I recently bought and arduino and have been having a LOT of fun with it...
Last night, actually, I was the most giddy I think I have been in YEARS...
I stole two servos out of a remote control plane from my childhood, and connected them to one another so that I could point a stick at almost any point...(think like what an observatory does...the end of my servo was the telescope)...
Anyhow (this is going to be a birthday present for my friend that introduced me to this)...I connected an LED to the end of a stick that was connected to one of the servos, then wrote some code to spell out words with it in the air...
Set a camera in front of it, turn the lights out, expose for about 30 seconds (or however long the drawing takes) and get a word...totally stupid, totally pointless and TOTALLY fun...
For this project I needed:
2 servos (any servos will pretty much work...you can buy them at your local hobby shop)
1 LED
some wire.
Some Spaghetti sticks (I used these to make an "arm" for the LED).
The birthday present is going to be a program that spells out "Happy Birthday" in the air, as well as the source code for it :).
Honestly, after the servo went back to its "home" position, and shut off the LED, it took about 10 seconds for the photo to process. Seeing the photo come onto the screen with my message in it was AMAZING.
Seriously, if you're even thinking about buying one of these, JUST DO IT! Playing with this thing feels like when I first started to code way back when...
Last night, actually, I was the most giddy I think I have been in YEARS...
I stole two servos out of a remote control plane from my childhood, and connected them to one another so that I could point a stick at almost any point...(think like what an observatory does...the end of my servo was the telescope)...
Anyhow (this is going to be a birthday present for my friend that introduced me to this)...I connected an LED to the end of a stick that was connected to one of the servos, then wrote some code to spell out words with it in the air...
Set a camera in front of it, turn the lights out, expose for about 30 seconds (or however long the drawing takes) and get a word...totally stupid, totally pointless and TOTALLY fun...
For this project I needed:
2 servos (any servos will pretty much work...you can buy them at your local hobby shop)
1 LED
some wire.
Some Spaghetti sticks (I used these to make an "arm" for the LED).
The birthday present is going to be a program that spells out "Happy Birthday" in the air, as well as the source code for it :).
Honestly, after the servo went back to its "home" position, and shut off the LED, it took about 10 seconds for the photo to process. Seeing the photo come onto the screen with my message in it was AMAZING.
Seriously, if you're even thinking about buying one of these, JUST DO IT! Playing with this thing feels like when I first started to code way back when...