I spend this rainy day working on an old project and I am happy to announce its 99.8% finished. Now I have a nice Atmel Board screwed to the wall with an ethernet port. Nice little project where you can access measurement values and digital I/Os via normal http access. For now I have 3 temperature sensors running. One outside, one on the ceiling and one on the floor of my office. Idea is to control a fan when the temperature between the ceiling and the floor is to hight. I have this problem specially in winter times when the heater is on. Next week I will attach a light sensor as well. For now you can find all the measurements on pachube feed 1303. For example here is the outside temperature sensor. Time is in utc.
If you ever wondered if geeks are social here is the answer. Yes they are and they are very social and organising some very cool events which are called “geekends”. Combination of weekend and geek. Not just going for hiking with friends. No developing, building, ironing and coding very cool and geeky things.
As being a reader of the very cool MAKE magazin I read the article on a brain machine the other day. This project is great for a geekend. Something to build, some hardware, software and after all a great toy to play with.
The idea is to build one of these Brainwave (aka Light and Sound Machines) on your own with a little micro controller. Lets see if we can optimize the hard and software a little bit. The original one is based on an other project and therefore the hard and software is not optimizes for a LSM.
More Information on the original project you can find the the blog here.
Stay tuned to my blog to read more on this geekend.
Together with a friend of mine we are planning to take the opportunity and make a nice friday-easter-geocaching-event (fege). We are planning to make 3 or maybe 4 multicaches and several single caches on the road. Here are the stages for the multis (must do)
As you can see on the picture sitting with Thinkpads can be very social. Reminds me of this famous picture with guys sitting on a not yet finished skyscraper.
Last weekend was a big event in Stuttgart. Its called “Lange Nacht der Museen“. Many many museums and galleries are open until 2 o’clock in the morning. Lift organized this event and they also hired a log (well not enough) buses to transport all the people around Stuttgart. Well most of the time you spend waiting for totally overcrowded buses but nevertheless it was a great event. Thanks to Lift for this. Besides the Mercedes Museum, Boat tour in the Stuttgarter Harbor (yes Stuttgart has an Harbor), Wine Museum we visit the bunker below the marked place. Here are some pictures of the former bunker which was an hotel after the second World War and was given up completely long time ago. They had some pictures on the wall how the hotel was looking before when it was still active. And besides that they invited the last active hotel employee who talk about old times.
Moin
After a lot of experiments with Atmel and servos the schematic design for the leg controller is ready. Unfortunately the Atmega8 has the I2C interface on 2 of the ACDs so only 4 ACDs are left. Therefore I have to use 1 Atmega8 for each leg to control the 3 servos. Besides the PWM servo control I also added 3 PWM LED controllers (via transistor). Just in case later on I decide to “pimp my robot” Well at least I can use them for visual debugging when I train the robot to walk. The idea of this schematic is quite easy. There are
2 connectors for the bus (i2c and power)
3 connectors for LEDs (transistor connected)
3 PWM servo connectors (with current (resistor) measurement)
1 SPI interface to flash the atmel onboard
Well its not a big deal but maybe someone finds it usefull. Next week I have to fight with placing it on a board without to many crossings.
Now I have a nice Atmel Board screwed to the wall with an ethernet port. Nice little project where you can access measurement values and digital I/Os via normal http access. For now I have 3 temperature sensors running. One outside, one on the ceiling and one on the floor of my office. Idea is to control a fan when the temperature between the ceiling and the floor is to hight. I have this problem specially in winter times when the heater is on. Next week I will attach a light sensor as well. For now you can find all the measurements on pachube feed 1303. For example here is the outside temperature sensor. Time is in utc. 
