I recently soldered up a Boarduino from Adafruit Industries. Boarduino is simply an Arduino clone with a smaller form factor, designed to plug directly into a breadboard rather than giving you the female headers of the original. I thought I’d post a few photos of the process.

I really like the idea of the Boarduino, because I found I was doing almost all of my prototyping on a breadboard, and it seemed like I was always trying to figure out new and different ways to anchor the big Arduino down.

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image: Randomskk / cc by-sa

My Weller WES51 arrived today (w00t!), and in celebration, I thought I’d compile a list of my favorite soldering tutorials around the web.

How to Solder Correctly: An excellent starting point, thanks to a detailed seven-minute video and lots of close-up images.

Soldering Tips (PDF, 284K): Ten pages of required reading by Tom Hammond, with advice on tool selection, tip tinning, component positioning, and solder types. Lots of great diagrams for all of us right-brained learners.

Basic Soldering Guide: From Everyday Practical Electronics magazine, discusses tool selection, soldering methods, and — perhaps more importantly — de-soldering!

Soldering Basics: This detailed tutorial from SparkFun.com includes several short videos and lots of pictures, then lets you really get your hands dirty with step-by-step instructions on soldering up a basic RS232 shifter board kit.

Surface-Mount Soldering: More and more components and ICs are shrinking in size and doing away with through-hole pinouts. Just go easy on the coffee and you too can solder SMDs!

Basic SMD Soldering: A whopping 8-part solder-a-thon from SparkFun. Starts with tools, moves into surface-mount soldering techniques, then takes it up a notch with hot-air rework — for when you mess up.

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Inspired by Armadillo Aerospace and their laptop-controlled Pixel rocket, I decided to figure out how to use an Arduino module to achieve wireless remote control of a flight vehicle.

Along the path to development, an achievable intermediate goal would be something like a wireless RC rover with a video camera, monitored and controlled with a laptop and joystick on a WiFi network.

Step one in the process is simple joystick control of a servo over a USB connection. This project builds upon the process documented in “Arduino Serial Servo Control.” I welcome any comments or suggestions for improving or adapting this code.

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UGOBE is a small California robotics company that develops life-like animatronic creatures which they call “Life Forms.”

Their first creation is a cute, foot-long, green dinosaur-bot named Pleo. Pleo is an autonomous robot pet which incorporates a range of environment sensors, fluid mechanical movements, and a custom made “Life OS” AI operating system which allows all these elements to work together to simulate a living creature, reacting to and learning from its environment. Far out.

I really enjoyed these short videos, in which Caleb Chung, the toy-creation guru and UGOBE co-founder, gives a short tour of UGOBE Labs and talks about the development of Pleo. Looks like an awesome place to work!

Learn more about UGOBE at http://www.ugobe.com/.

One of the cool features of the Arduino platform is its ability to talk to other electronic devices using standard protocols. The big draw of physical computing, in my opinion, is the power it gives you to affect a limitless range of real-world objects with your PC, rather than just boring old monitors and printers.

This short tutorial will demonstrate one way to use Arduino to control a servo motor with a PC, using a USB cable and the Arduino’s serial library. It will in no way attempt to be an introduction to asynchronous serial communication, since such topics are better addressed elsewhere.

RC servos are comprised of a DC motor mechanically linked to a potentiometer. Pulse-width modulation (PWM) signals sent to the servo are translated into position commands by electronics inside the servo. When the servo is commanded to rotate, the DC motor is powered until the potentiometer reaches the value corresponding to the commanded position.

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The digital pins on the Arduino board can be set (with code) to output either HIGH (5V) or LOW (0V) — essentially ON or OFF. This is great for applications like blinking LEDs or activating relays.

But what if we wanted an output voltage somewhere in between 0V and 5V? This might be useful in applications like controlling the speed of a DC motor, or “dimming” an LED.

Well, the digital pins cannot directly produce an analog voltage; as we’ve said, they’re either HIGH or LOW. But it turns out we can simulate these “in-between” voltages using a technique called Pulse Width Modulation, or PWM.

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Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use microcontroller hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.

