I started daydreaming at work about how to go about making hardware interface with an RSS feed. I have seen some projects that use Arduinos with ethernet shields to check Twitter, for example, but they seem unnecessarily bulky. Or clumsy. I spend a lot of time working on the command line, and love to put together dirty little scripts to solve problems. It sort of goes along the lines of ‘when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail’…I figured that the same thing could be implemented with a little shell scripting and my trusty Arduino, sans anything complicated.

So far, so good.

bad lab mobile

I put together a sketch (after the bump) to drive my LCD, writing serial output to the screen. After verifying that the sketch worked via the Arduino IDE’s serial monitor, I popped open a CLI and got to work. FWIW, I am using Ubuntu 11.04 still…ctrl-alt-t pops open a terminal window…unity has me all over shortcuts these days. Anyhow, I was able to verify that I could echo text and direct it to the USB port that the Arduino was mounted to. No sweat.

As a proof of concept, I decided to display the number of times that I had the word “awesome” on swantron.com. Once the LCD was shown to work, the sky is the limit…see some regex, pipes, wget, and so forth in action:

CLI FTW

Survey says:

+11 awesome

Eleven “awesome”s. Awesome.
(Hit the bump for some code, an oddity, and more fun…)

So that is that. You could link two of these together for 160 characters…toss together a shell (or Python, etc.) and have a Twitter display, for example. Whatever you want to…gosh.

I did notice an odd “feature” of the Liquid Crystal library I used. For some reason, it wraps lines in an interesting fashion…

command line usage:
> echo “why does this library I am using wrap text wonky as hell?” > /dev/ttyUSB0

1 > 3 > 2 > 4

No idea why this is. Sort of confusing. Anyhow, the entire sketch is pretty straight forward. Did somebody say snippet?

// LCD sandbox
// http://swantron.com
// driving LCD from command line
// 2011

#include

// **Define pins**
// LCD RS – pin 12
// LCD R/W – pin 11
// LCD ENABLE – pin 10
// LCD BACK+ – pin 13
// LCD DATA4 – pin 5
// LCD DATA5 – pin 4
// LCD DATA6 – pin 3
// LCD DATA7 – pin 2
// LCD VSS, CONTRAST, BACK- – ground

LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 10, 5, 4, 3, 2);

int backLight = 13; // Define pin for backlight

void setup()
{
pinMode(backLight, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(backLight, HIGH); // Backlight level (LOW / HIGH)
lcd.begin(20,4); // (Columbs, Rows)
Serial.begin(9600);
}

void loop()
{
// when characters arrive over the serial port…
if (Serial.available()) {
// wait a bit for the entire message to arrive
delay(100);
// clear the screen
lcd.clear();
// read all the available characters
while (Serial.available() > 0) {
// display each character to the LCD
lcd.write(Serial.read());
}
}
}

We’ll see where this one ends up. This one might be a launching pad for a bigger and better thing. Stay tuned.

Ronco alert

Check this footage of the OOM3K in action. Here, I had it configured to open the door when the ultrasonic sensor echoes off of something within 8 cm…

After the bump, of course

Not only is this thing awesome, but you can get all sorts of clear looks at my trusty Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven. Yard bird is a big hit at the old Swanson place.

There is not much to this code…I built it on top of the LED binary project code. Prepare for a bitchin’ snippet.

//Open-er-o-matic 3000

// Joseph Swanson | 2011
// http://swantron.com

// Setup
// LEDs connected to pins 11, 2-5
// Ping))) sensor signal to pin 7
// Servo signal to pin 10
// Ping))) +, servo + to 5V
// Ground the shit out of everything

#include

Servo myservo;

int pos = 0;

// Pin assignment
const int ledPin1 = 11;
const int ledPin2 = 2;
const int ledPin3 = 3;
const int ledPin4 = 4;
const int ledPin5 = 5;
const int pingPin = 7;

// Create variables to store LED states
int ledState1 = LOW;
int ledState2 = LOW;
int ledState3 = LOW;
int ledState4 = LOW;
int ledState5 = LOW;

void setup() {

myservo.attach(10);

//Define pins 1-5 as output
pinMode(ledPin1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin4, OUTPUT);
pinMode(ledPin5, OUTPUT);
}
void loop()
{
// Reset LEDs levels to low to begin loop
ledState1 = LOW;
ledState2 = LOW;
ledState3 = LOW;
ledState4 = LOW;
ledState5 = LOW;
pos = 0;

// Set duration variable
long duration, inches, cm;

// Loop section for ping signal pin…start as output
pinMode(pingPin, OUTPUT);
digitalWrite(pingPin, LOW);
delayMicroseconds(2);
digitalWrite(pingPin, HIGH);
delayMicroseconds(5);
digitalWrite(pingPin, LOW);

// Listen with same pin
pinMode(pingPin, INPUT);
duration = pulseIn(pingPin, HIGH);

// Convert time to a distance
inches = microsecondsToInches(duration);
cm = microsecondsToCentimeters(duration);

// Configure this for LED sensitivity
delay(500);

