Got some Arduino and Bluetooth parts in the mail. These are for a Arduino RC project I’m working on. The one mentioned earlier. I’m kinda tired now, so don’t feel to write a long blog.
So to keep it short, it is about controlling light and winch in my RC scaler with my phone using Bluetooth. As you’ve seen in the earlier videos it is working really well. I’ve also been in contact with other RC enthusiast which want to buy my solution. So I’ve ordered ten Arduinos and ten Bluetooth modules. 
Forgot to post this when I uploaded it to Youtube.
I’ve started a new RC project with my scaler car. As I don’t want to spend the $200 (in Norway) a new fancy controller with extra channels, I had to think about something else. So I went into my “tool-box” and took out my Arduino and borrowed a bluetooth module from a friend. Now it’s all hooked up to my lights in the car, and I’ve made a nifty app that controls it all. It’s still not “realease” ready, but not far from it. Atleast for an alpha version.
A friend of mine showed a Arduino project called Auduino. I non-technical words it’s a synth, but it is also something that:
uses granular synthesis techniques to generate a distinctive filter-sweep sound that had much more character than boring square waves
It is pretty easy to make, and fun to play with. Even thought some of the notes/tones it makes is just noise. What you need is an Arduino, 5 potensiometers and some wires. Hook it all together and upload the library and your set.
Read more about it over at TinkterIt.
Some weekends ago I was working on my old Nitro car. The one I’ve switched the engine on. In image two from that post you can see some circuits boards. What you see is an Arduino, Xbee, and a three dimensional accelerometer. The Arduino do all the processing of data, and sends it via Xbee to my computer. Using the data gathered with the three dimensional accelerometer it was possible to map out the g-force that the car generate.
So what you can see in the image is the g-force generated by my car. Next step is to make a more readable display.
Not much time to blog personally lately, mostly because I’m a bit lazy. Plus I’m writing on my master thesis, so I feel that I write enough.
“Anywho”, I have an RC car I want to modify in some way. I have changed it gasoline engine to be electric (not that hard, just change the two engines and get the right gear(s)), but what more can I do? I’ve been thinking about making it drive by it self (hence the Artificial Intelligence in the title), but is that any fun? Of course it would be a challenging and interesting coding job, but fun with RC cars is to drive them your self. So what can I do? I googled it a bit, and found these cool project.
HackedGadgets: Use the motor from a drill instead of a “proper” RC car engine. I’m going to try this this weekend. Since I have a spare drill laying around, and a spare RC car (had to get the electric engine from somewhere). Just need another set of batteries, but they aren’t that expensive.
JBProjects: Make a programmable RC car. This is similar to how you program a Lego MindStorm robot. Probably not going to do this on my big RC car, but I have a small one which is kinda broken with no projects going on. So with a h-bridge and an Xbee or something similar, this should be easy to get up and going. Guess the main challenge is to understand how fast it can go, and get it to turn properly :\ We’ll see later when I get time to build this. Plus I need to buy some wireless communication parts.
RCArduino: What about adding traction control or speedometer to the RC car? Both of these could be really fun to try out.
One project I have thought up my self it to make more crash proof. I’m not that a great driver of RC cars so sometimes I crash, but what if I could make the car handle better, or at least withstand the crashes? Some sort of rollcage. With some solenoid I could make it fill over like in the movies. That would be pretty cool.
Or another project would be just to add some cool lights underneath it, and maybe add movable shocks.
Any other ideas?
As mention in the last post I had forgotten to blog about my Makey Makey, this is partially to that I was quite busy when I got this last year, and that I didn’t have any project to test it with. I’m still a bit busy, but I’ve been working on a small game that really can work with the Makey Makey. So that’s why I’ve made this video of me playing BitBlock on fruits and a cake. Enjoy.
It was really easy to use the Makey Makey, as expected. It’s just an USB interface with an Arduino. Meaning that it function just as a keyboard/mouse.
Got my self a new Arduino Starterkit and it looking pretty sleak! I’m not really a Arduino projecter or Arduino-artist. Or whatever people using Arduino call them self, but I like to plunder with it sometimes, and a brilliant book comes with this new starterkit. It’s called “Arduino Projects Book” and have 15 different project where 14 of them are pretty cool (the first one is an introduction to breadboard, LEDs’ and basic electronic theory. Compared to the booklet you get with the Sparkfun kit, it’s like day and night. I haven’t read the book yet, but it look like it have elaborate explanation of the parts you need to learn when working with Arduino, and with the more interesting project I would recommend this kit over the Sparkfun one. I’ll try to make some of the projects later this week and blog about them. First I just have to read the book and I want to try out my Makey Makey I got last year (Which I just found out that I hadn’t blogged about, so guess I will try to write a little bit about it later today, or tomorrow).
It’s so easy and fun to blog with my new phone. So I just wanted to tell you about what I’m trying to do now. What you see on the image is something called Arducopter. It is a helicopter with four rotors. And it’s all controlled by an Arduino. The problem is that we crashed it, so now it its all unstable. So time to calibrate.
My friend and I are nearly done with the first version of our boat project called Green Boatnet. It’s all made of plastic and we use Arduino to control it.