MachineGrid::Robots at Work

Controlling the Nikon D40 with gphoto2

gphoto2 is a neat little command line interface to talk to digital cameras. The Nikon D40 DSLR is also supported. I was not able to find a good guide on interfacing the D40 to gphoto, so I wrote this down for reference.

Installing gphoto2
1. I have Fedora10 installed on my laptop. Running the following simple command “yum install gphoto2″ as root installs gphoto2.

2. Doing the above however does not install libghoto2 which is the core library designed to allow access to digital cameras …

1 Comment | Posted in » Nikon D40, hacks

Digital Picture Frame Hacking Roundup

With all the nice hacks on digital picture frames scattered around the web, I decided to put them all in one place for reference. Due thanks to all the hackers out there who put their work out for everyone to see. It’s the joy in reverse engineering. For some of the hacks I’ve included a compressed file with the code and webpage archived in case the original site goes down. If you …

4 Comments | Posted in » Hackable Toys, Tutorials, hacks

Taking Apart the ATV-360 EyePiece [Head Mounted Display]

As promised, after taking apart the ATV-360 Spy Video here, this is a follow-up on taking apart the Head Mounted Display[HUD]. The HUD has some very interesting DIY parts and ideas which you can try out. Maybe a cool wearable. The details on all the parts used are at the end of the post and comments are open for discussion.

The HUD consists of a frame which sits in the same way …

13 Comments | Posted in » Hackable Toys, Tutorials, hacks

Hacking the Hannah Montana Photocube - Almost!

Things with LCDs are very interesting. I found a Hannah Montana Digital Photocube on sale and decided to look what’s inside it. Good for a day of hacking :)

First a description:
Storage capacity: 8 M bit (Up to 70 photos) Resolution: 128×128 dpi
Display: 1.5-inch color LCD
Supported File Format: JPG (JPEG),BMP, GIF, PNG, & TIF
Power: 2 xAAA batteries (not included)
USB Ports: Mini-USB 1.1 interface

Searching around the net produced a lot of work done by …

7 Comments | Posted in » Hackable Toys, Tutorials, hacks

Taking Apart the Spy Video ATV-360

I finally took apart the Spy Video which I got for a very good deal. I wanted to see if it would serve as a good platform for a robot and if the drive system could be upgraded. The most difficult part was taking apart the wheel hubs. The interesting part in the hubs design is that a better motor can be attached to it. The following sequence shows …

4 Comments | Posted in » Hackable Toys, Robots, Tutorials, hacks

Just got my Spy Gear Spy Video ATV-360

Just got my spy video ATV-360 from Spy Gear. My local Target had this on sale for $28 and it was too good to resist. So much so that I bough two of them - with one as a standby for parts.

The ATV comes with the following features:

-A skid steer design for easy maneuverability.
-A …

2 Comments | Posted in » Hackable Toys, Robots

Did not find the page you were looking for?

Hi there, I had to clean up the site since it was getting messy and it was based on a very old version of Mambo. MachineGrid is now based on WordPress - Similar to Mambo, but I needed a change.

Anyway, in case you were linked here from other sites to certain parts of the old site, you may find new links below.
I put up the few informative pages which used to receive a lot of traffic, the …

No Comments | Posted in » New Site, News

A Simple Serial Parser Using A State Machine

This note illustrates how to decode or parse incoming serial data with an example. Transmitting one byte serially to a microcontroller is simple.The easiest way to do this is to interrupt the controller when a byte arrives on the receive pin. There is no need to parse or separate data as whatever comes in, is assigned to a variable. But what if there is more than one byte that needs to be received.How would you go about separating all the bytes and …

No Comments | Posted in » Tutorials

Soldering Your Accelerometer - The ADXL202E

I finally get my hands on Analog Devices’ accelerometer- the ADXL202E. It’s small,very small.
See what I mean!

However there’s this problem, I usually work on PDIP packages and SMDs do give me a scare,not because I’ve never soldered them,but because I do not have the necessary equipment for it. So I decide to do my thing , and also take a little inspiration from Sparkfun’s Breakout board.

My first step was to find a thinner tip …

No Comments | Posted in » Tutorials