BezBlog

After fixing my pinout mixup from the previous version, my Simple USB LED Controller (SULC) v0.2 works! Check out Part 1 and Part 1.5 for a bit more background on SULC.  In short, it's a ridiculously simple way to control high-power RGB LEDs from a computer.  You can send commands like "red, blue" or "all green" to control the LEDs, rather than implementing some complex protocol. The build process for this version was the same as my first prototype - using a laser-cut solder paste stencil and "frying pan" reflow soldering - so I don't have any new pictures to show of that.  However, I do have pictures and video of the new version in action: (I ran out of TLC5940s, so I decided to make this board with just 2 of them rather than waiting for a shipment to arrive - notice the missing IC in the top right corner) The video gives a brief overview and shows just how easy it is to control high-power LEDs with SULC: The full de...

I just got some PCBs in the mail!  These are the PCBs I designed for Next Make's Campus Preview Weekend (CPW) event later this April.  CPW is when all the MIT admitted students are invited to come check out the campus and see what life at MIT is like.  Generally all the student groups on campus throw fun events for the prefrosh - and Next Make is no exception! This year, prospective students of the class of 2016 will be able to solder up and take home a cute USB gadget at the Next Make event: The board plugs into a usb port and pretends to be a usb keyboard - it can then "type" a message into the computer it's plugged into, without having to install any drivers (inspired by an Instructable  USB PCB business card  that types out a guy's resume).  You can program any message you want into it (up to about 1000 characters).  Here's a video of it in action: The board is based on the ATTiny45 with  V-USB  (software USB...

I've been working on a simple usb led controller  (read  Part 1 ), but unfortunately ran into a bit a of snag - it turns out that the surface-mount package of the TLC5940 has different pin assignments than the through-hole version I've used before - even though it has the same number of pins in the same physical arrangement, the pin assignments are shifted over by 7 pins, which means my original PCB designs don't work.  Lesson learned: double check the datasheet!  I've updated the PCB design and sent off v0.2 to have new PCBs made, so now I just have to wait a few weeks for them to arrive. In the meantime though, I was able to get the LUFA usb library up and running, port the Arduino TLC5940 library to work on the ATMega32U2, and get a good portion of the led controlling firmware written.  In order to test this out, I programmed the controller board I built, but had to use led drivers on a separate breadboard.  It's ugly, but it works: The goal o...

Back when Next Make built the Next House Party Lighting System , we designed the LED controllers to connect on a shared RS-485 network over CAT5 cable.  This was a great solution for that system since the controllers were far apart (RS-485 uses differential signaling so it's pretty robust over longer distances), and we had 24 separate controllers to connect so we wanted to be able to chain them together on a single network. But if you wanted to set up a smaller scale LED system with just 1 or 2 sets of LEDs, those controllers were a bit overkill - you needed a separate USB->RS-485 converter and then had to string them together with CAT5.  So I set out to design a simpler high power LED controller that had a USB port directly on it (I'm calling it  SULC - the Simple USB LED Controller ). Instead of using an FTDI (USB->serial converter IC) along with a microcontroller, I wanted to try out the ATMega8/16/32U2 family of AVRs which has USB support built-in.  Un...

The Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 is pretty great, but the "Zoom" slider in the middle never seemed very useful to me - how often do I need to zoom in or out? I scroll much more often than I need to zoom, so it would be nice to remap to scroll instead.   Although Microsoft's control panel lets you remap the special function keys, it doesn't let you change the Zoom slider function. Luckily for Windows users there's a fairly simple xml file that you can edit to change the mapping (and there are plenty of explanations: SuperUser , Josh Highland , Joel Bennett , etc). Unfortunately, the "commands.xml" config file doesn't exist on Mac OS X. Instead, there's a binary file for the configuration, which makes it tough to modify: /Users/YOUR_NAME/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.keyboard.pref After a bit of reverse-engineering, I was able to remap the Zoom slider to the UP and DOWN keys (sadly, using the SCROLL mapping doesn't auto-repeat...

This past January I organized and ran MIT's 26th annual 6.270 Autonomous Lego Robotics Competition . Basically groups of 2 or 3 students are given a box with Lego, a microcontroller, motors, and sensors, and they have just 3 weeks to put together and program a fully autonomous robot to compete in a game. Here's the first part of the final competition video: MIT Tech TV Part 2 is on MIT TechTV This year's game was about capturing territories and gathering resources, on a hexagonal playing field: The organizing team with the playing field Robots had to spin a gearbox to capture a territory: Then they could collect ping pong balls by pulling a lever: And then dump them on their half of the center: One of the robots actually shot the ping pong balls into the center: But the really cool part is that 6.270 is entirely student-run - the organizing team that I led had about 8 core members that took care of everything from ordering Lego, motors, and electronics, to developing lectu...