So it’s been over a year since I posted about that NERF turret! I’ve not been totally idle since but nothing’s really finished to a high enough standard to blog about. Instead, here’s a post of almost-finished projects, crushed dreams and lost hopes!
July 2010: I built this pretty firefly from some paperclips, LEDs and an ATtiny. It lights up when you hold it, and sleeps the rest of the time. When it lights up, though, it pulses pretty firefly patterns using an 8-bit pseudo-random shift register.
August 2010: Jon and I soldered up the first revision of SelWX, which took ages due to some bent pins on the STM32. Sadly we never got around to writing much code for it so while we got it pinging, that’s about it for r1. We’ll probably do an r2 fairly soon with easier hardware and try to get something working.
October 2010: I wanted to make my long coat light up, so I sewed 20 lillypad LEDs into it. It worked, but only very briefly before my power busses broke, and sadly I didn’t get any photos of it in action. I’ve got the parts to redo it for this winter season though =D
January 2011: Jon and I tried to make a small FM radio transmitter, but it didn’t work. We didn’t have much time to investigate why. I also made a nightlight out of epoxy and coloured dyes and LEDs and all that, but sadly don’t have any photos.
May 2011: I took apart this NERF gun to try and mod it to be fully electronically automatic, with a micro stepper motor mounted inside the clip and a small solenoid actuating the mechanism. Unfortunately the mounting hardware involved proved really complex, and a surprisingly amount of force was required to actuate, so nothing really came of this (but now I have some steppers, solenoids and drivers in my spare parts…)
June 2011: I made this breakout board for an ADF7012 radio to test out some new telemetry ideas for CU Spaceflight. It’s not working yet, but hopefully soon…
Anyway maybe now I’ll do some more hardware stuff and actually blog about it in time!