arduino

Not much to say here, this is the final result of my latest attempt. Took about 20 days or so. I've still got the camera in place, and I'm going to leave it shooting until that bloom falls off.

The results are in! (well, offloaded from the camera anyway.) This one turned out much better. Much more consistent.

there's a bit of an unfortunate shift at the end where the bloom we really want to see gets a bit cut off, but the movement is really cool!

Partial results are in! They more or less suck.. ; )

I initially set this system up and had it shoot in our living room, on a wobbley tv tray with no flash. (I figured my wife wouldn't be happy about a clamped down monstrosity and a flash going off in the dark every 30 minutes.. turns out, she's fine with it!)

So, anyway.. that's the first draft. I edited out about 80% of the frames that were just a black square..

The next one (with flash) should be much better. Though it'll be toward the end of this bugger blooming. There will be many more of these.. this is just a trial run.

I've been building this thing for quite some time. For the last 2 nights or so, I spent some time finishing up version 1. It is now functional. (and has taken 23 or so pictures of my desk plant in the last couple hours)

Photos of the rig (with notes pointing out the parts) can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/abandc/sets/72157600201419395/

When I get the pics parsed into some useable video, I'll post it here. Today is pretty much a proof of concept day, then I'm going to find a way to position it, and light a plant such that I can get pics of Celeste's blooming Christmas cactus.

I created a basic model of the Arduino microcontroller board in Google Sketchup. Sketchup is a really handy tool. Once you learn to use it, you can model anything and everything with arbitrary accuracy. This model is accurate down to .01mm. (the resolution of my digital calipers)

It should be a handy thing for anyone looking to prototype something digitally before they go making parts.

I put together another video of what i've been doing with my dorky geektoys. This is a cool steppermotor/gear assembly i got out of an old dot-matrix printer. I originally assembled it all with a mess of 4 radio shack transistors, but then i found this tutorial (and discovered that nice clean transistor array chip) which made it simpler to work with.

argh... sorry I'm all sniffly in the video. It's cold in my garage. My video production skills still leave something to be desired.. oh.. and the word i was looking for was photodiode. Damned if i was going to go look it up and tape that thing again though.. ; )

so... there ya go.. that's motion.. now what the hell do I do with it? ; )

UPDATE:
Free bonus video with purchase!
How to run the arduino off of a 9.6v Makita battery!

I have to say, I'm pretty psyched about this idea. At 1.3 amp hours, I'm one step closer to some robotic fun.

It's an ambient orb style pulsating pig!

that's it... really. but i learned to read digital and analog pins, and how to write to the analog out pins, and before that the digital ones. Woot!