arduino workshop, day 2

The Arduino course at #spacearduino is over. We covered more material yesterday morning that was new to me, including some links to intriguing books (such as Artificial Reality by Myron Krueger) and resources such as the Oomlout online shop and the infrequent blog by Tod Kurt.

The afternoon session was, for me, less successful. I worked with a guy called Phil, trying to link Arduino and Processing with the datastreams of Pachube that are linked to various sensors all over the world. I’d looked at this briefly a long time ago but gave up as it was very obscure, so I thought this workshop would be a good opportunity to pursue it further. Phil and I tried to follow online tutorials, which involved downloading and installing libraries and copying code, as well as setting up our own feeds to Pachube, but we couldn’t get it to work. Indeed, the Processing code we copied from the Pachube tutorial sent too many requests to Pachube (there’s a limit of fifty requests within three minutes), so we soon received warnings that our requests were now blocked.

I gave up after a while, and instead tried to get a stepper motor to respond to changes in light levels, with the eventual aim of getting a toy’s head to turn towards one of several motion detectors, so that it would appear to be following someone moving nearby. (I later found that Tod Kruft has a recent project doing something very similar, though it wasn’t linked to sensors.)

I couldn’t remember how we’d set up a circuit with light dependent resistors yesterday, so there was something wrong with my circuit design, and I got very small voltage readings from the LDR. Still, I know that I’ve got a similar circuit design in a book at home, so I can continue to explore this later.

At the end of the session, each group showed off what they’d achieved (or at least tried). Twitter was a popular theme. One guy replicated Baker Tweet to send automatic tweets at the push of a button, while another group tried but failed to get LEDs to respond to specific hashtags. The most impressively successful group, however, kept things simple (a good tactic) by hacking a toy car’s remote control by replacing the left/right and back/forwards buttons with four tilt switches mounted on a cycling helmet, so that the person wearing the helmet could control the car by tilting his or her head in different directions.

Conclusion – an enjoyable but slightly frustrating weekend. I know more about Arduino now, and feel more confident about exploring further, with a list of ideas I want to test, but it would have been better had I commandeered more of the workshop leader’s time to help sort out problems with Pachube. Best part of the weekend? Being inspired by this video…

Tags: arduino