Hackfest!

Last night I attended a hackfest at Quick Left in downtown Boulder.  Teams were given SparkFun Inventor's Kits with an Arduino Uno starter board and some sensors and transducers with which to build projects during an evening of hacking fun.

A trio of web developers from New York and I formed a team, but they took off early to have a bite to eat and attend a tequila tasting, so I pressed along on my own.  We set out to build a system that would use a light sensor (eventually two light sensors) and a servo to track the position of a flashlight.

After about two hours of work, it was working!  See the video below.

I spent the last 45 minutes or so tweaking the code to smooth the motion of the servo and light sensors by adding hysteresis and a delay after writing a new position to the servo before re-starting the main loop (and re-reading the analog values from the light sensors).

With more time, there are a handful of straightforward improvements to be made:
- Add gain to track faster when the light is moving quickly.
- Build a more symmetrical light guide (something not pieced together with a slip of paper and scotch tape).
- Perform a more careful calibration of the light sensor circuits.
- Add some signal conditioning to the light sensors to take advantage of the full input range of the ADC (analog to digital converter) on the Arduino board.
- Refine the servo control to improve motion stability and device reliability.

Some of the other teams had a lot more software/application development background than I did, and put together some really neat projects.  I think my favorite was an R/C car that was driven by an Arduino that interprets text messages.  Anybody could send a text message with an 's', 'g', 'l', or 'r' (for stop, go, left, right) and make the car drive around.  I think they tied for 3rd place, but if the judging were based on positive audience reaction, they would have been the clear winners.

All in all, it was a fun evening and a nice introduction to the Arduino platform.  I anticipate some interesting projects in the future; making the Arduino work with other circuitry, sensors, and actuators to do interesting things.

If any of the other hackfest participants find their way to this blog, please do feel free to leave a comment or shoot me a message if you need some awesome hardware added to your next project.

New job

Last week I accepted a new job with a company in North Dakota and will be re-locating in October.  It will be a significant change from living in Boulder, but I'm ready to move on to the next chapter in my life (and career).  After a couple years of splitting my efforts between cycling and trying to be an engineer, I am going to put bike racing on the back burner and turn most of that effort towards engineering.

I'm going to keep this short, in hopes of getting back into the habit of posting regularly.  The idea is to keep posts shorter but more frequent.

Before heading to North Dakota, I will make a trip to California to compete in the 2012 paralympic track cycling national championships as a tandem pilot for a visually impaired cyclist from North Carolina.  We will compete in the 4km pursuit and 1km time trial.

After having a later start to track riding this year compared to previous years, I took a while getting my track legs going, but am feeling pretty good now.

In the tradition of including a picture or two with each post, here are a pair of wildlife pictures I took in the last week or so:

The neighbor's cat is totally relaxed, even in the presence of three deer (there was one standing to my left when I took this picture) and a nerd.

I rescued these raccoons from the dumpster a week ago last night.  They had climbed in looking for food but then couldn't climb out.