I also have a few background documents that may be interesting* to some:

Senses/States Matrix
Emotional Effects on Outputs
Robot Emotions versus Movements

My current mental obsession is an ALife simulation running under Linux, and I thought I would try out this learning architecture in a simulated environment on a capable processor.

*I find this stuff extremely interesting, but then according to my teenage daughters I’m weird. Of course they think weird is a compliment.

It took me a while to figure out how to put it together with the cam attached to the lid, and my daughter suggested a rod & tube setup:

The cam is connected to the lid through a bearing and a brass “bicycle fork”:

When the cam spins, it lifts the lid enough for the arm to come out and flip the switch.

One thing that I did slightly different was use a 5V DPDT relay to reverse the motor instead of a DPDT  switch. This allowed me to use a SPDT switch with a lower actuation force.

Disclaimer:

I am not a Computer Scientist, nor do I play one on TV. This is a description of how I went about solving a specific problem, not necessarily the best method. For informational purposes only. Use at your own risk.

Installation of Strawberry Perl was completely straightforward on my XP machine. I haven’t tried any Win7 installs, but the home page suggests it is just as simple. I just downloaded the Windows installer and let it run. This will install Perl on your machine let you run scripts from the command line.

1. Create a folder to place all of my code and research material.

2.  Create a text file in the folder where I had all of my puzzle related info called “prompt.bat” (no quotes), and consisted of the single word “cmd” (again no quotes). Double-clicking this file will open a command prompt within the folder so you can launch the scripts easily.

3. Download a word list that can be easily read into your script. I used output from Tea, but I also found some other word lists here: http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

4. Create a text file (I prefer Notepad++ for text editing. Be sure to set the Language to Perl to get the correct syntax hi lighting) with the name of the puzzle and a “.pl” suffix. This file will be your Perl Script.

5. Start the script with “#!/usr/bin/perl” This tells the computer that it is a Perl script.

6. Here’s a script I wrote to find all the rotations of a word (anyone who saw my sample puzzle on the forum may recognize this) listrotator.pl (Save target as… or you may get an error. No idea why). You can run this by typing “perl listrotator.pl words.txt” at the command prompt.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#use strict;

my %words;

my $i;

open(DATAIN,”<$ARGV[0]“) || die “cannot open \”$ARGV[0]\”: $!”;

while(my $line = <DATAIN>){

$line =~ s/\s+//;

$words{$line} = 1;

}

foreach my $word1 (sort keys %words){

my $num=0;

my $word=$word1;

print “-$word\n”;

for($i = 1; $i < length($word1); $i++){

$word= rotate($word);

print “$word\n”;

}

}

sub rotate{

my $foo=shift;

chomp($foo);

my $out=substr($foo,1,length($foo)-1).substr($foo,0,1);

return $out;

}

The beginning of the script reads in the command line argument (words.txt in the example above) then reads the word list into memory. Specifically into a hash structure named words hash, but I’ll discuss that later. While reading the file into memory, it also strips carriage returns and unprintable characters.

Next the script steps through each entry in the hash (%words). It takes this entry, and rotates it using the rotate function, once for each letter in the word. This way we end up with all possible rotations.

In a future post I’ll cover some of the neat things you can do once you have a word list in memory.

Outside

Inside

USB Connectors

Charging my iPad

Schematic

Closeup of foot

Battery and Connectors

Internal partition

The yellow piece is some scrap expanded PVC left over from a laptop desk I built for my wife a while back. The PCB is mounted to this, opposite the battery.

Partition & chamfer

The bottom of the partition is chamfered and held into place by another piece on the bottom. This lets it set into place easily, but still holds the battery in place tightly.

