Judgement Day is coming!

The judged event will be Noon, April 16th in the BC Infil (Engineering B106). You are welcome to bring friends, family, ect if you'd like.

You will need to submit a basic report of your project by April 9th.  This doesn't need to be anything fancy, but needs to detail: your budget and bill of materials, your code, your circuit, any mechanical/concept work, as well as a "works cited" listing your sources for code, circuits, and anything else you used.

You are welcome to bring trifolds with an outline/pictures/ect of your project if you'd like.  Be prepared to answer questions such as, "How does your code work?", "How did you come up with this idea?",  "What were some engineering challenges?".....the ropes.  You should have a working knowledge of your project.

PLEASE READ: Even if your project isn't complete or isn't working, you should still submit it anyways.  You still have a good chance of winning a prize if you've thought through everything well. Only a small portion of your score comes from the actual functionality.

Servo and IEEE Standards Workshop

Alrighty folks, the last workshop is tonight at 6pm in Clark A205.

We will be talking about servos, motors, and electrical mechanical movement as well as IEEE Standards.

The workshop will be a lot of fun, we'll be connecting servo motors to our boards, connecting the boards together, making a "servo protocol", and then making one Arduino control all of the others with the standard we create.

If you have wire strippers, please bring those in, otherwise, all you need is you Arduino, computer, and USB cable ;)

For more information on IEEE standards or to get an overview before the workshop, take a look here:
http://www.ieee.org/portal/cms_docs_iportals/iportals/education/setf/tutorials/baseline/index.html

Update the firmware on your Arduino's 8U2

If you folks are having issues with your Arduino and not being able to talk to it, you should look into upgrading the firmware on the USB to processor bridge chip (in laymans terms).

http://arduino.cc/en/Hacking/DFUProgramming8U2

Project Design Workshop

Due to exams and people's events, this week's workshop will be online.  As facebook allows for longer videos, it has been posted there.  Please take a look when you get a chance ;)

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1847281102763

Hacking Workshop!

Welcome back folks! Wednesday, January 26th's workshop will be on hacking electronics. 

 It will be at 6pm in Clark A202.

You will need to bring, along with your computer and Arduino, an old keyboard with a PS2 connector.  The PS2 connectors look like this:

 

If you don't have a keyboard at home, you can get one for around $3 at a thrift shop.  It may be worth the time to ask ENS and computer lab directors to see if they have an extra one you can have for free.

If you have them, please bring wire cutters and an exacto (hobby) knife.

To make things go faster, you should cut off the PS2 connector close to the connector, strip back the outside sheath by 5 inches and strip each wire by a about an inch.

Your wire should look like this:

          

______________________          5 inches                   1 inch

                                           |===========wire===--------exposed wire

                                           |

         cable                          |===========wire===--------exposed wire

                                           |

_____________________|==========wire====---------exposed wire

I will supply wire and connectors to connect the keyboard to your Arduino.

See you there!

New Arduino Software

Arduino 0022 has just been released.  I recommend downloading it and then deleting the old one (be sure to move any of your sketches over the new folder).  This new version has a library for talking to SD cards as well as a few new functions for character manipulation macros.  It also has patches that solve some of the issues you may come across if you don't update. You will not need to update your drivers.

You can download it here: http://arduino.cc/en/Main/Software

Failing. Yep.

Many professors and engineers will tell you about the projects they've done, the things they've invented, the innovations they've harbored, but they will rarely tell you about their failures.  How they hooked their chip to a power supply and it burst to flame.  How their experimental new concrete crumbled before they even took it out of the mold. How that chemically stable compound somehow ate through the table......How their projects never worked the first time.

You're project will most likely not work at first, but don't be disheartened.  It literally happens to EVERYONE, they just don't like to talk about it.

My words of advice to you when something doesn't work (be it your project, homework, anything:

• Don't freak out

But I'm not dividing by zero!

The more upset you become, the more you will just want to set your project down and forget it. It also tends to snowball...the more upset you become, the more upset you become because you can't fix the problem because you are upset and it accumulates until you look like the guy and the right (yeah, it really works that way). This leads into the next bit of advice:

• Take a deep breath and slow down

Dude, check out the backwards diode...

Opposite to the effects stressing over an issue, calming yourself will only serve to help you out. You can think much better when you aren't imagining yourself pulling the printer scene from Office Space on your project.  Go through the issues slowly, systematically and logically, looking at possible problems.  

• Bite sized chunks

Bite sized.  Enough said.

Separate your total situation/project into bite sized chunks that can easily be solved. You can't finish the Pizza Casba 7lb pizza challenge in one bite.  Nope, it's going to take you quite a few and likely help from friends. Break your project up into small little chunks. I need code that does this....I need wheels that can grip like this.....I wan't pizza now....  When troubleshooting, do the same thing.  Break your code, circuits, mechanical issues, everything into smaller and smaller chunks till you solve the problem.

• Stuck? Take a break.

Break me off a piece

Remember back to, well, any week of college, and you'll remember forgetting the answer to a problem.  It's on the tip of your tongue and just behind your eyes, but no matter how much steam pours from your ears, you cannot remember it.  Minutes after handing in your test, you divine the answer from the ether.....too late....   

When you get stuck, you can try too hard and saturate your mind to keep from absorbing new ideas.  Take a break.  Go grab a candy bar from down stairs, ride the elevator up and down, talk to a random stranger, draw a face on the side of your hand and make it talk.  Anything helps.  Something I've found is that by leaving the room, you change your mindset, allowing you to think differently.  Folks spot me riding my longboard randomly across campus trying to solve something.

• Rotate the mirror and don't reinvent the wheel

"Can't touch this."..wrong MC

If you don't find an issue, see if you are possibly tackling the problem from a bad angle.  Are there ways of approaching your goal another, easier way? Has someone already conquered this problem?  Did they fix it?  How so?  Don't spend too much time trying to reinvent things if it isn't necessary.