Posts

I have been researching various ways to build a radar for robotic projects. I already have a Garmin LIDAR Lite I had bought years ago, so LIDAR seems to be the best way to go. However, my research shows that there are several additional parts that are also required: A slip ring, to keep the rotating LIDAR module in connection with the rest of the robot Some kind of pulley mechanism to rotate the unit A stepper motor or a brushed motor for rotation In the case of a brushed motor, an encoder would be needed to calculate exact position Wide metal bearing of some sort A timing belt or similar for pulley I found several projects that show some level of success with this method: ...

ZoomBox is ready! I designed and printed the top part and fitted the arcade buttons in. I wanted the button icons to be extruded out, which presented a problem. If I extruded them, I couldn’t print the top part upside down. Eventually I decided to print without them and then printed them separately in black filament. Then used a white acrylic pencil to contour the icons. I am pretty happy with the result. ...

Despite my initial aversion to it, Autodesk Fusion 360 is truly an amazing tool. The combination of sketching on faces and timeline editing makes it incredibly powerful. Following the great Layer by Layer tutorials form Adafruit I designed a simple case for the ZoomBox. I was able to import the official DXF files from Arduino right into Fusion 360 and map the screw holes exactly. Surprisingly, there was no good information available on component heights. I had to manually measure them. For reference, the USB-A port is 12mm by 11mm and the power jack is 9mm by 11mm. They are respectively 9mm and 4mm inset from the edges of the board. These two drawings were also good references but they didn’t provide all the information I needed: ...

I had a very informative hacking session tonight and quite a few trips down rabbit holes. I decided to do a little side project: A couple of big hardware buttons that can control Zoom mute/unmute and screen share on/off states on my laptop. I spend most of my days on Zoom and it would be very handy. Easy, right? Well, it turns out that it’s not that easy. First thing I did was confirming that Zoom already had global hot keys for the controls I needed. Found them under Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts. Looked good. ...

Added some logic to the LED rainbow so it dims slowly over the course of the hour before turning off for the night, and same in the morning. With that, I call this project complete! Decided to add Bluetooth control to the LED Rainbow. Every once in a while we need to change the go to sleep and wake up times and M wants to be able to control the colours from her iPad. ...