Serial LCD with Flash eeprom

This is part of a larger project, for an electronic Blood Bowl board. Testing a number of ideas in one project - converting a parallel interface LCD into a serial interface, using a shift register and reading data from Flash-based eeprom to display on the LCD.

Sorry about the blurry image, but you should just be able to make out the string of characters as it cycles through a list of names, stored in the external Flash eeprom chip. The characters should read

• Blood Bowl
• Griff Overwald
• Varag Ghoulchew (ran out of characters!)
• The Mighty Zug

then cycle through them all again.

PIC controlled traffic lights

Here's a pretty cool set of microcontroller-powered miniature traffics lights from one of our youngest members. He's building an electronic toy set for his younger brother for Xmas and is using these to get starting with PIC programming.

Note how the sequence accurately follows a real set of lights - including that frustrating delay when both sets of lights stay red for a second or so - just in case any last-second idiots are trying to jump the amber light and squeeze through before the second stream of traffic is released!

Continuous rotation servo hack

In preparation for Robot Week Wales on 5th December, we're putting together some robot kits. And that means messing about with continuous rotation servos. Most of the off-the-shelf servos are pretty big and lumpy - we'd like to use the little micro servos, to keep the robot size small. So we hacked some micro servos from Oomlout

Stepper motor controller with jog function

This is a PIC18F4550 and a ULN2803A darlington relay controlling a stepper motor.
The PIC provides a USB interface to the host PC, allowing you to send a specific number of steps and a rotation direction. The motor can also be turned using the "forwards" and "backwards" jog buttons.

The noise in the video is not rowing neighbours, as suggested by some viewers, but a Radio4 play and my partner on a sewing machine in the other room!

In this example, I'm using a 1.8 degree stepper motor. I'm driving it using half-step rotation, so one rotation = (360/1.8)*2 = 400 steps. You can see this value being entered into the USB/HID app on the laptop - 400 as two bytes is 1(HB) and 145(LB)
Working this back, 1*255 + 145 = 400

When the "send data" button is pushed, the stepper completes one single, full rotation.

Miniature playable synth

While it's been a while since we posted a video here, we've have been busy making cool stuff and trying out new ideas (just check out the main blog for details).
Anyway, here's the latest development: it's part of our miniature instruments range - a tiny 17-key, fully playable, fully-polyphonic, USB synthesizer.

CNC machine working!

After nearly two weeks of messing about, trying to learn five different types of CNC controlling software, we eventually gave up trying to be different and fell into line with most other CNC users and installed MACH3.

Tom from almostobsolete is our resident G-Code guru and hand crafted some code, off the top of his head, to create a drawing. After pressing go, it wasn't long before we could answer his "can you tell what it is yet?" Rolf Harris style impression.



The video was taken on Robot Steve's Android phone but for some reason the video clarity is nowhere near as good as in his previously uploaded video...

What's pretty exciting about getting the CNC machine to actually work is that we've already a whole load of PCB layouts designed, waiting to be etched. The idea is to pre-drill the copper boards, then use press-n-peel to create the etching mask. That way, we don't have to worry about boards being skewed or starting off the drilling in the wrong place and knackering up an entire A4 sheet of pre-etched copper board!

Laser cutting boxes

Here's a quick video showing the laser cutter at BuildBrighton in action.
It's cutting out a box, designed using BoxMaker, from http://rahulbotics.com/personal-projects/boxmaker/?boxmaker.
The video was uploaded from Robot Steve's Android phone no less.