I’ve been reading quite a lot about Arduino & open source hardware recently and managed to build my first robot! Since I learned quite a bit in the process I wanted to share the experience.

This robot is based on the Magician Chassis from Dagu using an Arduino controller & Monster Moto Shield. I order the kit from Australian Robotics who have had really good service and delivery times.

I approached the building in a few stages;

1. Assemble the chassis
2. Program the Ultrasonic Range Finder
3. Program the Monster Moto Shield
4. Combine the above three steps!

Assemble the chassis

Assembling the chassis was quite simple. Most of the pieces simply screw together although I had a bit of fun trying to get the motor mounts to snap in place. They were a bit tight but managed to fit so if you experience the same then you should get there eventually.

Programming the Ultrasonic Range Finder

This part was fun and my first experience doing something more interesting with an Arduino beyond blinking a LED. I used a breadboard and experimented getting the range finder working in isolation. This is generally a good way to approach building anything, as once the range finder was working I knew that code was fine and could go onto the next step.

Before moving on, I made one simple mod to the basic range finder sample, and that was to add a feedback LED so I could see when the robot detected something in front of it. Not needed, but good for debugging.

In the picture below you may notice an Ethernet Shield, this is not needed and was simply part of my test environment.

Assemble & Program the Motor Shield

This is the part of the project was the most challenging. I made a few mistakes but got there in the end.

First of all I could have probably gotten away with just using the cheaper Ardumoto – Motor Driver Shield rather than the Monster Moto Shield but after watching the demo video on the Sparkfun site and viewing some images, it appeared that that was the recommended controller and being new, I wanted to make sure things worked.

The blue screw terminals shown on the board below are not supplied so you’ll need to purchase and solder these on as well as the risers (not shown below) so it mounts on the Arduino board. If you are new to soldering (or a bit rusty as I was) you may want to practice on something else before burning out a $80 board. For this I used a different cheap Arduino shield to practice on.

My last hurdle was powering up the motors. I made the mistake of thinking that the motors would be powered via the base Arduino power source and spent a few hours scratching my head trying to work out why the motors wouldn’t start even though the board had lit up. I emailed SparkFun tech support and they quickly set me straight (thanks Michelle!) and advised that I’d need an additional power supply even though one was not shown in the photos. I connected a second power supply and voila! We have movement!

Putting it all together.

All that was left now was to combine the 3 stages above. Merging Arduino code, putting the sensors on the robot chassis and start testing it out. This part was smooth sailing and after a couple of trial runs and tweaks to the code, I’m quite happy with the results.

Here is a video of the completed robot

If you are interested in building something similar, here is the final Arduino code I used

SensorBlinkMotor.zip

Now comes the hard part.. what to build next? Stay tuned…

Given that I often demonstrate Adobe’s server products (LiveCycle ES and others) I typically have a server centric environment on a VMWare image stored locally on my laptop. I have (finally) upgraded my demonstration environment from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 R2. Since I often get asked how and why I set up my demo environment the way I do, I’ve captured some notes and share them

I won’t cover the actual OS installation, so i’ll assuming the OS & drivers are installed and you’ve run Windows update. First, in order to make the OS look slightly more familiar, I install the Desktop Experience feature using Server Manager, or with the following command line:

• ServerManagerCmd -i Desktop-Experience

• Click Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization
• Click Personalization and select the Aero Theme

Stop the annoying Windows server shutdown event tracker. Each time you reboot you have to log a reason why… useful in production, but ANNOYING in development & demo.

• To open Group Policy, click Start, click Run, type gpedit.msc, and then click OK.
• Local Computer Policy-> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates-> System-> Display Shutdown Event Tracker
• On the Setting tab, click Disabled.
• Click Apply, and then click OK.

Relax the password security on this demo install. This way you can have any type of password you like.. just don’t do this on a production machine with any sensitive data!

• Group Policy Object [computer name] Policy
• Computer Configuration-> Windows Settings-> Security Settings-> Account Policies-> Password Policy
• Disable the setting “Password must meet complexity”
• Run “gpupdate” command to refresh the group policy

If you want to automatically log into an account;

• In the Start menu click Run and enter control userpasswords2.
• After clicking OK the User Accounts window will show up.
• Click the account you want to login automatically and uncheck Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer checkbox.
• Click Apply, it will ask for the password of the user you selected.
• Enter the password of the selected user twice and click OK.
• From now on every time you start Windows it will automatically login!

