So, it was pinewood derby time for the Cub Scouts again. My son’s pack has a race for the adult kids too. I had been plotting my car since last years races. I wanted to really light the thing up.  Last year I had working head and tail lights, but this time I wanted bigger and better. I was just not sure what form it would take. I had considered many options. The most predominant idea was using an accelerometer to change the light settings based on force. The problem was that I wanted the lighting to stay very minimal until race time so that the surprise factor would be maximized. I was leaning heavily towards the Arduino Pro 3v due to it’s nice and tidy size. After more thought I started heading away from the accelerometer and started thinking about using an XBee to control the Arduino remotely.  Then while shopping at Sparkfun one day, I stumbled upon the Funnle IO board and that locked the plan together.

Funnel is an Arduino based board, with the added benefit of having an on board Xbee socket. Plus it is tiny, has a 3.2v line in (for  LiPo), and a LiPo charger onboard too.

I ordered the stuff from Sparkfun and started designing the circuits. The mental picture was to make 2 stripes that ran down the sides of the car. These would be able to blink, pulse, fade, and ripple. Then on the 4 corners I wanted to have a very bright strobe light effect that would strobe at about 1 pulse per second. The idea was something like a jet preparing to take off and the taxiing lights. I put together a breadboard mockup.  I decided to use the 6 PWM outputs for the stripes. This way I could make them flow however I wanted. I worked on many different ideas for making a slow PWM roll. I finally found that to make the lights really roll along, I needed to have more than one set as the rolling motion is much more pronounced when repeated in a longer strip. The thing started to take form.

I decided to use 3 sets of 6 LEDs on each side, but instead of running down the sides, they would actually sit on top of the car like some evil menacing engine. I did not want big bumpy 5mm LEDs all over it (which actually might just be cool), so I went with surface mount. All the LEDs and resistors are 1206. 36 LEDs at 20ma each would easily exceed the max draw for the Funnel, so I built a driver board to take the load off of the FIO. The driver board was nothing fancy, just a few small 2222 transistors (sot-23).

One thing I had a great amount of fun with was designing empty spaces on the board. Once the board was designed, it was quickly clear that though functional, it was hardly cool looking. There was a still ton of blank space, so I decided to decorate the PCB. It was arts n crafts time with Eagle Cad. So, I spent a couple of hours just playing with shapes. By about noon the next day, I had the board etched, and all soldered up, and was ready to start testing. I uploaded the code to the funnel and started to play. I had some problems with one the channels of strip lights. It turned out to be a transistor that was not completely seated on the board. It looked soldered, but when I heated it up and pushed down on it, it just sank. It was a quick fix and it worked great from there on out.  I made sure that the xBee was working, but mainly stayed on the ftdi cable during the remainder of programming and testing.

After designing the car, I needed to route out the innards where everything would fit. This was a little easier on paper than it was in wood. Eventually, it started to come together. Making a long story short, I got everything together and it worked great. This was my first real Xbee project. I really liked that I got feedback from the car which was sitting like 60 feet from me. Of course I had to program the Arduino to do so. All I needed to do to trigger an effect was just type a letter into the serial command box in the Arduino IDE. I had about 14 different things I could have it do.

Edit: (News) - My car is on Sparkfun’s Front Page!!! Call it my Andy Warhol 15 seconds. :0)

Edit: (Clarification) - No, I am not employing a “joule thief” circuit in the car. We get to name the cars, and I felt that the name fit. Some folks have asked if this is an “official scout issued” PWD kit. Yes it is, but I used 2 kits. The finished car is legal weight, but just scraping by. The wood weighs almost nothing as it is more or less, a shell.  When I weighed it after finally getting all together, it was over by quite a bit. I had to hollow out just about every place that was thick enough to be drilled. I avoided the spaces right around the wheel grooves as I did not want it to bust through during the race. If you look at the front picture on the video, in the reflection in the glass you can see where I had hollowed out the sides. Drilling a car that was already completed was a pucker factor of about 12. I really thought I was going to blow out one of the sides. But even that was not enough, when it raced, it did not have the left screw in place as it pushed the car over the legal weight of 5 oz..

Eagle Boards, Schematics, and Arduino Code

The following nonsense is a pseudo blog I wrote on the BYOAC Forum back in 2006. It is about the construction of my arcade cabinet “BLACKOUT”. There were 5 full pages of threads to wade through. I have tried to edit it down into some sort of understandable form and added information for those who are not familiar with the retro arcade world. Knowing that not everyone would have the same background, I decided to also write a preface to the build log. It may give a little understanding as to why one would be daft enough to take this on. You will find that many of the folks who built one of these have similar stories. If ya don’t care, then skip it and head to the build.

PREFACE

I was an 80’s kid. I grew up with Atari being the sole home video game system. The word Nintendo was not part of any child’s vocabulary. It was the beginning of a craze. We first moved to Texas when I was 9. My friend Clint (who lived in the apartment below us) said that I needed to come with him and to bring quarters. There was a golf and tennis club behind the apartments we lived in. I found a quarter and followed him to the club house. Though it was the early 80’s and it still reeked of the 70’s. We found a way to sneak in the side door of the place. It was classy with orangish walls and brown smoky glass panels separating the various rooms. He pointed at a large box taller than me. It had a TV inside of it, and a console of buttons just under the screen. “It’s Asteroids”, he said. “Did you bring quarters?” I showed him my quarter. “It’s not enough” he told me. I pointed out that it only cost $.25. I did not understand. He explained the game and put in a quarter to show me. It looked like fun. His game ended remarkably fast (He was not very good). He said it was my turn. He had a weird look in his eyes. It was the pusher giving the future junkie his first fix. The quarters were lined up on the glass just above the control panel. The quarter was inserted. It made a deeply satisfying kachink. The player one button started to flash. The screen told me to press start, and I did. The music started, my ship appeared, and I started to play. My game ended remarkably fast (I was not very good). My heart was racing. I just stood there staring at the screen. I did not want it to be over. My one quarter was not enough. I was hooked.

I was a kid with a near obsessed need to do better at these things, one quarter at a time. Fortunately for me there were many places near by that had games. There was a little movie theater just inside of a strip mall that went out of business. They turned the lobby into an arcade. I lost a lot of money there. They had so many great games like Donkey Kong, Frogger, Bosconan, Pleades, Galaga, Galaxian. They had 4 small rows with about 4 or 5 games in each. On the back wall there were few pins as well. At that time though, I was not into the pinball machines. I think that this was there that I learned that if you told the guy behind the glass that the machine stole your quarter that he would come over, unlock the door, and click in a few credits. But they got wise to us far too quickly.

I also helped the convenience stores stay in business. Between Mr. J’s and 7-11, I laid down a few rolls of quarters. There I found Roc n’ Rope, Time Soldiers, DK3, Cloak and Dagger, Crystal Castles, Mappy, and Super Mario Bros. and Dragon’s Lair. When I got a little older, I started to go to Castle Golf and Games. The bonus there was that it had a Malibu Grand Prix right next to it with even more games. We would ride our bikes for close to an hour to get there. We would often waste all our allowance and birthday money there. It was at these two places that I found Tron, Gauntlet, Gorf, Centipede, Space Fury (Stupid Alien always taunting me), and Red Barron which was one of my favorites for a long time. Castle even had a Black Hole Pin which is still one of my all time favorite pins. Castle had rows and rows of games. It was a great place until they started to charge $.50 for the games (greed).

Over the years, arcades started to die off. Home consoles started to eat up all the quarters that people used to put into the machines, and most of my hang outs disappeared. Though it was sad, in some way, I suppose it was a good thing. I got to start keeping most of my money. I tried several of the consoles, and to some extent I enjoyed them. The problem was that they never had the same feel as the real thing. There was something to the full sized joystick, the concave buttons that you could really hit, the sound and vibration of a cabinet pushed into distortion because the volume was set far too high. Another thing is that the games changed when consoles took over. Eventually I left my kidhood behind. I would occasionally find a game here and there and drop a couple of quarters into them, but money became more valuable, and that sort of closed a chapter of my life.

