Mark Foster's Blog

My dad got me an ARDX Experimentation Kit for Arduino for my birthday. I just finished all the 13 experiments and I have to say it is a pretty awesome kit and a good introduction to the Arduino. The kit comes with a variety of input and output components/devices including:

• 10x Red and 10x Green LEDs
• 10mm Blue LED
• 5mm RGB LED
• Force Sensor
• DC Motor
• Hobby Servo
• Shift Register
• Piezo Element
• Pushbuttons
• Variable Resister/Potentiometer
• Photo Resister
• Temp Sensor
• Relay

Also included are some transistors, resistors, diodes, etc. After you finish going through the experiments this gives you a good head start once you decide to build your own project.

Another bonus to the kit is that is comes with a custom cut piece of clear acrylic to mount the included Arduino and a bread board. There are wiring sheets you can cut out and overlay on the bread board but I didn’t find these necessary.

Code for most of the projects can be found online at the URLs mentioned in the instructions with the exception of the last two experiments. For the RGB LED experiment I could not find the code online and I had trouble with the code printed in the manual. I had to make the color arrays regular variables instead of constants to get the code to work for me. I could not find the force sensor code online either but the code printed in the manual worked and was pretty trivial to enter.

Overall I have to say this is a great kit for someone that would like to learn how to use Arduino to interface with real world devices.

The ARDX kit comes with many electronic components and breadboard wires. More than needed to complete all the experiments.

The Arduino comes packaged in an interesting little box.

A 9 volt battery clip and power plug are included so you can run your Arduino without a USB connection for power.

The manual is complete with a description of all the components, and 13 experiments.

One experiment uses the Arduino in combo with a transistor to control a small toy/hobby motor. Code is included to shut the motor on and off and run the motor at different speeds.

Experiment 5 shows you how to use a shift register to effectively add many more digital outputs to the Arduino.

An RGB LED experiment demonstrates how to combine the base colors to create additional colors.

Experiment 13 demonstrates how to use a pressure sensor with the Arduino. The Arduino increases the brightness of an LED as more pressure is applied.

For Christmas 2011 Pictometry had a holiday “Throwdown” challenge. Each department was given box of miscellaneous items that had to be incorporated into some sort of creation. The box was handed off from one engineer to the next. Everyone was too busy. Finally, with two days left before the judging, it was time to take action. With much help from my fellow engineers I built TreeBot, a remote control Christmas Tree with all the trimmings and wireless video for remote operation.

It consists of my old Duratrax Evader RC car with a Christmas Tree mounted to it, Christmas lights on a power inverter, an iPod Shuffle playing Christmas tunes on an amplified speaker and a 2.4 Ghz video transmitter for remote operation. It is decorated with various items we had to use in our creation. We came in second place behind Finance who did a Christmas Carol play using the items as props but I feel it was a good entry representative of engineering given the time constraints.

Here is a video of the TreeBot in operation.

I took some pictures of TreeBot as I took it apart in case we decide to build something similar next year:

TreeBot

We used a cheap amplified speaker and an iPod Shuffle loaded with Christmas music to give TreeBot a voice.

A 2.4 Ghz video transmitter was used to transmit TreeBot's perspective to a receiver wired to an old analog video monitor another engineer donated to the cause.

If I were to do it again I would use a wider angle lens for the video camera. Navigating around corners was particularly difficult because of the narrow field of view.

We made the face out of materials provided. The eyes are made from little sticky foam beads shaped into balls and the mouth is a strand of foam peanuts.

TreeBot was lit up using a standard strand of incandescent Christmas lights (provided) using a cheap power inverter on a 3000mAh 3S LiPo Battery pack.

Presents were secured to the tree using zip ties. Nylon zip ties were used extensively throughout TreeBot.

A piece of wood was placed into each of suspension points to keep the car from sitting on the ground under the weight of the Christmas Tree.

The skirt of TreeBot consisted of two pieces of cardboard from the box we were given cut into two half circles and then stapled together to form a semi-cone. It was covered with wrapping paper and garland was zip tied around the edge. The skirt was then zip tied to the Christmas Tree stand.

 

The stand that came with the Christmas Tree was zip tied to the car's frame.

Bolt's were used as a standoff to level the Christmas Tree stand on the car. Zip ties were again employed to secure the Christmas Tree stand to the bolt heads.

It was not terribly shocking to find that the cheap power inverter wasn't putting out the advertised voltage even though our input voltage met specifications. Regardless, it was enough to power a strand of Christmas lights.

This is the car frame after everything was removed.

The car has been returned to its former self.

I just finished a scratch build of the Funbat, an RC plane design that uses Dollar Tree foam board designed by Bloody Micks. I posted build pictures here on RCGroups.com. Now I just need a nice calm day.

SELinux will block PHP/Apache from connecting to PostgreSQL (and probably any other DB) by default on some Linux distributions. If you are trying to get PHP to connect to a PostreSQL DB on a linux box for the first time and you are sure your pg_hba.conf on the target box is setup correctly then try this:

setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect 1

This should configure SELinux to allow Apache/PHP to connect to other hosts.

I just finished testmywireless.com. It is a mobile-targeted website that allows you to test your wireless bandwidth on mobile phones or tablets that do not have Flash support (I.e. iPhone) without installing an app. It is intended to be used as a comparison shopping tool for folks in the market for smartphones and tablets. To test broadband performance, disable Wi-Fi on the device, open a browser and go to testmywireless.com. Press “Test My Connection” to test the device’s broadband connection performance.

The site also allows you test the browser’s support for modern web standards and search for service providers near your location. The service provider search uses your current GPS location (with your permission) and shows each provider’s advertised upload and download speeds which you can compare with your connection test results. You can also search by postal code or city, state. The FCC/NTIA National BroadBand Map API is used to find service providers and their advertised bandwidth speeds.

It was a good little project to tinker with jQuery Mobile, integrate with a couple API’s, and learn more about JavaScript Asynchronous programming in general. It is not nearly as flashy as some of the existing bandwidth test tools and there are still some quirks and bugs to work out but it seems work pretty well for the most part. If you have a chance to try the site out, I would be interested in your feedback.