(see the project description for an introduction)
With the components in hand, I ready to build the prototype. All this prototype needs to do to be considered a success is take input from the accelerometer and rotate the servomotor (on which the webcam will eventually be mounted). I've broken the project down into a several miniprojects:
- easy press-button-to-turn-on-LED demo to familiarize myself with Arduino,
- reading the accelerometer's output onto my computer,
- and turning the servo clockwise/counterclockwise by pushing a button.
Hopefully I can do these things this weekend. The Arduino "platform" is so well put together I'm optimistic this will go quickly. Mal sehen.
I'm setting up an Subversion repository to hold all the code for the project. My hope is that at the end of the project I'll be able to share not only the code, but the history of commits as well.
(see the project description to make sense of this)
So I settled on the materials for the prototype. They include:
- Arduino Starter Pack [link]
- An accelerometer [link]
- Continuous motion servo [link]
- Basic Webcam, Logitech
And I located a few tutorials on getting started with Arduino:
For the next few month, I'll be posting about the Windows on Last Miles build. Most of the initial posts will document my crash course in Arduino hardware programming. Before I get started I wanted to make one acknowledgement. My motivation to do a public production blog has has its roots in the tremendous openness of the Processing community. Specifically, I found Daniel Shiffman's ITP Processing programming course, The Nature of Code, very helpful when I was first diving into Processing.
p.s. All code for the project will be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 3. All content (including this blog) will be released under a Creative Commons Attribution + Noncommercial + ShareAlike (by-nc-sa) License. Remind me if I forget to plaster something with a notice.