ShieldStudio is celebrating International Programmers‘ day on January 7th.
Keep a lookout for our specials on January 7th for 1 day only.
Store is open again.
Store Closed!!!
Dec 4
To all our customers.
Please take note that our store is closed until approximately Dec 18th 2010 while we re-stock. To be notified when the store is up again please use the contact page and send us a note.
Thanks to all of you who ordered 4-digit shields during this sale event.
Please do not forget to let me know when you get your shield and also how you like it.
Thanks again.
Arduino : MAX 6953 scroll
Nov 10
4Digit Shield is getting smooth scrolling.
Below is smooth column scrolling on the 4-digit shield. This is not a native mode of the MAX6953 driver but one can use the “User Defined Font” character address space to fake smooth scrolling is some way.
Below is the default character scroll. It is quite use-able but not as smooth as column scrolling.
Column scroll vs. Character scroll:
Pros:
- Column scroll on 4 digits looks nicer than scrolling one character at a time.
Cons :
- Column scroll uses much more code space since we cannot use the built-in character map to generate user fonts.
- Column scroll is CPU intensive – shifting in column by column and the writing to user fonts is intensive. How much I don’t know yet, but it should use quite a bit more resources than character scroll.
November 2010
November has special meaning to me. I’ve heard via the grapevine that it may be special for you too.
- Keep watching twitter
- Bookmark ShieldStudio.com
Something fun:
Hermit crabs as pets. Yup it happens and it so happened that a few weeks ago my kids got two of these hermies as a gift – from a friend.
About 2 weeks later one died which of course had the whole house in mourning. It turns out that this dealer never told our friend that hermies are not as tough as they would want you to believe. After some research it turns out that these things need some control system managing the crabitat; perfect for Arduino and we set out to prototype a control system.
Specifications:
- Temperature control – between 72-80 F (22-27 C) below 72 F on a regular basis, the crabs will likely become weak, stressed and ill.
- Humidity – RH between 70% and 80%
- Light – Some sort of cycle between day/night.
- Anyone kow of more? Please drop me a message.
Prototype:
- Microcontroller – Arduino/Freeduino/Netduino or some duino.
- For temperature sensing : DS1820
- Humidity – It urns out that this is not so important right now. Having the crabitat closed as in the picture keeps humidity pretty constant at 80% We will have to look at something here in the future though.
- Heat & lights – Working with electricity is not for everyone so I opted for remote switching. For this X10 firecracker(CM17A) with X10 appliance module controlling the lights. I got this as a kit a while ago from X10 when it was on special for $9.99 or something in that order so keep looking for specials when they run.
Algorithm:
If temperature is below 72 then turn on the IR light until temperature hits 80. This will be expanded to include humidity soon.
Here is the prototype running for the past month with some happy crabs.
Too many wires in this system for now. It will be cut back as soon as the remote sensing of humidity and temperature is complete.
If you are interested in something like this or have ideas for improvement then please let me know via the contact page and I will keep you updated about happenings on this project.
Having fun this weekend using 4-digit shield.
I just purchased a new aero garden and decided to see if the 4-digit shield will run off these lights with a small solar panel.
The $10 panel came from ebay and includes a little lithium battery.
The spec for the panel says:
- Solar energy board: 5.5V/80mA
- High capacity build in polymer battery: 1350mAH
- Output voltage: 5.5V
- Output current: 1000mA
- Dimension: 93×44×10(mm)
Turns out that the Arduino runs just fine driving the 4-digit shield and reading temperature from a DS1820 sensor. Depending on how this thing runs one may have to put the micro to sleep to save some power or perhaps do some other tricks.
4-digit Shield and Netduino
Sep 25
Great news for .NET developers. They guys over at Secret Labs have tested Netduino with the ShieldStudio 4-digit shield and verified compatibility. I’ve posted some sample Netduino code on how to drive the 4-digit shield with a Netduino board.
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