Tinker it now!

While I’m testing the new Arduino bluetooth board I’m also building some examples to explore the different possibilities that it offers. I’ve started by reading a sensor and sending it to a mobile phone and now i’ve tried something less abstract. I’ve got a cheap (14.95 EUR) Ikea Fado lamp and hooked it up to an Arduino BT board then I wrote a simple piece of code that would change the brightness of an LED depending on a message coming from the bluetooth interface. Then i started reading Jurgen Scheible’s tutorial on how to write python programs for the Nokia Series 60. After a couple of days of hacking I have the app up and running.

Basically you can browse for all the bluetooth devices in the area and select the lamp you want to control then you can turn it on and off from a menu. Once it has been mapped you don’t need to browse it again. next step the colour….

Action shots coming soon. In the rest of the post you can read some more about how i built it.
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I’ve split the post in two parts not to annoy people with the story of how I got here but I needed to build myself an ISP programmer and I only had arduino boards lying around so I started searching. I have learned a few things from Guido Socher’s very informative website and I found his avrusb500.

Version 1.5 worked magically with a modified arduino using a 3.6MHz crystal

Then I set about modifying the code to make it run with 16MHz the standard Arduino. The code is not designed to run on different clock speeds so it needs to be changed in various places

I have now a version that works, it needs to be tested more because I am not so sure of the timings but try it out.
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Two weeks ago, when I was in germany, I had to complete the test of the new bluetooth boards and I was clearly on a rush to get stuff done. In these precise moments is when big fuckups happen… so this is,partly,  a lesson on how NOT to do things…

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So the workshop is done. I was with Alessandro at Nextlab. They are a bunch of great people. Adam and Akos were there so it was all one big family.
Gabor invited us to present at Dorkbot Budapest. I gave a presentation about Arduino.

I’m in budapest for Dorkbot and to run a workshop with the great Adam Somlai-Fisher.

Apart form the usual boring phycomp stuff sunday night me and alessandro will cook for the magyars some real italian food. He produced the guide to the perfect italian lasagne instructables style (in 56 steps!).

le Lasagne

it’s in italian but the images are very eloquent