Project Logs

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• Finally a board

  Emil J • 10/05/2014 at 19:08 • 0 comments

  So the piece of scrap copper clad board I drew traces on didn't turn out good at all - when I started scrubbing it with the chloride, the traces smudged away! I relally didn't know that scrubbing it off makes it easier only for toner transfer made PCBs. Nevermind, grabbed myself a protoboard and soldered a few wires to the module I sticked to the border with some tape. Also I made a basic voltage regulator with three 10k resistors so the CC2540 does not get fried from the RX again. Heh. Fried T-Rex.

• So we got another BT module!

  Emil J • 10/02/2014 at 18:45 • 0 comments

  Yay for that! It's CC2540 based as well, but the unpopulated board pins are so tiny! I tried making an adapter board for it with the classic - laser printer, magazine paper, iron it on, peel off, dissolve excess copper. Since the spaces between individual pins are only 0,47 mm wide so that was quite unsuccesful - they sort of merged. Laser toner is just plastic you melt on the copper so no wonder. Order a good prototyping PCB? Not my thing. I have drawn the traces to pins we need (GND, VCC, TX, RX, RST) by hand with aan alcohol based pen. Aw yeah, old school. I shall etch and solder and be back with an update with pictures , hopefully we finally get to actually test it all with the arduino mini and the briliant code to build on from this series:

  Thanks [WaiHoYan]!
  In the future I'm thinking once we have a proper working board to parse data to android, we could design a holder under the pistol barrel and 3d-print it in the nearest hackerspace brmlab.cz. Balance is vital. Give this a skull or follow for more updates!

• Guess who messed up?

  Emil J • 09/19/2014 at 12:56 • 0 comments

  So yeah, I connected the 3.3V Rx on the BT module to the Arduino's 5V Tx. Well, another one coming in a few days.

• Deadline stuff:

  Emil J • 08/20/2014 at 22:31 • 0 comments

  I'm going to tell you a story of procrastination and bad timing. When [Anna Dedova] had the idea of building this device, I was on a German language course. Then I was with my family in Switzerland. Then for a week at my ouncle's house, doing DIY stuff, learning C and whatnot. Then is now - I had about four days to start writing stuff up and, being a procrastinator, am writing this just a few hours before the deadline. Also, the under 18 form is a bit stupid - you have to scan it again? It has the same legal potential as having people write down their names in an online form and would have the same probability of someone faking it. Supplyframe's lawyers kill trees. But the trees are slowly getting vengefull... just saying.

• Sensoric Test of Force Sensor

  Emil J • 08/20/2014 at 22:23 • 0 comments

  Yeah, that means my kitten tried to eat it. What a cute little murderous bastard.

• Whelp, four project logs? Okay, what's now:

  Emil J • 08/20/2014 at 22:21 • 0 comments

  So according to the official rules, you must have at least four project logs. Huh. Okay: we have the sensor! I'm going to be having fun with it to test out how the area of finger affects the resistance and stuff. I order a Arduino Nano clone and an 9DOF IMU so in a few days we should be able to have some results!

• First Thoughts

  Emil J • 08/19/2014 at 20:17 • 0 comments

  In the beginning, we thought that sticking a USB cable in a notebook and having an Arduino on the other end would be enough. Well, nope! The cable would be freaking annoying when trying to get the ultimate shot. Bluetooth slipped into mind almost immediately as a pretty universal solution. BLE was chosen for the low energy consumption - we want to keep the weigh including the batteries low so the feel of the gun isn't heavily affected. After a while of googling a 0,25" force sensor was chosen due to the size of the trigger. The real challenge is mounting the sensor on the trigger, we might need to modify the trigger itself - or even opt out for a different solution. We'll see about that later, when we actually have the necessary supplies to get the thing going.

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