Atmel on

Some HypnoOrb Progress

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:53:19 +0000

While my latest round of HypnoOrb progress hasn’t yet resulted in another fully functional design, it’s a good step in that direction. I’ve been learning to make good use of Cadsoft’s free version of their PCB design tool called Eagle. At this point I’ve been kind of stuck on getting the path of the wires routed well. The free version of Eagle provides some routing features, but I’m told it’s best to go with some other tools, tools that I’m pretty sure cost the GDP of a small nation, or possibly continent. But fear not, this is a fairly simple board, so I think worst case I should be able to manually route it in a very awesome way…. I hope. Anyway, below’s an image of the latest layout I’ve got…

Arduino Independence

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:08:43 +0000

Getting the Arduino Processor to function on a breadboard

The next step in my HypnoOrb project is to figure out how to get the Arduino microprocessor (AKA ATMega168) that makes the whole thing work function with as little hardware as possible. Thanks to this awesome site, I found, I now know what I wasn’t doing right before finding that document. I hope making a reference to that helpful tutorial here will help others find it faster than I did. Have fun!

Arduino/Freeduino Play

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:24:18 +0000

Here’s a video I decided to toss up on YouTube just showing some of the results of some of the goofing around I’ve been doing with my Arduino board (it’s actually a Freeduino).

I had a lot of trouble getting the board to work at first, but once I ran it through an ultrasonic cleaner it seemed to smooth out a lot. Though, some times it still has a hard time programming, in which case I can just apply pressure to the FTDI chip and then it’ll program. I’ve tried re-soldering the pins on the FTDI, but that didn’t entirely resolve the issue enough. Not to worry though, it consistently works perfectly enough for me.