Monthly Archives: April 2011
Chest buss built
I built the full-scale chest buss tonight. I still don’t have a solid plan for how I’m going to suspend this thing on my chest yet, but at least it’s operational. Here it is plugged into MiniMe for a test.
Time for a new scope
Encoder working
Arm and leg harnesses complete
I’ve got the full-scale arm and harnesses complete, along with their elastic straps. I’ve become an expert at fabrication with elastic and anorak snaps! I also made a temporary spine that lets me attach the arms and legs to the Arduino, so I’ll be posting some pics with those harnesses lit up soon. They represent 18 of the 50 total LEDs in the outfit.
Strapped guns
Time to get strapped
There are some spatial relationships between LEDs on different harnesses that I’ve planned, such as the ones shown here. Those LEDs are supposed to generally line up, and it will be much easier for me to actually achieve that kind of alignment if I can take the measurements on myself, instead of just in theory. I feel like a tailor now. :-S
The long…limbs…of MiniMe
I just built the full-size leg subharness. Here’s both the full-size arm and leg harnesses attached to MiniMe’s spine. Every day I’m more glad I built that miniature.
Improved display
After observing the rather abysmal performance of my LCD over I2C, I decided to give it a go with SPI, which I read was a lot faster. The good news is that it really is a lot faster, and I in fact demonstrate here acceptable interactive UI speeds for activities like scrolling through a list, which involves changing most of the memory on the display all at once. The bad news, of course, is that now I need five more wires going to wherever this display is going to live, which I hope will be my wrist or the back of my hand. Perhaps it’s better anyway that I’m not polluting my I2C buss with instructions for the display.
First shot at display
I’m now spending some mental cycles thinking hard about real-time control of anthrolume while I’m wearing it. I ordered a bunch of parts for control and display, and they’re starting to come in. Here’s my initial experiment with interfacing a 20-character by 4-line LCD display to the Arduino. I am hoping to have a display like this on my wrist or the top of my hand.