To apply Enhanced Security Configuration to specific users by using a computer running Windows Server 2008

• Log on to the computer with a user account that is a member of the local Administrators group.
• Click Start, point to Administrative Tools, and then click Server Manager.
• If the User Account Control dialog box appears, confirm that the action it displays is what you want, and then click Continue.
• Under Security Summary, click Configure IE ESC.
• Under Administrators, click On (Recommended) or Off, depending on your desired configuration.
• Under Users, click On (Recommended) or Off, depending on your desired configuration.
• Click OK.
• Restart Internet Explorer to apply Enhanced Security Configuration.

Other post installation tasks include

• Enable Windows Audio (optional – disabled by default)
• Install Winzip
• Install Firefox
• Install Flash
• show file extensions
• turn UAC off

Sources

http://www.expta.com/2009/02/how-to-enable-aero-glass-on-windows.html <- Aero on Win2008
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd883248%28WS.10%29.aspx <- Enhanced Security
+ others I cannot remember

Have your own tip? Please share!

Quick post to share a great utility for anyone like me who would like to show off their Android app on a projector. In my case I’ve been demoing the latest Adobe Reader, LiveCycle client, Acrobat.com, Photoshop Express apps from Adobe as well as some samples created with the upcoming AIR for Android.

The problem is that I used to use a web camera and try and hold the phone in front of it while demonstrating. What I’ve started using now is AndroidScreencast (http://androidscreencast.googlecode.com). It’s a java app that displays whatever is on your Android device onto your PC. The screen refresh rate is not amazing, but it does work on Mac, Windows & Linux!

All the gory details are on the project site, but it works great!

If you’re like me and have finally made the move to a 64bit version of Windows, be it Vista or Windows 7, you may have come across an annoying glitch related to PDF previews within Outlook 2007. Instead of displaying the PDF correctly you receive an error similar to “This file cannot be previewed because of an error with the following previewer: PDF Preview Handler for Vista -  To open this file in its own program, double-click it.”

Adobe Acrobat and Reader both come with Adobe PDF preview handlers for Outlook but the installer has a mistake which means the preview handler does not work on 64-bit systems. It turns out the problem can be fixed via a simple registry change.

All that needs to be done to correctly preview PDF docs in Outlook 2007 64bit is to first download the latest Adobe Reader, then add the following key to your registry;

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREWow6432NodeClassesCLSID{DC6EFB56-9CFA-464D-8880-44885D7DC193}]

"AppID"="{534A1E02-D58F-44f0-B58B-36CBED287C7C}"

The fix should only be applied to 64-bit versions of Windows that have Adobe Reader installed. Don’t apply the fix to 32-bit versions of Windows.  To install make it easier to configure, download the adobe_pdf_x64_fix, unzip then double-click the adobe_pdf_x64_fix.reg file and follow the prompts.

thanks to http://www.pretentiousname.com/adobe_pdf_x64_fix/index.html for this workaround..

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Web09 conference in Auckland, New Zealand with Adobe’s Paul Burnett, Andrew Spaulding and Ryan Stewart. I took a few notes from some of the sessions. While this isn’t a complete run down of the conference, and does not include comments on every speaker, here are some of the remarks I picked up on.

Rod Dury – http://www.drury.net.nz/

“NZ has a huge internet bandwidth… fiber to the home is a proposed solution but the real problem is incoming bandwidth to the country.”

Dan Rubin @danrubin & Steve smith @orderedlist

Designers coming from print to web need to learn about the “backend” of sites and the limitations, just like they had to learn about the printing process and limitations of presses.

Jarred Bishop – @jarred
“APIs allow you to do cool shit with other peoples resources”
Twitter = Command prompt for the web OS
Baker sends tweets when things come out of the oven! http://www.bakertweet.com/
Pamela Fox @pamelafox
Online Maps – Avoid “Red Dot Fever”
Usability tips for online maps – label dots
visited states for markers
categories / filtering / sidebars
clustering
Use Poly not points e.g. Search Auckland and you get one point, Auckland isn’t a point!
If you need something to click add a centroid marker
Data Resources: shapeWiki, DynGeometry
Use custom markers (but include a legend!)

