huntr2
09-03-2007, 02:42 AM
I had the initial idea for this project back in 2005, I built a PIC programmer and had all of the parts to continue but that's about as far as I got as I stared Uni.
Patrick and Dave recently inspired me to take another look at this project with the episode on the Internet controlled crane games.
The initial idea and the current hardware is largely based on this (http://www.larwe.com/zws/products/picxie2/index.html) project. I am however using a more up to date microcontroller, the 16F628 with it's internal clock and also slightly different flip flops. Here is the setup:
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/DSC00072.jpg
Since that episode of systm I have had many ideas. My current aim is to get the PIC interfacing with the PC via the serial port. At the moment I have to program the PIC to change the display pattern. Ideally I want to be able to open up a terminal and issue commands to display patterns. One of the final aims is to get it controlled via the Internet and have a webcam setup so people can make their patterns and see them (Like the LCD webcam project that was on digg a while back). And possibly getting all of it controlled by an xbox running linux (maybe - don't know the feasability of this yet).
The current state is that I have the hardware working and am able to program patterns into the PIC using the JAL programming language with the help of a Java program (see below) I wrote to help me generate the hex addresses for the LED's. Animation (displaying multiple frames) is coming along (you can see the tetris demo below) but the code needs optimising and I would like to switch to C if I can ever get the compiler working properly.
Youtube video of the tetris program running (just about).
http://www.youtube.com/v/opsSAFlkIjw
Below are pictures of the Java program I wrote. It's easy enough to figure out the hex addresses for a single LED but this program makes it so much faster and only took a couple of hours to write.
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/pat1.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/pat2.jpg
There is probably loads more I could talk about but here is an initial post, I'll let you know how things go, just thought I'd share what I'm doing. Thank you to System for inspiration.
-Rob
Patrick and Dave recently inspired me to take another look at this project with the episode on the Internet controlled crane games.
The initial idea and the current hardware is largely based on this (http://www.larwe.com/zws/products/picxie2/index.html) project. I am however using a more up to date microcontroller, the 16F628 with it's internal clock and also slightly different flip flops. Here is the setup:
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/DSC00072.jpg
Since that episode of systm I have had many ideas. My current aim is to get the PIC interfacing with the PC via the serial port. At the moment I have to program the PIC to change the display pattern. Ideally I want to be able to open up a terminal and issue commands to display patterns. One of the final aims is to get it controlled via the Internet and have a webcam setup so people can make their patterns and see them (Like the LCD webcam project that was on digg a while back). And possibly getting all of it controlled by an xbox running linux (maybe - don't know the feasability of this yet).
The current state is that I have the hardware working and am able to program patterns into the PIC using the JAL programming language with the help of a Java program (see below) I wrote to help me generate the hex addresses for the LED's. Animation (displaying multiple frames) is coming along (you can see the tetris demo below) but the code needs optimising and I would like to switch to C if I can ever get the compiler working properly.
Youtube video of the tetris program running (just about).
http://www.youtube.com/v/opsSAFlkIjw
Below are pictures of the Java program I wrote. It's easy enough to figure out the hex addresses for a single LED but this program makes it so much faster and only took a couple of hours to write.
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/pat1.jpg
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i207/huntr2/pat2.jpg
There is probably loads more I could talk about but here is an initial post, I'll let you know how things go, just thought I'd share what I'm doing. Thank you to System for inspiration.
-Rob