Hi There...

Hi there...

I'm sorry I've been absent for about a month now... Somehow I think I've now felt how it is to work full time and not really be able to get home in between. I've kind of felt like being a nomad traveling between work, parents and girlfriend. And everytime i got home I was just to broken down to do anything related to this blog. But! Finally it is a bit of a holiday (Eastern) And I write again.

In the time since the last past I've red the prototype of the book from the guys that made Arduino, which made me exited about it again and made me want to have an old small keyboard to use it to circuit bend :). Also I got 2 mice from my mom to use (Since my laser based mouse died.) which use balls. I broke one open, because I only needed 1 :). And I found out it works with infra red! I didn't know that!!!!! I put 5 V to one of the infra red LED and with a small flash and buzz it died really fast... it was pretty cool though to see :) And luckily it has 2 of them so i can still experiment with one other :).

So today i decided to do something again!

I drank waaaay to much coffee, and I can give you a tip: Don't drink to much coffee when you start soldering! (I didn't get hurt but it took waaaay longer than it was supposed to.)

Here is the picture of the mouse and circuit that came out of it:

My girlfriend is also going to start using Arduino and got one from her faculty. We tried it at my home and now she wants to use the digit thingy from another circuit she brought and had to make for her studies:

Which will be hard to remove..

I borrowed some braid from my brother because I thought it would make it easier to remove the IR sensor from my mouse circuit.

But hell no! With my coffee maneuvering hands holding pliers and an soldering iron I thought that maybe it would be impossible to remove parts from and old circuit board. But luckily google directed me to instructables which was full of advice :) (apparently i'm not the only one having problems with this :) ). (instead of removing all the tin you need to have tin to melt it! so braid isn't very usefull :) another tip here!)

So finally I got it loose and plugged it to my arduino. The data that I got from is was 1023 all the time, even when I covered it. Probably because of the extreme temperatures and lighting conditions on my desk.

So i put is somewhere cooler (as far as the USB cable would allow...) and put a can on it to keep some light out. And now it dropped, somewhat, to around 1000, sometimes... hmmm... probably to much light still... anyway there was some change, enough to use :)

So I decided to solder some lines to it:

And attach that to to my arduino and that to my speaker!

And when holding my hand in front of it i could register the change of infra red and make some kind of beat to it :). ooh the fun :)

Yep, it is nice :).

Any way I'm kind of getting tired of writing.... sorry, no offence but my Caffeine filled head has absolutely no concentration power.....

I also made a picture of my plants that are in my room :) they really like good weather and sun as you can see, though they also need a lot of water... And since i'm not home a lot of time they are a bit sad a lot of the time... Garduino?

Also the scene of my room looked really good from a distance :)

good bye! :)

cheers, frank