Dan Rubin @danrubin
Use the cpu power in our brain
Instinct overrides learning – eg door with handles on both side, people will pull over and over even if it says push.

“The real world is a series of highlights and gradients”
If your interface requires instructions, redesign it!
eg – Mint.com – subtle use of design to make people instinctively know what to do.
Attractive things work better – Donald Normal
“We all want the sexy car – we fool ourselves into believing its better”
Photography – Very easy way to add to a site – everything else builds around it.
Stop searching online for textures, make use of your scanner and the real world textures around you – Use Photoshop Offset Filter and clean up the image to make repeating textures.
Look around you, get away from the computer screen and use what is around you for inspiration.

As usual the Twitter back channel in effect at #web09;
Good use of Twitter by @jarred to answer questions live during his session.
Adobe @ryanstewart was able to explain his jokes post presentation!

Web09 was a great conference and the Adobe team and I enjoyed being there!

I’m really pumped! Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, lead by Adobe and supported by technology leaders such as Cisco, Intel, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba etc and content providers like MTV, NBC, BBC and more.

We drag around our devices with us every day, and these little things (media players, mobile phones etc) come out partying with us, sit in airport terminals with us, even sit at a lonely dinner table with us when travelling. So why is the experience on these devices not as good as the heavy laptops we carry around?

The good news is that its about to change. Adobe is lifting the restrictions on the use of the SWF & FLV file formats. This means that device manufacturers can easily embed Flash content designed by designers, not just coded by developers into their new products, leading to a great user experience!

We’ve seen some great examples of whats possible already.. iRiver have used Flash as the UI for their media players for some time, Flash comes with both the Sony PSP & PS3, and some mobile manufacturers are building the entire phone UI in Flash!

This is really big and I’m sure we’ll be talking about this for some time!

SmallWorlds beta was opened up today and I was lucky enough to get an invite.

Mitch Olson and the rest of the guys over in Auckland, NZ have been flat out creating what I believe to be the best online interactive experience currently on the web.

So what is SmallWorlds? The best i can do to describe it is to think of a cross between “The Sims” and FaceBook. You create an avatar, get some credits and start looking around. Second Life also comes to mind, but unlike Second Life, you can be logged in and interacting with people in seconds thanks to the fact that SmallWorlds only requires Adobe’s Flash Player.

Interacting is fun, you can play pool with others, listen to music, watch TV (YouTube clips), look at art hanging on the wall (Flicker) and more.

It’s currently in beta but still loads of fun. If you want an invite, send me an email.

I should have done this a long time ago, but i finally managed to get my iPod hooked up to my Mazda 3 SP3 factory stereo and it is fantastic. Great sound, great integration with steering wheel controls etc, the iPod is charged while driving and icing on the cake is the fact that the song names come up on the dash!!

After countless hours scouring the internet, i came across a company call Integrated Solutions on eBay and many other forums. They sell a unit called “Axxess” with various cables etc to integrate. Thanks to recommendations and Flickr photo tutorial from JBHenry I decided to give this unit a go.

Well after ordering on eBay and delivery with a few days, it took me less than an hour to install everything, from opening the boxes to sitting in the car listening to music. I took my own set of photos which you can also see here.

All up i’m very happy and will be able to listen to a whole lot more tunes without messing with CDs, and more Podcasts without having to mess with stupid noisy FM transmitters.

Came  across this little gem (thanks to Binusha for the link!). Tutorom offer loads of free lessons on everything from Adobe Flex 2, to Oracle, JavaScript, Adobe PhotoShop CS2 and more, and thats just the tech related topics ( you can learn how to drive a manual car!)

Definitely worth taking a look at. www.tutorom.com

Yes its raining, but don’t go home, don’t go shopping.. if you’ve registered make sure you join us tonight at WebJam

Jam Bar, Level 4, Hotel CBD, York St, Sydney.