// March through cm values…output LEDs an servo
if (cm < 80) {
ledState1 = HIGH;}

if (cm < 64) {
ledState2 = HIGH;}

if (cm < 48) {
ledState3 = HIGH;}

if (cm < 32) {
ledState4 = HIGH;}

if (cm < 16) {
ledState5 = HIGH; }

if (cm < 16) {
pos =( pos + 14 ); }

// fire all LED values...fire servo
digitalWrite(ledPin1, ledState1);
digitalWrite(ledPin2, ledState2);
digitalWrite(ledPin3, ledState3);
digitalWrite(ledPin4, ledState4);
digitalWrite(ledPin5, ledState5);
myservo.write(pos);

delay(100);

}
long microsecondsToInches(long microseconds)
{
// 1130 feet per second...transofrm inches
return microseconds / 74 / 2;
}
long microsecondsToCentimeters(long microseconds)
{
// 340 meters per second...transform cm
return microseconds / 29 / 2;
}

I hope you enjoyed this one. I had a fun time with this piece of crap. Plus, it has given me some ideas of how to extend this setup into something more refined. Spoiler: more awesome.

nanu nanu

Stay tuned…this is a good day.

cubed

Regular Cheetos have nothing on jalapeno Cheetos, also for the record.

Since I haven’t blathered about how awesome Android stuff is in a while, I figured I would ramble about games for a while. So far, I have found four games that are pretty much “must-have.” I hate that term, but it gets me search engine traffic. And traffic is a must-have. (Sorry.) You can find these must-havers on Android Market, but you probably knew that. Let’s begin.

In order of most-must-have, to still-must-have-but-not-as-much-as-most-must-have…

Angry Birds — Q. Why so angry, birds? A. Those egg-stealing pigs, that’s why.

I like that one ^

D - Fence...get it (shakes head)

Fruit Ninja looks more like Nacho Ninja

Stupid Flanders

Well, in any regards, get Angry Birds. Meetings at work become little workday vay-kays. Little bird flinging vay-kays.

If you come across anything that I should check out, hit me with a comment. Or, Tweet that crap over to @swantron. Plug.

pew pew pew

So far, I have checked off one step of two. My steps are as follow:

Step 1) Tear apart item
Step 2) Hack the crap out of said item

Stay tuned…

that sums to plus 3

Playing GBA games on a Droid is cool.
Playing GBA games on a Droid via a Wiimote is ubercool.

Once I can figure out the accelerometer input, I’ll post more. In the meantime, I’ll be playing a little Mario Pinball. Suckers.

I’m posting some pics I snapped…I’ll toss in the full write-up soon.

I inverted the colors of that last pic, quite obviously. That will be my template, so to speak, on which to wax nerdy in a Physics-y kind of way. Stay tuned.

My basic set-up is this…Radio Shack solar cell, breadboard, florescent light source, Arduino, and a notebook.

Step 1) gauge light source via multimeter.

one point twenty-one gigawatts

1.7 V…no need to toss in a resister, as the Arduino can handle 5V without issue. Good to go.

Step 2) Interface with Arduino via breadboard.

breadless soldierboard

This could have been a direct setup, but for the sake of not soldering a solid lead to my solar cell array, I chose to twist the crap out of the existing + and – leads of the wire outs on the unit, and cram them into the breadboard. USB connected to the Arduino, of course

Step 3) Chop in some code for the Arduino. This was the tricky part…not that tricky, however:

~~code snippet time~~

void setup() {
Serial.begin(9600); }
void loop() {
int v = analogRead(0);
Serial.print(v);
Serial.print(‘ ‘);
delay(900);
}

~~~end code snippet time~~~

enhance...enhance

Note the lack of comments? I’m a flipping math dude, so that is wholly optional in my book. Long story short, Wiring is a stripped cousin of C++…I have to void setup and loop here, since I am not concerned with anything once I let ‘er rip. I will touch on the programming specifics at a later date, but inquiring minds can find this info quite easily on the Arduino project’s main page, or on Wikipedia. Knock your socks off. I added the delay for sake of real-time monitoring, and matched the baud rate to which I had configured my USB connection. ttyUSB0 would be that in question…9600 would be the rate.

Step 4) Read input via serial monitor.

those figures average out to 'awesome'

As you can see, it is pretty much constant, with some fluctuation due to my set-up. Noisy, yes. Cheap components, yes.

Step 5) Testing ‘zero’ state. Here, I have employed my box of smokes. American Spirit Lights, to be precise.

Yellow Box of American Spirits...A Labritory Must-Have

Step 6) Gauge system.

Here, I’m altering between ‘on’ and ‘off’ states. I start with the ‘off’ (smokes on solar panel) configuration for a time, remove the box to open the system to ‘max input’ for appx 7 secs, and then place the box to remove the input energy.

FOR THE WIN INDEED

Most definitely for the win…with the experimental noise, that could be considered effectively zero. For the win.

In summation, I have read in analog, as intended. Lessons learned? Pretty straight forward I suppose. My cheap-o solar cell is rated for a max of 6V, which I was far under. If I was to use this setup with a stronger light source, I would need to take this into consideration. I didn’t perform any data transformation, as I was not concerned with ‘actual voltage input values’ in this case…merely relative. Most importantly, I was able to knock out the task I had set out to do. Hopefully, I can ride my EE high and get cranking on something awesome, like a netbook robot. With some lasers.