Gepatto Blog » Arduino

Arduino a compass, serialproxy and Unity3d

patrick — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:56:52 +0000

I have been trying to connect my arduino to Unity3d 2.6 on both OSX and Windows.
Unfortunately the implementation of the SerialPort in the version of mono that Unity is using is broken on OSX.
I did have succes on windows, once I found out that the mono-serialport doesn’t support events and therefore is synchronous!!
The best way would be to use a native plugin, but that would mean you would have to use the Non-Free Pro version of Unity.
So.. In comes Tinkerproxy and Sockets. Using a socket to relay the serial-data also means that you don’t need Unity to be on the same machine as the arduino.
I even managed to read the sensor data directly from an arduino with an ethernet shield!

So what happens if take a compass module and tie it to the y-rotation of a camera..
well here is a video of me sitting on a desk chair with my laptop and the compass on an seeeduino.
[ sometimes macbook interferes with the compass! especially when I placed the compass over the HD ]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgYFstG9JkY

Flash now talking to breadboard prototype

patrick — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:21:04 +0000

The Guys from Merapi pointed me towards their AS3-only branch on SVN.
It took me while the get my test running, mainly because I forgot to use the registerClassAlias function in flash, which ended up in Java not recognizing my messages.

After a succesful test, I quickly hacked a swf-module that could be loaded into version 2 of the Ukulele Chord Finder ( version 1 can be found at http://www.ukulele.nl ) that we have under development.
So now we can talk to Merapi Straight from the browser.

I also managed to turn the Java Side of the Merapi-Bridge into a Mac application.
So here’s a video of the things I made.

[See post to watch Flash video]

First breadboard prototype finished

patrick — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 09:18:23 +0000

Well, it took a lot of wires but here’s the first breadboard prototype:

The Arduino with Protoshield and Breadboard with ledmatrix

On the left we have an Arduino Decimila with a prototypeshield on top.
The prototypeshield contains a max7221 ic 2 capacitors and a resistor.
The breadboard contains 64 leds in a 8×8 matrix.
I was aiming for a 4×16 setup, but there was no way I could get the wiring done on one 1 breadboard.

The 8×8 ledmatrix

So far this is just a worked out example of : http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/MAX72XXHardware

The Arduino is now running a simple loop.
Next stop is writing an intelligent layer like firmata.
So more to come soon……

[See post to watch Flash video]