library

48 Articles

ROS Turns Three

November 9, 2010 by 4 Comments

Turtles!

Since its first debut three years ago, ROS has been gaining some popularity with the robotics folks.  It’s behind the scenes of those impressive quadcopters you may remember from a while back.  ROS helps abstract the lower level functions of a robot by supplying lots of code for commonly used components (wiimote for example). Being an “operating system”  it comes with lots of nice features you would expect, like a package manager.  It’s open source and many of their projects are well documented making it easy get started.

Check out the video after the break to see it in action Continue reading “ROS Turns Three” →

Python Library For Emotiv EEG

September 13, 2010 by 23 Comments

Want to control things with your mind? The Emotiv EPOCH EEG is one of the best pieces of hardware you can get that is ready to be hacked into your project. Too bad the entry-level SDK will set you back $500. Or you can take advantage of [Cody Brocious’] work by using his Emotiv Python Library. He sniffed around the data coming in over the USB connection and discovered that it’s encrypted. With a bit of trickery he extracted the key and built the 128-aes decryption routine into his package. So far this just pulls raw data from the unit so it’s up to you to figure out how to properly filter the signals and differentiate which sensor corresponds to each data stream. But it’s a start, and hopefully it’ll lead to more mind controlled doo-dads.

Update: Adafruit Eagle Library, Now With Arduino

February 6, 2010 by 9 Comments

Adafruit Industries has just added an Arduino shield footprint to their EagleCAD library. If you don’t know, the Arduino headers use non-standard pin spacing. Learn to deal with it, there’s too many Arduino shields in production to have any hope for a change in the future. This footprint should make it a lot easier to design your own boards. If you use this package make sure you’re getting the library from their github, they’ve been adding parts regularly. Setting up version control will make sure you always have the latest libraries.

[Thanks pt]

Adafruit Eagle Library

January 21, 2010 by 15 Comments

We love it when a PCB comes out right the first time. We’re careful enough with our designs that if something is wrong it’s usually a footprint problem, like we picked the wrong package for the components. Adafruit is helping to make the design process easier by sharing their Eagle library. Like the Eagle library version control we saw earlier in the month, this library is housed on github making it easy to stay up-to-date. The library includes many components (switches, crystals, IC’s, etc.), and fixes some prolbem-footprints, like 0805 surface mount pads.

Javascript Drum Machine

November 17, 2008 by 14 Comments

js-909

[Cameron Adams] recently appeared on a panel about JavaScript libraries. He represented the hard working coder that still wrote everything from scratch. He wanted to make something mindblowing for the audience. He ended up creating the JS-909 drum machine entirely in javascript without relying on libraries or flash. While he makes no claims of compatibility, it certainly is a nice bit of kit.

[via Waxy]

Tiny Arduino Ethernet Board

October 17, 2008 by 15 Comments

[sgk] built this tiny ethernet board to be used with the Arduino. It’s based on a WIZnet W5100 chip. The chip handles all of the TCP/IP communication and you talk to it via SPI. It’s compatible with the standard Arduino ethernet library. [sgk] hand soldered these boards including the 80pin LQFP main chip. His next project is to put the AVR and W5100 all on the same board. It sounds like he’ll use components larger than 1005 though.