nuumio's blog

After a long time being silent here in LMR I finally got some time to post an update to my weather station project.

On April 2nd a bit after 11:33:22.546588 AM GMT+3 it happened. My weather station's (http://letsmakerobots.com/node/25773) remote unit died. I was having my morning coffee and noticed that weatherlogger hadn't received any updates for last 10 to 15 minutes or so. Last update was at previously mentioned timestamp.

Here's a quick project update: I've been busy with studies, work and other stupid things and I haven't had much time to spend with really important stuff - my weather station project. Now that I finally got more time and spent couple of nights building I got radio silence! Oh ****!

The weather is out there and so the weather station must be out there too. My weather station (or what will someday be a weather station) has now spent last two nights outside on my backyard. The idea is to test how it, and especially its lead acid battery, survives in cold weather.

Believe it or not but this thing right here is a wind vane for my weather station:

"A wind vane"

I've been thinking about making a weather station for a while. My goal is to have it running when I go for a two week trip at the end of the year so I can check how cold it is back here in Finland :-) To put it simply, the idea is this (the usual weather station stuff I think):

Today I made my first SMD soldering. This is where I started:

FT232RL and SSOP28 adapter

And this is what I ended up with:

Done!

I got Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope out from the customs today. Unfortunately I haven't got much time to play with it yet. However I managed to get one screenshot out from it. Here's a capture from ATMega8's XTAL1 when the chip is run with 16MHz crystal:

Looks nice. More about the scope when I figure out how it works, what I can do with it and what to write about it :-)

Last night I was building my next bot, Hammer, and I got to the point where I had all the electronics more or less completed and some mechanics done too. With some help from my dear friend hot glue I managed to build a shaky test platform. I hoped I could test Sharp IR distance sensor and motors. Maybe even do some simple navigation stuff. Here are a couple of pictures how Hammer looks like right now.

Front

Today I decided that my Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX webcam needs upgrades. I got the camera, some polymorph, plumber's tape, hot glue and couple of servos. Let's see what we get when we put those together.

Ooops! I forgot to take a picture of the original camera. If you have never seen a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX webcam there's some pictures of it at least here. There's might be some pics at Logitech site too but since this is a discontinued model they could be hard to find.

Some time ago I had a great idea: I'm going to make two robots. One will be an obstacle avoider and its job will be just wander around with its big head. The other bot will then try to catch it and hit the head with a hammer. Tracking would be done with infrared leds and phototransistors. For the time being I've pretty much completed the first part and posted Head. Head already has infrared leds on its head so next thing would be building an infrared tracker.

So, my next robot project has two robots: Hammer and Head. Hammer will have a hammer of some kind and Head will have a big head. Hammer and Head are going to have some fun together. Well at least Hammer will have fun...

Here's a list of updates to help with page navigation (if it ever works):

• Update 21 Jun 2010
• Update 22 Aug 2010
• Update 23 Aug 2010
• Update 24 Aug 2010

And now on to business:

Last week I got this avrUSB500v2 programmer kit from tuxgraphics.org. The kit has all the needed components except the ATMega8 chip. You have to purchase that separately. Here are the kit's components and ATMega8:

Note that FTDI smd-chip is conveniently already soldered to PCB.

[See updates and videos on the bottom of this page]

Isotope's LadyBugBot looked like fun to make so I thought to give it a try. Also, this bot would make a great gift to someone having a kitchen renovated and I just happen to know one :-)