Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 25th, 2010

Hooray! I had a $50 prepaid credit card thanks to the Wolfram|Alpha “I want my money back!” program. Basically, I bought their iPhone App for $50, when I thought it was $4.99. Then they insanely dropped the price, too. I’m glad that they finally refunded us though, it is very kind and very modern of them!

I decided to buy 5 chips off of Mouser. 3 ATtiny85s, and 2 595-TLC5945PWPR 16-Ch LED Driver. The LED driver is a PWM shift out chip. It came to $15 bucks. Not too bad, right? Well, the shipping was $20. I don’t understand what was so important about the shipping. $20, seriously? OH and, I selected to pay the shipping at the door, but instead they took it off of the credit card! ARRG! So this is what my $35 went to:

1 sheet of bubble wrap:

Another sheet of bubble wrap:

Two more sheets of bubble wrap, and the electronics:

Fire pit material:

An ugly box:

Obviously that was not worth $20 of shipping. At least Sparkfun gives you a nice box that you can hack with!!! >:(

So the chips. YES! I cannot wait to see what these LED driver DIPs look like. Only the bag is sepperating me from these wonderful things now…

I open the bag, and this film reel thing slides onto the desk. What? I didn’t order a film reel?!

There’s two tiny chips inside of the film reel. But they’re NOT DIPs! I ordered a DIP because I don’t have a Weller! On the product it even said “DIP”! ARRG!

At least they got the ATtiny85s right…

So here it is. Two $5 chips and they aren’t even DIPs. I am royally doomed now. :’(

So yeah. I have no idea how I’m going to use these tiny things. I don’t have a precise soldering iron to make it work. Also, I have nothing to solder these things to! What on earth! I don’t want to go and do something extravogent, that’s why I bought the chips! All I wanted to do was drive LEDs! GRR!

Anyway, I checked out BubbleBoy to see what was going on inside of it with regards to the servos. It appears as though the wires attaching the servo to the head broke.

BubbleBoy would probably bob its head a lot better if the servos were attached to the head via metal axels. They’re only $3 at the local hobby store, so might as well buy the ones that fit this time instead of trying to aimlessly sand down the larger axels. It will be interesting to see how well the axels fare compared to the wire! ^_^ This will be a good time to refurbish BubbleBoy.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

It’s December!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008

It’s December!

I thought of a stupid idea which may turn out to be somewhat cool… I’m going to draw a robot graphic each day for the entire month and post it on here.

As for those decoration robots, here are pictures:

I think they will make good gifts…

The ATmega328 is going okay, I guess. I still don’t have it working yet- I tried the Windows XP machine and Java just freaks out on there.

I finally googled the right keywords and found a mac version… but it doesn’t work either. :/ I’ll have to play around with it…

Posted in: Art, Other, Programming, Projects.

Giving in to the ATmega328

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, December 1st, 2008

Today I’m going to give in to the 30K of memory in the ATmega328. x_x

Yesterday I was trying to compile the code I wrote for MANOI, and it’s always a few hundred bytes too big. 8( How am I supposed to do anything if it’s too BIG?!

I hope that the modified version of Arduino 11 will work okay on my Windows XP machine… why do I get this feeling that it won’t … xS

Those XMAS decorations that I was making the other day I had to put a pause on since I couldn’t find a hole puncher. The XACTO knife wasn’t XACTLY doing its job >_> . I think that the hole punch will be too big for the LED, so I’m not sure yet what I’ll do. Hmmmmm!

Oh yeah, if you didn’t notice- I fixed the smilies O:) … but I also accidentally deleted all of the links from the sidebar. I’ll have to re-add them by hand AGAIN! Grrrrrr… >:(

EDIT: Nevermind… they weren’t deleted :>

Posted in: Art, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Problem after Problem after Problem

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Wow, hahahaha I meant to post this yesterday! I wrote it all up… then forgot! Haaa woow

It really feels like I’ve been working on this software to control MANOI for ages now. On Friday I thought that I was really close to finishing off- that it would be so simple to send a variable from Processing to the Arduino.

Evidently, that assumption is DEAD WRONG! I have to send it through Serial. This raises many problems, like the possibility that the data might be fed to the SSC as well.

I’m now powering the SSC-32 by the Arduino. It’s plugged in to the Gnd and pin 6, so I can tell it to turn on or off. PLUS, I have a latching switch on the 5V, just in case.

So it almost feels like I can safely say that I’m really close to finishing off. I’m playing around with code that only sends data to Arduino when it knows it will receive it. Of course, when I try to send data to the SSC-32 it messes the whole process.

The moon last night (2 nights ago) was really bright… it looked pretty through my telescope ^_^ This Harvest Moon is one of my favourites because you can see Tycho Crater.

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Bad Day

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

It was a pretty bad day at my research lab today (aka: my desk next to the kitchen table, the kitchen table itself, and the floor) xD .

I was playing around with the Pololu uSSC’s, they were working great after I set the servo numbers!

But, I was a little troubled by two things.
1) When the program is sent to the Arduino, the Pololu uSSC gets a fatal error because of all the goobley that goes on the TX line when transferring the program to the ATmega.

2) When I pressed on the servo, the voltage drain was visible when the boards flashed on and off

For the first problem, I tried so many things with switches and crazy circuits … but it didn’t work. So I just used a jumper from the Arduino TX to another row where the SIN’s would be on the Pololu uSSCs so that I would only have to unplug one wire instead of two each time I was trying a program. That was OK.

For the next problem, I supplied 3 more volts in the form of two rechargeable AA’s. But… after looking at a breadboard for so long your eyes start to go crazy… I inverted the poles.

It wasn’t even a second later when the board became so hot that I panicked, tearing it out of the board. But, a cloud of smoke lingered in the air. At that time I knew it was toasted… even one of the batteries was smoking.

So at the end of the day, I have one extremely dead Pololu uSSC, one that doesn’t work, and one dead RBBB. I *think* the RBBB isn’t working because the ATmega isn’t working

So… yeah… pretty bad day. The lack of sun week after week after week doesn’t help either. It’s like living in a groundhog hole You get some sun, but once you go out, it disappears.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.