We are very pleased to announce that our Kickstarter for the Balanduino balancing robot has successfully been funded by $13,494 which we are very happy about.
We have just received stickers from our printing company and have decided to give a little bonus in form of a signed Balanduino post card. We will be shipping this post card and stickers to all of our backers who have pledged $10 or more, within next week.
Hello to all of our followers. This is just a short reminder that the Kickstarter of our Balancing robot, the Balanduino, is nearly finished.
We have already reached our goal of $10.000, but of course it would be great to get even more backers and pledges.
In the meanwhile we have recorded a new video of the robot with a GoPro mounted on the top.
I’m happy to announce that documentation is now available for all the libraries I have written for the USB Host Shield library.
The documentation is available at the following link: http://felis.github.com/USB_Host_Shield_2.0.
The documentation is generated using Doxygen which is a free documentation-generator based upon the header files in the source code.
For instance the following comment will end up looking like this in the documentation:
I hope this will be useful for people who is new to the USB host library or even people who just want a quick overview.
If you spot any typos or got any comments please let me know in the comments below.
In December last year we developed a small Bluetooth controlled RGB light strip for the christmas tree, to be controlled with your Android smartphone
The demonstration of the project and the smartphone control can be seen in the video below.
The main aspect of the project is to use an Arduino to parse incoming Serial commands to enable and set different effects for the attached RGB strip.
The code for the project, including the Arduino code and the Android application project, can be found on GitHub: AndroidControllableLights
Another interesting aspect of the project was to enable wireless update of the Arduino sketch, using the Bluetooth serial connection. Scroll down in this post if you are only interested in figuring out how this can be done. Read more…
This is a short announcement regarding the USB Host Shield from Circuits@Home, which we are now carrying in in our store.
By buying the official shield you will support the continous development of the library and get support from us!
The shield can be found and bought here: USB Host Shield 2.0 for Arduino.
The shield can be used with almost any kind of Arduino including the most popular Arduino Uno, Arduino Mega, Arduino Leonardo etc. If you are in doubt if your Arduino is supported please don’t hesitate to write a comment below.
You asked for it and here it is.
I finally got the time to implement support for Wireless Xbox 360 controllers to the USB Host Library. This is done via a Xbox 360 Wireless receiver that is normally intended for Windows computers.
The receiver supports up to four controllers internally, so it was fairly easy to implement it.
Actually I havn’t tested the library with more than one controller, but if somebody out there could confirm if it’s working or not, with more than one controller, I would really appreciate it!
Thanks to Tim, multiple controllers is now confirmed to work! Read more…
We at TKJ Electronics have just received a big bunch of inexpensive 2×16 Alphanumeric character display with a built in HD44780 controller, making it easy compatible with the Arduino or any other microcontroller.
We all know that it has been quite a while since we have written any posts on the blog and we apologize to all our readers.
Before telling more about the project and the blog post finally to come I would like to explain the reason for the big delay.
As TKJ Electronics has been evolving quite a bit over the past year we have been provided with a still increasing amount of consultancy work.
This includes everything from PCB Layout, Arduino software development, Robot platform development, ARM processor units and FPGA solutions. Read more…
This board features their new STM32F3 microprocessor with a Cortex-M4 core running up to 144MHz together with an FPU and a DSP that was announced back in June.
STM32 F3 Discovery Kit
The exciting news about this upcoming board is the on board features as the board will contain a 3-axis gyroscope (L3GD20) and a 6-axis e-compass consisting of a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis magnetometer (LSM303DLHC).
As the board is supposed to be priced around $10 this will make an extremely low cost AHRS system with plenty of processing power to do the DCM math algorithm together with PID loops and other tasks.
I have for a long time been interrested in Kalman filers and how they work, I also used a Kalman filter for my Balancing robot, but I never explained how it actually was implemented. Actually I had never taken the time to sit down with a pen and a piece of paper and try to do the math by myself, so I actually did not know how it was implemented.
It turned out to be a good thing, as I actually discovered a mistake in the original code, but I will get back to that later.
I actually wrote about the Kalman filter as my master assignment in high school back in December 2011. But I only used the Kalman filter to calculate the true voltage of a DC signal modulated by known Gaussian white noise. My assignment can be found in the following zip file: http://www.tkjelectronics.dk/uploads/Kalman_SRP.zip. It is in danish, but you can properly use google translate to translate some of it. If you got any specific questions regarding the assignment, then ask in the comments below.
Okay, but back to the subject. As I sad I had never taken the time to sit down and do the math regarding the Kalman filter based on an accelerometer and a gyroscope. It was not as hard as I expected, but I must confess that I still have not studied the deeper theory behind, on why it actually works. But for me, and most people out there, I am more interrested in implementing the filter, than in the deeper theory behind and why the equations works. Read more…
