OctARM - Octopus inspired robot.

OctARM can pick up things like octopus, it is awesome. (it looks like elephant to me more), check it out:

Robotic Vibraphone playing MIDI file.

I always want to build a robot that play MIDI on real instrument. Recently, I discovered the "Meet Marv" project is what I want. Marv is a MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone, which can play MIDI file, it is used for future research on musical automation (cool!).


Check out the demo here:


Link:
http://www.robovibes.com/

My Geeky Valentines' Day gift for her.

Just want to share with you all about my latest work for the Valentines'Day 2010. This year, I would like to try something new, I made a church & wedding model for her. I get all the components or models from tomytec, a japanese company made 1:150 scale plastic model like house, church, car etc. I bought a church, tree, flowers and also people models, and start to arrange them in place. I found some photographs of church online, so the arrangement should look real. Most importantly, I added LEDs inside the church, with the USB power +5V, the model look even better at night:) Lets take a look of the photo & video. "Happy Valentines Day" all of you!

Geeky Valentine's Gift for Her

Valentines' day is coming, since you are reading my blog, I am sure that you are geek like me:) One project caught my attention recently, it is easy to make one yourself especially the deadline is coming! The project is LED people, 2 LEDs blink when touching each other, sounds fun. Check the demo video here:


and the schematic and photos:
http://www.cibomahto.com/2008/02/thing-a-day-day-13-led-people/

Free circuit simulator.

When I was still in the University learning basic electronics and circuit designs, we have to do many calculations on paper. It is hard to imagine how the current flow in the reality. Nowadays, there is a good simulator online which is free and powerful, it is pretty promising to me. You can take a look here: http://www.falstad.com/circuit/


via http://www.scienceprog.com/free-fast-and-useful-java-based-circuit-simulator/

JTAG pinout in a single page

JTAG exists in many processors based on ARM and MIPS core. It is useful for debugging and writing flash.

There are different headers for various chip vendors, I found a good page showing a wide ranges of JTAG header pinouts:

http://jtagcables.com/jtag-pinout

Also, there is a free, powerful JTAG tool for Windows & Linux called "Openocd". It supports ARM7 (ARM7TDMI and ARM720t), ARM9 (ARM920T, ARM922T, ARM926EJ–S, ARM966E–S), XScale (PXA25x, IXP42x) and Cortex-M3 (Stellaris LM3 and ST STM32). You can use it with different JTAG dongles as well. Definitely nice to try it out.

Pyxis OS for Arduino.

Instead flashing new program to your arduino internal flash storage, you can now copy the application binary to the SD card and run on the arduino. With the help of Pyxis OS, you will turn your arduino to be a PDA like system. You can have advanced graphics APIs and also run applications from SD card. The biggest problem is that you only allow to write the application in the Pyxis OS specific programming language:( But it is still cool.



In their website, they provide a free PFAT implementation for turning the EEPROM to a file system in AVR. it is free:)

Link:
http://www.skewworks.com/