Woah hey I haven’t updated since last year. Well here’s a post. Here’s some backstory behind this one: Last time SparkFun had a Free Day, I won $100 after entering a ton of Captchas for several hours and getting lucky. One of the things I spent it on was continuous-rotation servos because I felt like trying to make a robot of some sort. I once tried modifying some regular servos to be continuous-rotation but I pretty much just ruined them, so I don’t want to try doing that again.
In any case, here’s a quick attempt at a simple robot that just moves forward slowly. The wheels were made from parts of a VHS case which were then taped to the servos. I guess the main issue is that it’s USB-powered so it has a really limited range. I tried using a 9V battery to power the Arduino but apparently that isn’t enough to power two servos (I could hear them clicking, but not moving), so I’ll need an extra power source specifically for the servos. The problem is my lack of battery holders.
Decided to put Puppy Linux on my Yunocchi USB, and decided it would be neat to have a matching wallpaper, so I made one. Puppy Linux is pretty awesome, everything runs fast. I also haven’t really used Linux before this, so it’s kind of fun being able to customize so many things just by editing some text files.
Just making this post since I haven’t made a post on here in a while.
Today I was bored and I remembered this video I saw awhile back that had a TF2 kill counter using an Arduino. I’ve been playing TF2 a lot recently (since it became free to play, I’ve been doing a lot better in comparison) so I figured it would be cool to implement something like that. I could’ve done it with LEDs or even GLCD screens (actually it might be cool to do something with the LoLShield), but since Cubey’s been sitting on my desk unused for the past few months, I thought I’d put him to use. Cubey gradually turns around as I get more kills, and after a certain point, he starts moving his ears. He turns back around in disappointment when I die, though.
I used Python to read the config.log file located in the tf folder (on mine, it’s “C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\your_username_here\team fortress 2\tf”). It reads the latest lines and looks for “A killed B” or “A suicided” and sends either a + to the Arduino when A kills someone or it sends a 0 when A is killed by someone else or kills themself. The Arduino then reads from the serial port one character at a time and makes the Cubey servos move accordingly.
Python and Arduino code are in the full post, and in this zip file.
Binary tree generator. No, not the data structure, but an artistic representation of a binary tree (edit: I have learned that this kind of thing is called an L-system). The swf can be found here or embedded in the full post. Click the button on the bottom left to randomly generate a new tree. I’ve also uploaded the source FLA file here. I didn’t really bother to optimize the code, so there are probably a lot of improvements that could be made.
Note: The FLA file is saved in Macromedia Flash Professional 8 format, with Actionscript 2.0. It’s a pretty old version of Flash, so it should be openable by any of the Adobe versions of Flash as well.
Made this short platformer game awhile ago. It is a game in which you shoot arrows at things. Previous versions of the game can be found here.
