code and fabrication resources for physical computing and networking
tigoe.net | pcomp home | blog | code, circuits, & construction | my del.icio.us links
{ Category Archives }
Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It’s a nifty little board. You attach a DC motor and the board can an output voltage when the motor is turned, and analog signals telling you the direction and speed of the motor. It turns a DC motor into a rotary encoder, of sorts.
Rob Faludi just turned me on to CoolTerm, a serial terminal app for OSX and Windows. It looks like a nice addition, and is cross platform, which is handy for teaching; no need to reference different apps on different platforms. I’ve only tried it out a little, but so far, it’s nice. You can have multiple ports open in multiple windows, and you can see bytes in ASCII or hex. It’d be nice to see them in decimal too, but that’s just a wish.
Coming late to the game, I’m trying out a Bluetooth Mate from SparkFun with an Arduino Lilypad.
Overall, it’s a nice Bluetooth radio to use with microcontrollers. A few thoughts on getting it working:
Matt Mets has written a nice Nikon remote control library for Arduino. I used it to make a motion trigger and intervalometer. It looks like this:
