I managed to get the accelerometer to work and put in a sensitivity so it prints when the chip has been moved (i.e. does not print the raw data, just the statement “MOVED” when there has been movement. However, for the bag movement alarm project I need it to tell for how long there has been…
For the bag movement alarm project, I got myself a cheap postage sized accelerometer. The breakout board I purchased online is labeled GY-521, which I found out afterwards is just one of the many boards for the MPU-6050 chip. The MPU-6050 is actually both an accelerometer as well as a gyro. Pretty cool for such…
For the bag movement alarm system, I need to have a secret security code that can shut off the alarm. I wanted to have this be very simple, so just use a multi button interface. For the project, I decided to chose 4 buttons (largely as this gives a good number for simple security, and…
A key part of the bag movement alarm project that I have started is that you can hit a button to turn the board on, but hitting the button again does not turn it off. This is to prevent the thief from being able to turn the alarm off by simply hitting the on/off switch. I also…
So one of my new projects is to create a movement alarm for preventing bag theft. The motivation for creating this is threefold: 1) When I go to a happy-hour or a cocktail party, I often have my computer bag with me. But I do not want to carry it around with me, so I…
A while ago, thanks to the joys of eBay and manufacturing in China, I ordered some low-cost 16×2 LCD character screens, and they finally arrived. Yeah, now I can get down to trying to output some text to the LCD screen, just one of the pieces of the puzzle for creating a metro ‘next train’…
The Quadcopter didn’t fail, I did. After a successful first trials, I took the Quadcopter out for a second spin, hoping to get some good footage. I had lots of space to play with, but when it is up high and far away, you lose some of the spatial awareness. So I got it stuck…
There really is something cool about flying. My batteries arrived for my recently acquired quadcopter, and today was a beautiful sunny day…. so perfect time to test out the quadcopter and do some first trials. I met up with my friends Hussein and Julia before heading to DC’s Meridian Hill park, to put it through…
There is something cool about flying. A short while ago I decided to order an extremely entry level quadcopter so that I could learn a bit about how to fly one. Not that I really have a purpose – although I anticipate that being able to take video with it will be quite fun –…
If they had this when I was studying electrical engineering, I never would have switched to civil. Because making something blink has never been so exciting. This weekend, I decided to finally pull out my Arduino board and see what I can do with it…. and it turned out to be quite a bit of…
Discovering my makerself 