Overview
We are building this robot with my friend. It is (when finalized) supposed to be able to detect metal objects and interact with them (move them, ideally...). So far it has only two IR sensors for obstacle detection, so no metal detection.
[TodBot] has a new piece of hardware on the way up. His Blink(1) is currently about 50% funded on Kickstarter. It’s a USB nub that has an RGB LED inside of it. When plugged into a computer it can be used as a status indicator. At first that sounds like a let down, but his marketing is fantastic as the myriad of uses really caught our attention. If you’re on the road you can use it to report back your server statistic. Plug one into each rack-mounted servers for quick visual indication of which one has crashed. Or find your own use.
You probably remember [TodBot] as the creator of the BlinkM. Recently he was calling it the world’s smallest Arduino. Well this Blink(1) is being marketed as Arduino programmable as well. The board size is about the same, and both have an RGB LED module. The difference is that the BlinkM had an ATtiny85 and needed a serial converter to program it. This has a USB plug so we’d bet he’s swapped the tiny for an ATmega8u2 or something from the same family.
Don’t think one blinky LED is going to cut it? For folks that just need more resolution there are other hardware options out there. For instance, this project gives you a wireless 8×8 RGB led display to use as an indicator.
One of the exciting new features of the Arduino Leonardo is its ability to act as a USB human interface device like a keyboard or mouse. This can make interfacing hardware projects with third-party software much easier. For example, if you want to build a physical button to go backwards in your web browsing history, you can have the Arduino send your browser’s keyboard command for back each time you hit the button. But if you have an Arduino Uno, you’re not out of luck.
Michael Mitchell recently shared his tutorial on how to use DFU Programmer to update the firmware on the Atmega8U2, which, according to the Arduino documentation, “acts as a bridge between the computer’s USB port and the main processor’s serial port” on the Uno. Michael also points out that you’ll need to make a slight hardware modification to the board if you have the DIP version of the Uno board—SMD Uno owners can keep their soldering irons holstered for this one. Michael demos his tutorial with a volume controller for his Ubuntu box and naturally he offers all the code you need to make your own.
More:
The AWESOME Button: A Made-to-Measure USB Input Device
The Bullduino’s are starting to arrive. When [Arclight] received his in the mail the first thing he did was to share the hardware details. Of course this is the hardware that participants in the Red Bull Creation contest will be receiving ahead of this year’s contest.
The board is an ATmega328 Arduino clone. Instead of an FTDI chip for USB this one is sporting an ATmega8u2. That’s not too much of a surprise as it should translate to a cost savings. [Arclight] reports that the stock firmware flashes a message in Morse code. It seems the Hartford HackerSpace got their Bullduino several days ago and already decoded the message. It reads:
“Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?”
The guys that did the decoding speculate that this could be a type as ‘l’ and ‘y’ are inversions of each other in Morse code; or it could be some kind of clue. At any rate, if you want to do some disassembly and see if there’s anything lurking in the firmware, [Arclight] posted FLASH and EEPROM dumps from both ATmega chips along with his article.
