Spiders are good for the garden but they scare me. Here’s a good way to have fun with your older sister. Attach some kind of spool to a toy motor shaft and mount it up high. Then tie a string to a creepy bug and run it up to the spool. When the motor runs the bug goes up. Disconnect the motor and the bug comes back down.

Click the picture for a video.

      

    Sometimes you just want to smack something. Ya know what I mean. Don’t take it personal. It’s real easy to do. If you want to make some noise or knock something over just stick a stick on a motor shaft and let fly. A word of caution once the motor stops turning don’t leave the battery connected too long. It may smoke.

Click for video:

           

Using the lab notes from Prof. Robbie Berg I hooked up a memory chip to a Logochip using an I2C interface. So if somebody would want their Logochip to remember a bunch of numbers like a data pattern or say an audio track this could help. It could also be helpful if you wanted to use another device that had an I^2C (also called”2 WIRE”) interface. Memory is saved when the power is off too. The PDF formatting of his lab notes kind of screwed the line feeds so I tried to tidy things up. But it’s real easy to hook up. The part only costs a buck. You can paste this code in, load, and go. Might be a good thing to put in the wiki.

Logo code for reading and writing data to a 24LC64

The Logo code below (also stored in the course conference is the file calledeeprom.txt) contains the procedures needed for a LogoChip to be able to write and read data to and from a 24LC64.

To write a byte of data to the 24LC64 use write-eeprom <address> <value> where <address> is an integer from 0 to 8191 and <value> is an integer from 0 to 255. For example try

   write-eeprom 100 57

 This command stores the number 57 in memory location 100 in the 24LC64

To read a byte of data from the 24LC64 use read-eeprom <address> where <address> is an integer from 0 to 8191 and <value> is an integer from 0 to 255. If you try

   print read-eeprom 100

you should see the number 57 print in monitor window.
Here’s the code:

Just stuff all this in your program somewhere or put it in a library and include it in you code.

Here’s something that was popular a few years ago. You could have a pot of flowers with a bumble bee or a butterfly flittering around it. It’s a neat tick. Mount a toy motor in the middle of the flowers. A wheel mounted on the motor shaft has a small hole drilled off center. A thin wire stuck in the hole extends out to the bug. Click this picture for a video.

                  

This is in response to a previous error and also to make sure that parallel data lines to multiple LCD modules would work. I haven’t built the whole circuit but enough to conferm that it will work. Earlier I posted a schematic if a single line LCD module that had pin 3 grounded and it should have been tied high. Here’s a picture of what I wired up:

           

And here is a schematic of a Logochip and 3 LCD Modules wired up to it:

                    

And here is some code that sets up the Logochip and initializes the LCDs and prints aome characters on each LCD.

                           

Here are some links to more useful information on the LCD Modules

        A real crummy copy of the manule (LCD-111)

       More info than you want to know about the LCD controller

      A site with other applications using this LCD display

          You can make any sort of flexible joint move with a little gear driven motor out of a toy robot or car.  Just wrap some fishing line around the drive wheel and then thread it up and around the joint. You can run one string through several joints. Here I made a worm out of sections of pink foam plastic and then taped them together. 

Click the picture to see it work.