, I was running power the wrong way through the circuit. When I looked at the board I saw what you see in that picture. The wires were right there in my peripheral and I missed them completely.
There’s a lesson in every mistake. What is the lesson here? Double check everything? I thought I had. Reconfirm your assumptions? That’s improbable going on impossible. I wonder how many times I will have to wire things backwards before I learn to check it every time. How many times do you have to experience a lesson before you learn and pass the class?
Below is how to wire the correct circuit. I’m using 1k resistors for the sensor and 220Ohm resistors for the IR LEDs. The dot on the top of the sensor is next to pin 1. pin 1 and pin 3 are 0.050″ longer so you know they’re the positive legs.
Here’s a single sensor in the array, isolated for simplicity.
Here’s the sample code I ran on the Arduino.
[code lang=”c”]void setup() {
Serial.begin(57600);
Serial.println(F("Hello, World!"));
}
void loop() {
Serial.print(F("0=")); Serial.print(analogRead(0)); Serial.print(‘\t’);
Serial.print(F("2=")); Serial.print(analogRead(2)); Serial.print(‘\t’);
Serial.print(F("4=")); Serial.print(analogRead(4)); Serial.print(‘\n’);
delay(100);
}[/code]
Here it is working in a robot.
