Futurlec ATMEGA Board Edits

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Administrator

I bought an ATMEGA board from Futurlec to use as a controller in my new robot I’m building, since it has the wonderful Atmel ATmega128 microcontroller and several 10-pin expansion connectors and RS-232 transceivers already on the board.

I was frustrated when I couldn’t get my brand new ATAVRISP mk II USB programmer to talk to the board (through a 6-pin to 10-pin adapter I made). I discovered that there was bus contention on the UART0 Receive Data signal because of the way the board is designed. The RS-232 transceiver chip on the board was always driving the PE0 pin, but this is a shared signal pin. Its other purpose is to be the Programming Data In (PDI) pin. My programmer couldn’t drive a low signal value on the pin because the RS-232 transceiver was always driving high. So I hacked the board to get rid of the bus contention and to allow my ATAVRISP mkII programmer to work with it.

Click HERE to view the PDF that shows the edits I made to prevent bus contention on RXD0 during programming.

Posted in Robotics | Leave a comment

Foam and Fiberglass Composite Robot Shell

Posted on February 6, 2008 by Administrator

Click here to go to my robot shell project page. This is my first attempt at using fiberglass and foam to make a strong but lightweight shell for my new robot. I’m basing it on Robert Q. Riley’s excellent article One-Off Construction Using Fiberglass Over Urethane Foam.

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Gimp Basics

Posted on January 14, 2006 by Administrator

Click anywhere on this paragraph to go to the new tutorial on using the free Gimp program to do things like resizing images, adding drop-shadows, and making transparent backgrounds!

Posted in Graphics | 1 Comment

ARToolKit is a Cool “Augmented Reality” Toy!!!

Posted on November 20, 2005 by Administrator

This is a really cool little toy (the research project is located at http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/) that superimposes a movable 3D object (a cube, a toroid, a sphere, etc.) onto a live video stream (like from a firewire-connected camcorder) in the place of a special template or pattern. On the video, the software superimposes the object wherever you have the special pattern (a black square with some writing in it). I’ve created a disk image (Mac OS X 10.3-10.4 compatible) with the test programs already compiled and ready to run.
Click Here to Download ARToolKit-2.71.2.dmg.
To run the programs, print out the patterns in the patterns folder, plug in your camcorder, and run the programs in the bin folder. Here are a couple of snapshots:

simpleTest
 
exview

Posted in Graphics, Video | 2 Comments

How to Create a Stop-Motion Animation Short Movie on Your Mac Using Your Digital Camera and iLife

Posted on November 12, 2005 by Administrator

We’ve added a tutorial on how to create your own stop-motion animation short movie using an inexpensive digital camera and the iLife software suite on a Mac. Click anywhere on this paragraph to view the tutorial!

Posted in Audio, General, Graphics, Video | 3 Comments

How to Create a Podcast for Your Church

Posted on October 23, 2005 by Administrator

Click on this paragraph to view the tutorial page on how I set up a podcast for my church, and also to show you how you can create a podcast for your own church’s audio content. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Posted in Podcasting | 2 Comments

How to Make Professional-Looking, Yet Inexpensive, Web Graphics

Posted on October 22, 2005 by Administrator

As a web developer, it is important to me to have professional-looking web graphics on the sites I maintain. I’ve added a tutorial page that talks about creating graphics for websites using a relatively inexpensive digital camera and the freely available Gimp program. Click on this paragraph to go to the tutorial. Enjoy!

Posted in Graphics | 2 Comments

Hello world!

Posted on October 22, 2005 by Administrator

This is a new look for the iHerr website. The tools have been put in place that will allow blogging. This will be used for adding tutorials and announcements. If you want to go to Laura’s pages, they’re HERE.

Posted in General | Leave a comment