ellentriek #10

AVR Programming

| Wendy

A lot of physical computing set-ups work with an Atmel AVR Atmega chip, on which you flash – compile a little programme to interact with the physical reality and sensors. The most popular chips are the Atmel Atmega 168 – or 328. They are at theart of a microcontroller such as Arduino. But the chips themselves can be programmed and used as well. This is at a deeper level than programming Sketches onto your microcontroller!

In this Hackaday post the first step towards programming such a chip are set up.
In this Sparkfun tutorial they show you how to programme such a chip through Arduino.

If all goes as planned, we will try this at the next workshop! There is still time to register.

Kilo’s

| Wendy

One of the projects in this C, A & C – Ellentriek session will be about measuring force and good ways how to do that. After a chat with www.effiandamir.net we will probably look at scales and hacking them.

As a small preparation, I had a look for weighing scale hacks:

– Via Hackaday we are led to two projects.
— hacking and monitoring
— hacking scales and storing the info on an sc card

– The following links give ideas – but none of them are worked out in detail:
— http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=6052
— From the Arduino forum: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1221027834 & http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1231217442/15

Setting up your prototype

| Wendy

The first part of setting up your prototype is setting up your breadboard, connecting it to your microcontroller.
The ITP – the Interactive Telecommunications Program – part of NYU have some nice tutorial pages, for example showing how to set up your breadboard step by step. A lot of work goes into writing and documenting this..

Ellentriek #10

| David

ELLENTRIEK #10 : Ellentriek vs Code, Arts & Crafts

(a little bit) Beyond prototyping
(een kleine stap) Voorbij prototypes
(un petit pas) Au delà du prototypage

An advanced level workshop building Arduino-like constructions. When building a physical computing construction using a microcontroller, you are often confronted with breadboards, loose wires and headerpins.

Furthermore, an Arduino board itself is quite big. In this ‘Ellentriek vs. Code, Arts & Craft’ session, we want to try to go a step further using our expertise and ‘the little grey cells’.

While building and constructing we try to solve following questions:

How to ‘miniaturise’ an Arduino microcontroller?
How to program Arduino pro mini’s, freeduino nano’s, Ardweenies, …?
Which microcontroller suits you best?
How to build your own microcontroller?
How to translate your breadboard trial version to a pcb?
How to make pcb’s with a laserprinter?

On Saturday evening (7pm), Dirk Oosterbosch will give a presentation on Fritzing, a plateform and software for the documentation and sharing of prototypes, and the making of pcb layout for professional manufacturing.

Enrolling is advised through the imal website:

http://www.imal.org/en/activity/code-arts-crafts-vs-ellentriek

If you have specific questions/needs with regard to your project,
please let us know so we can prepare better.

The workshop will take place on the 6th & 7th of November 2010 from
2.00 pm till 6.00 pm at iMAL, 30-34 Quai des Charbonnages /
Koolmijnenkaai, 1080 Brussel.
This workshop is free & multilingual.

More info on www.pianofabriek.be or www.constantvzw.org or www.imal.org