Specs:

• Box – $6 brand new at the local thrift store, I only added electronics and handles. (I need to head back and get a couple more!)
• Battery – 12V 7Ah (~12 iPod charges or 3.5 iPad charges)
• Output – 5V @ 1.5A (will charge iPad while watching video)
• Connectors – 3x USB Type-A female
• 3A fuse directly on battery
• Power switch with blue LED indicator

Plans for the future:

• “Working” steam power plant
• Microcontroller based monitor (Battery charge level, internal temp, etc) with 128×128 OLED screen
• Embedded wireless web server (WRT54G based)

I have been thinking about the PDA for a week or two now, and decided to make a custom case rather than attempting to use a pocketwatch case. I picked up a 2″ brass pipe fitting from the hardware store and  started shaping it on the lathe. It should be just about the right size…

Steampunk PDA Case - Size Comparison

Steampunk PDA Case

Steampunk PDA Case

Steampunk PDA Case

CAD Assembly

Here’s the timer interrupt that services the analog to digital converter and the multiplexing of the LEDs:

ISR(TIMER2_OVF_vect){
static unsigned char activeLine=0;
static unsigned char adcChannel=0;
PORTC=0xFF;
PORTA=0xFF;
selectLine(activeLine);
PORTC=~green_display[activeLine];
PORTA=~red_display[activeLine];
activeLine++;
if(activeLine>7){
activeLine=0;
}
switch(adcChannel){
case 0: x_accel=(ADCH-x_flat)/10;
if((x_loc<500)&&(x_accel<0)){ x_accel=0; } if((x_loc>7500)&&(x_accel>0)){
x_accel=0;
}
x_vel=limit(x_vel+x_accel,-MAXVELOCITY,MAXVELOCITY);
ADMUX=0xE1;
adcChannel=1;
break;
case 1: y_accel=(y_flat-ADCH)/10;
if((y_loc<500)&&(y_accel<0)){ y_accel=0; } if((y_loc>7500)&&(y_accel>0)){
y_accel=0;
}
//if((abs(y_accel)>1)||(abs(y_vel)>20)){
y_vel=limit(y_vel+y_accel,-MAXVELOCITY,MAXVELOCITY);
//}else{
// y_vel=0;
//}
ADMUX=0xE2;
adcChannel=2;
break;
case 2: z_accel=(ADCH-125);
ADMUX=0xE0;
adcChannel=0;
break;
default: adcChannel=0;
}

}

And the main loop:

while(1){

if((abs(x_vel)>STICTION)||(abs(y_vel)>STICTION)){
x_vel=(int)((ELASTICNUMERATOR*(long int)x_vel)/ELASTICDENOMINATOR);
x_loc+=x_vel;
y_vel=(int)((ELASTICNUMERATOR*(long int)y_vel)/ELASTICDENOMINATOR);
y_loc+=y_vel;
}
if(x_loc<0){ x_loc=-x_loc; x_vel=-x_vel; } if(x_loc>7999){
x_loc=7999;
x_vel=-x_vel;
}
if(y_loc<0){ y_loc=-y_loc; y_vel=-y_vel; } if(y_loc>7999){
y_loc=7999;
y_vel=-y_vel;
}
x_pos=(unsigned char)(x_loc/1000);
y_pos=(unsigned char)(y_loc/1000);
plotBall(x_pos,y_pos);
_delay_ms(50);

}

I just added the 3-axis accelerometer, but haven’t soldered on the supporting components. Also I still need to add the Li-Po charge IC. I am currently using the STK500 both to power and program the board.

So without further ado, here are some pics…

Mazetrix project

Mazetrix Bottom

Mazetrix Top

My board is for a project based on the Tiletoy, and incidentally not unlike the Space Invaders Button, the Awesome and 64Pixels.

Many moons ago I managed to score several 8×64 Red-Green matrix displays salvaged, evidently, from a casino display. Even though I had managed to reverse engineer them and figure out how to display nifty messages, they were just too large and too COTS for me. I removed the 8×8 LED matrices (matrixes?) and designed a small board to run them. The display is run directly from an ATMega128, using a half-H bridge on each column so I can use the entire matrix as a sensor. Additionally, I have added a MMA7260 triple axis accelerometer. Last but not least is an IR LED pointed in each of the cardinal directions, also connected to be used as an input and an output, for communicating to neighbor modules(PDF link).

The ultimate goal is to create tiles with a red maze and a green “ball” than you can manipulate by tilting, just like the good old labyrinth game. When you get to the edge of a tile, you can connect another, which will attach magnetically, and the maze will continue on the new tile.

I’ll add more updates when I start building.

Here’s a few images to satisfy the curious:

schematic

Mazetrix Layout