Posts in Category: Android
Laser Engraver
So I originally started with some old printer parts and had a small working laser engraver. I am using some drawer rails as the X axis and now I’ve got some 3/8 rods for the Y axis. I happen to have the v-slotted bearings that a friend gave me a while ago which work great as the carriage.
I ended up purchasing 4 of the precision threaded rods as the regular threaded rods you buy at the hardware store have a bit of a dead zone to them (found that out the hard way). I originally had my X axis using a single belt…then went to two motors with 2 belts…and finally swapped them over to using the precision rods. Now it is pretty solid, especially for using drawer rails to hold it together. =)
It’s all run by a raspberry pi running OctoPi and then an arduino uno with the cnc hat.
I originally had my Y axis using two 3/8 rods with a 3d printed carriage that slid onto the rods…but this proved too stiff and the laser would show a slight warping when the Y axis would change directions. I then swapped it to the v-slotted bearings and a wooded rig as the carriage. This slid much easier and required no real torque from the motor at all to move around.
My next step with this is to rig the carriage to hold my dremel and act as a sort of mini-cnc…and ultimately handle doing circuit boards!
Battery upgrade for Parrot Rolling Spider!
So I was able to snag one of the little Rolling Spider qu
ads off a guy on Craigslist for $25! Figured something would be wrong and sure enough, the battery was junk. So I tried to save the battery…recharging lipos that are below 3.3v is risky sometimes but this seemed to charge fine once I got it up to 3.3.
Once I got it charged it powered on fine and I was able to take it for a quick flight! Buuutt…the battery lasted like 15 seconds. I was able to grab a quick picture during flight though!
So…I decided to see if I would figure out what the battery leads do to potentially wire up a better battery to it. You can take off the “face” of the spider and then unscrew the bottom piece. Getting the board out, you have to bend the LED “eyes” up a little so be 
careful when doing that. I was able to get the board out and solder some wires on to the “inside” leads. Looks like the lead closest to the side (if you’re looking from the top and the “eyes” facing up, it would be the right) is the positive and the other 2 
seems to be ground (-). I wired all 3 just in case. It was a pain as I’m not very good at soldering and ended up accidentally putting a glob of solder connecting both negative leads. I had to use my dremel and cut it out. I’m amazed I didn’t cut something else by accident.
Once I got the wires done, I found that I just use the positive and the opposing ground (not the middle) is all it needs to power on! All I had were 2 cell lipos so I rigged it to the top. Needless to say, it was too heavy but it worked!!! Pretty excited! Â Looks like I’ll be purchasing some 1s lipos in the near future. =)
Tessel.io
So I was able to get my hands on a tessel board and it has been a lot of fun! I’ve been toying with simple servo controls all the way to the Bluetooth Low Energy module (learning that from scratch was interesting!).
Using the servos I made a little arm to pick things up…but since it is made out of balsa wood, it is pretty flimsy.
I was able to get my hands on a stepper motor and get that working with the tessel so ideally I’ll keep going the same route to have the “arm” move up and down a track knowing it’s position as it goes. Maybe even have the arm be able to do a full 360 twist as well to be able to work on both sides of the track. Check out a video of what I have so far here.
The cool thing about the tessel is it’s native language is javascript so most developers coming from a web background can easily get to tinkering with hardware/electronics with it!
Will be exciting to see what others pull off with this thing!
Exchange Rules
New to the Google Play Store (for Android) and Windows Phone Marketplace (for Windows Phone), Exchange Rules lets you set custom email notifications for your Android phone based on criteria of who the email is from or on the subject of the email. Currently, this is only compatible for Microsoft Exchange accounts.
So you’re like me, you have a lot of emails coming in all day long for work so you don’t want your phone making noise each time a new email comes in. BUT, you do want to know if you get an email from your boss!