This short tutorial will guide you through the installation of the Arduino development environment on Ubuntu. These instructions reference arduino-0010 and have been tested on Feisty and Gutsy, both 32-bit and 64-bit installations. Thanks to this post on the Ubuntu Forums for the basic setup.

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MAKE Blog pointed me to this extremely cool project called a Wave Bubble. Essentially, this device is a portable, battery-powered radio frequency jammer, that will effectively disable cellphone and other RF communication (RFID, GPS, WiFi) within about a 2-meter radius of the user.

The design of the Wave Bubble comes from an MIT EE/CS masters thesis entitled “Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming our Personal Space,” in which the author describes the tradition of designing and using electronic devices as social commentary, known as “Design Noir.”

In addition to providing a detailed description and circuit diagrams for builing the Wave Bubble, the thesis is also rife with intelligent commentary on the psycho-social implications of using electronic products and is quite an enjoyable read.

From the thesis:

Manufacture and use of Wave Bubble is not exempt from FCC regulations. Anyone who decides to build and use it is performing an act of civil disobedience.

I love it! More information and some great photos are available at ladyada.net.

The simplest model rocket launch controller is the Estes Electron Beam, which is powered by four AA batteries and comes with 17 feet of launch wire and micro clips for attaching an Estes igniter. This system is adequate for launching small models with a single black powder motor. However, for firing a cluster of motors, or for igniting composites, a battery with more amps is required. In addition, spectators of high-power launches will need to be farther away from the launch pad than 17 feet. Unfortunately, electrical resistance in a long launch wire negates some of the advantages of using a larger battery. This problem can be solved by using a relay switch located near the launch pad, allowing the main battery to sit as close to the motor igniters as possible, while the launch controller remains at a safe distance.

The LC-3 Electronic Relay

The LC-3 is the third iteration of Principia’s electronic Launch Control system. It is based on a similar design by Eric Ohmit, but differs primarily in that the controller is powered independently of the main battery. The full system (pictured below, left) consists of a Control Box, a Relay Box, a pair of connector cables to the battery and the igniters, clip whips for multiple igniters, and 100 feet of RJ-11 (telephone) cord to connect the control box with the relay. [Click any photo to enlarge.]

The Control Box (pictured above, right) incorporates a key-operated arm/safe switch, which ensures that only the designated range safety officer (RSO) can initiate a launch. In addition, the control box provides a green LED continuity indication, which tells the operator that the circuit is complete and that the battery and igniters have been properly connected. Continuity is confirmed by flipping the red “Continuity” switch to the ‘on’ position and noting the illumination of the green LED. The LC-3 is then armed with the key switch, which causes the red “Arm” LED to light, and a high-pitched piezo buzzer will sound, indicating to all spectators that the rocket is ready to fire. When both the green “Continuity” LED and the red “Arm” LED are illuminated, the red “Launch” button will become active and also illuminate, and the relay can then be engaged by depressing the button. If all goes well, the motor will light and the rocket will launch.

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The Rocket-Mounted Video Camera project is nearing completion. Prior to the flight test phase, however, prudence demands that we run a few simulations to ensure that the rocket will have a safe and stable flight.

Initial Evaluation

Before beginning construction, we made a few ballpark calculations using (a free trial version of) RockSim, a Windows-based model rocket design tool, to verify that the addition of the camera wouldn’t adversely affect the model’s flight characteristics. To increase performance, we also swapped the specified D12 engine for a higher-impulse E9.

The images below show the results of this evaluation. You can see from the flight profile graph on the left that the predicted maximum altitude with the E9 motor is nearly 1000 feet. The stability diagram on the right shows the center of gravity (CG) position with the E9 engine, but without the addition of the video camera in the nose.

Although the CG was a little further aft than is desirable, we determined that the addition of the video camera and battery pack to the nose of the rocket would only improve stability, and that the E9 motor would help compensate for the loss of performance that the camera’s weight would create. Based on this preliminary analysis, we decided to go ahead with rocket construction, using an Estes E9-8 engine, the video PCB and a 2AAA battery pack.

Now that the build is complete and the camera is installed, we need to revisit these calculations with the actual mass measurements, to assure that we have an accurate picture of the flight profile before the first test flight.

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