Hacks
AVGA library on Arduino? Well…
by eimink on Jul.23, 2010, under Hacks
As some who hang out at #arduino@ircnet may remember, I was trying to generate VGA signals with Duemilanove board a while back. Then I stumbled across AVGA library by Jaromir Dvorak, and thought I could use it as a starting point. However, AVGA is designed to run on faster clock than Arduino and because of that some of the code needs to be modified, but not much. Ok, that doesn’t sound too bad, but another issue arises – AVGA has some assembly code put in to a .S file, and we all know that Arduino IDE doesn’t like them. There is a workaround for this – you could compile the assembler file by hand and add it as a object file to your build or you could do like I did, ditch the Arduino IDE along with the libraries and use avr-gcc to compile and avrdude to program. Of course you can use any AVR compatible toolchain here, the AVGA source has an example project for AVR Studio.
Hello world! AVGA on Arduino @ 16MHz
Controlling guitar effects processor with Arduino
by eimink on May.18, 2010, under Hacks
Today at work, during a coffee break of course, we were tossing around ideas about how to control guitar effects with accelerometer – like doing a whammy dive-bomb by doing a motion with guitar. Of course that would need the accelerometer to be built in to the instrument itself, but that’s not a problem. But where to find a suitable effects processor that a) has all necessary effects and b) has suitable input capabilities to accept external control of the effects? It turned out that I have a suitable device already!
Years ago I bought a Digitech RP50 effect processor for guitar. It’s not very good piece of gear but it has worked for me while practicing at home, and even during some home studio sessions. The nice thing about the RP50 is that it has a 6,3mm jack labeled Control In in the back. The user manual says that one can hook up a passive volume pedal to it and use it to control master volume, wah or whammy effects on the processor. Nice. Now, how can I emulate a passive volume pedal with Arduino?
New video from CarLab
by eimink on May.04, 2010, under Hacks
Last friday we were testing the Scirocco game controller again since there had been some progress in the software development. The steering delay is still a bit too big, about 300ms, and it seems that the bottleneck is in the message protocol with the gateway. If our upcoming optimizations are not enough for the delay reduction, we might need to bypass the gateway and tap directly into the powertrain bus, but then we lose the standard OBD-II interface. Check out the video after the jump, music for the video is provided by my good friend and his project Alpha Mind.
Volkswagen Scirocco 2009 as a game controller
by eimink on Apr.23, 2010, under Hacks
Ok, I know it’s been quiet around here for a while, but there’s a good reason for that. We’ve been quite busy at work this spring but now I’m allowed to release some inside info about one of our projects here at Kajaani University of Applied Sciences.
Last year, we got a standard VW Scirocco to our CarLab learning environment and in the beginning of this year, one of our trainees began his quest in figuring out the on-board diagnostics bus on that thing. Now we have a nice batch of information about the inner workings of OBD-II diagnostic bus on this car and we can read most of the ECUs on that car. One of our project engineers took our data acquisition software for trucks and modified it to work with the ‘rocco and yesterday I wrote some code to translate the car’s data to virtual joystick port. Today, we did a quick test with Rally Trophy. There’s a short video I took during the test after the break!
The car isn’t modified in any way, if you don’t count the addition of better sound system, there’s just a PC communicating with the car’s CANbus using OBD-II connector. The software translates incoming data from the car to virtual joystick port so it is possible to use any driving game that the PC is capable of running.
Epson 20×2 LCD
by eimink on Nov.23, 2009, under Hacks
While digging through my pile of hardware I found a LCD display made by Epson. I’ve salvaged it from somewhere ages ago and decided to see if it works. After a little bit of google fun I found enough info about it in order to get it running with my Arduino. The display is Epson EA-D20025AR and it is Hitachi HD44780 compatible, but there’s a catch. The connector is only 14 pins and it’s wired differently than you would first think. The small marker on that 14-pin connector that usually marks pin 1 is used to mark pin 2 in this case. I found out that there has been lots of questions about this particular display, so look no further – here’s the pinout for it:
Pinout for EA-D20025AR
