JeremyBlum.com

Behold! My newest little project. This one isn’t as complicated as some of my other creations, but it’s still a pretty cool little device that I put together.  I made this as a project for my INFO4320 class at Cornell: “Intro to Rapid Prototyping and Physical Computing”.  The assignment was to use a multicolor LED to react to some kind of stimuli.  So, I figured I’d make my stimuli this very blog!  Using a combination of PHP code on this site, a python script, and an arduino, I’m able to monitor website visits, and the OS/Browser of people visiting in (nearly) real time.  As always, I’m making the source code and schematics available below via a creative commons license, so go nuts!   A video is worth about 116,987,432 words by my calculations, so watch the video below to see how it works!

I have also made some other mini projects for this class.  I’m posting videos of all assignments for this class on a separate youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/jeremyeblum.  I’ll be posting the more interesting ones (like this one), on my normal channel as well.  But if you wanna see everything I’m up to, go subscribe to that other channel!  I’ve started work with three other group members on our final project for this class.  It’s ambitious, but if we can get it to work, it’s gonna be really cool (Hopefully on par with the Nerf Sentry Gun from last year)!

READ ON TO LEARN HOW IT WORKS AND TO DOWNLOAD SOURCE CODE/SCHEMATICS

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If you don’t read hackaday already, you should be, because it’s probably the best blog around.  Anyways, they’ve recently featured my roboclaw on their website: go check it out!

Here’s some of my other stuff that’s been on Hackaday:
http://hackaday.com/2008/07/14/deepnote-guitar-hero-bot/
http://hackaday.com/2009/05/17/nerf-centry-gun-with-image-recognition/

This is a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for over a year now. A while back, a friend got me this robotic claw kit from thinkgeek, basically to make fun of my prosthetics research.  It’s simple enough…A wired controller is connected to the claw and has a few levers for eliciting movement from the arm’s various motors.  As you might expect, I got bored with picking up blocks rather quickly.  I instantly had the idea to pick up blocks remotely!  Oh what fun that would be!  To accomplish this I employed one of my favorite microcontrollers, the parallax propeller. Admittedly, the propeller is overkill for this project, but it’s what I happened to have on hand–It has 8 cores and I am only using one, but this is only v1 of the claw, and I hope to take better advantage of this chip in the future.  The propeller chip communicates with a small web server (also sold by parallax) via a serial connection.  I’ve even setup a network webcam, and embedded the feed in the control webpage, so I can easily control the claw from anywhere in the world!

Read on for pictures, source-code, a video, and a walk-through of the system!

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The nerf sentry gun was developed as a final project for Cornell University’s CS1114 Matlab Robotics class.  Jason Wright (www.jasonline.net) and I worked on the gun together, and were awarded “coolest final project”.

Check out the video of the gun in action, and see how we built it:

READ ON FOR PICTURES, SOURCE CODE, AND A COMPLETE FEATURE LIST

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