Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Introducing the Illuminato, Part 2

Thanks for all the kind words of encouragement! I really appreciate it :)

Well, I only have a couple left from the initial set of boards I made, so Mike recommended that I put the price up a few dollars for the last ones if anyone really wanted one soon, until I make more in the next batch (probably one more month). I also heard a lot of people asking about in-circuit programming, which I'm going to do more research about (I thought no one ever used it, but it seems like some people really miss it... I just don't know too much about how it's used besides programming the chip initially). As for PWM, I'm also going to have to do more research on that, since I haven't really used it much before (right now, I wired 1 of the 4 to the backlight, leaving 3 left).

But before I get too far ahead of myself, I wanted to make sure I clarified something... I definitely, definitely could not have done this by myself! Thank you:

-Chris Ladden (website?) for his ideas on "circuit-design aesthetics"
-Mark S. from Rutgers for meeting up in New Haven the last few weeks and teaching me the real way to write C programs (and for laughing at my BitDJ code)
-Mike for teaching me CAD layout (slowly and very painfully)
-Phil and Paul or inspiring me to release everything GNU GPL "Open Source"
-Limor for convincing me that since everything is Turing Complete to begin with, it's all Open Source anyway and will run on a pile of river pebbles (ok, taken out of context, :-) but still influential - ha ha)
-David Mellis and Tom Igoe from arduino.cc for helping me early on understand the processing / arduino / physical computing metaphor
-NYC resistor because... I'm jealous you have real space to do work like this and I'm still doing this from my apartment... and the solder fumes are making me less smart :-)

...and of course, special thank you to my mentor who gave me some money to play around with and to actually build this board in the first place.

Well, now it's time to go solder these all up now... I think it'll probably take me the rest of the week, so that means I'll probably mail them out first thing next week. In the meantime, if I make good progress, I think I'm going to head over the Mike's house this weekend to play with his robot projects :)

3 comments:

NiñoScript said...

Nice work, I think everybody will be wanting one of these :)

About that non-standard icsp header... I like the idea, I never use that thing :P
Btw, does it work with banana plugs?

I think I'll never put something like that on a design of mine though, I find it too tempting to start screwing stuff there... hahaha

For now I'll keep studing your implementation of the "core files".
I really like how you put all the stuff in just one array. That way it is very easy too add new chips!

PS: Would you be my mentor? haha :D

Matt said...

Hey Nino! Thanks :) You know, I never thought about it that way, but now that you mention it... yes, the holes up front are the perfect size for those plugs that go into my oscilloscope. They just plug right in... although I might have smaller plugs than some people since my oscilloscope is a hand-me-down from ebay :(

Chris Price said...

Hi Matt

Chris again... (not your Chris!) I've been thinking about the illuminato long and hard. I really want one, but it doesn't have enough PWM pins for my needs. I'm trying to control 6 motors and get 4 analogue inputs from potentiometers. I could use something like the sanguino, but I don't think its compatible with most shields out there... sigh. And it doesn't look nearly as cool. Oh I also want to use a joystick to control the servos via a microcontroller. I'd like to do this wirelessly. Is there a way to do all this with the illuminato? Maybe in version 2.0? ;)