Tag Archives: arduino

WiiChuck controlled RC car

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So I built a line following robot last year and it was cool, but it really just did its own thing and wasn’t very interactive. Fast forward to now and I finally got the stuff together to build my own WiiChuck controlled RC car. It was a lot of fun to make and I hope others are interested in trying out projects like this as well.

What you will need:

  • Arduino
  • Wii Nunchuck
  • old soap dish
  • WiiChuck adapter ($4 at sparkfun)
  • Rutgers Motorshield or equivalent

The code I created for the project is open source and can be found here

You will also need to download the WiiChuck library.

LOL Shield – Starting Things Easy

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While I was over at the Maker Faire the other week I finally decided to take my arduino work more seriously. With that in mind I bought the simplest most annoying shield ever found across the net. The LOL Shield, lol standing of course for, Lots of LEDs. It was a fun project for a Thursday night. I finished soldering all the connections in about 1.5 hours and it was up and running almost instantly.

I must say this project is not for the feeble handed, it takes a lot of patients to solder 126 LEDs, yes you heard right more LEDs then would be ever necessary for any project, but then again the 8x8x8 LED cube  requires 512.

So what do I do now… Well, since I’m done with this I guess I could start manually programming it to do cool animations, except you cant really do much with 126 pixels. So for now I guess I’ll just leave it with Conway’s game of life running and see the interesting patterns it creates.

One possible idea could be to hook an inferred sensor onto it and measure how often my Betta fish chase each other, since I really have nothing better to do with my time.

A test of the LOL Shields font capabilities can be seen below:

Embedded Systems: The arduino

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I first used the arduino last year in IEEE Robotics when we did a line following robot competition. Needless to say it went pretty well considering my small knowledge of C. However, the arduino makes programming a multi controller a piece of cake.

This year, I plan to take the arduino to a whole new level and combine a few of the things I have been learning in class to start building my own creations such as; a LCD Clock, LED Text display, and my biggest project, an 8x8x8 LED cube which can be used to display animations in 3d which will also look really freaking awesome.

Yes I know it will require 8^3 (512) LED’s, but I think it will be a really good learning experience and will also be a great show piece next to the fish tank in my room.

Created by agofi on instuctables.com

It’s actually really simple to make but putting 512 LED’s together will be extremely tedious. Basically you put the positive and negative terminals in a sort of plane that will allow the multi-controller to address each individual LED