I grew up, got married, and started a family. Somewhere around 1997 or 8, I found MAME. This was an wonderful discovery for me. I really tip my hat to the guys who have put countless hours into developing it and making it work so well. I got to play so many of the games I thought were all but gone. My only gripe was that my arcade memories did not include sitting in front of a computer tapping away on a keyboard. It did however, include standing in front of a big wooden box, and beating the hell out of it. Several years later, I stumbled upon the BYOAC website and I started reading about all these people, who were actually building their own arcade machines. I read this site nearly daily for several years. Eventually, I designed and built a desk top arcade console. It had real buttons and real joysticks. I hacked a computer keyboard so it would interface between the computer and buttons. It worked very well, and gave me a little more of that feel that I wanted. Sadly, I still was not fully satisfied. Still reading the BYOAC pages and forums, I started to think about building a full sized cabinet. I designed, redesigned, and re-redesigned a cabinet of my own.

I thought about all my favorite games and realized a totally unappreciated artform. So many games had very unique cabinets. If you look at a Tron, Asteroids, and Ms. Pacman, you will see very different designs and methods of building. I found a great site called the Killer List of Video games or KLOV. There you can find listings, pictures, and information about the full sized games. I went to arcade auctions. I started to study how they were made. There is actually an unrealized art in all of this. The designers actually produced very nice machines. There were so many great shapes.

Finally I started to close in on the design of my machine. I decided that 2006 would be the year I built my machine. I tend to be a perfectionist on things I create. There are folks who say they can build one of these in a weekend. I really do not know how that is possible, but sure, whatever, have fun. I would take my time and think it through. I saw a lot of examples of cabinets with a rat’s nest of wires inside. I have seen very poor examples of structure, and worse examples of paint (hey, it’s important). After a long bit, I realized what it was that I was after and clearly what I was not after.

A word of warning… The log is way long winded (As if I could somehow be less). It is my dream arcade machine, and it is a beast. In total, it took a little over a year to build. There were many steps to get it completed. I thought about consolidating the log into a general overview, but as I re-read it, I realized that it was really a diary of the build. It is more than a simple how to. It contains so much of the mindset and reasoning as to why I chose to do what I did. It provides a fairly clear reality to someone who might be considering building one. Quite honestly, though I am glad I built the machine; it was not always a joyous and fun time. It was frustrating, hard, and caused more than one ripple in my marriage. It was far deeper in scope than it might seem at first glance. The other thing I discovered while re-reading this, was how poorly written it was (not that it is much better now). I am not a writer by nature. But I am taking the time to try and neaten up, correct the horrendous spelling issues, and fill in some holes that I may have left. Now that I am removed from the situation by several years, there are several things that I have thought of conceptually, different approaches, and life lessons. I will notate these extras (AT = After Thought).

Actually, to be honest, it is still not totally finished. There are a few little things that are more or less things I needed to do for me. But all in all, it is complete, and fully playable.

The following is my account of the build process (Said in your best Jack Bauer voice).
To start at the beginning, head on over to January 2006.

This is the opening of the video I put together for LW Scientific when they unveiled their product, the Lumin. Their product is able to quickly detect TB out in the field, rather than over several weeks in a lab, far away.

This is just part of a much larger piece. Many folks would be seeing this so I wanted to make something that would quickly grab attention. Everything is built from stills. My favorite, is the third little vignette. I worked on the background for quite a while. The original photo was somewhat blown out in several areas. I built back in the window. Then I made some dirty glass. The glass was kept semi transparent so that a deeper background could be added. I worked on the baby for a while and eventually found the look I was going for. I selected an appropriate outside environment and put the whole thing into 3D within AE and finally did an overall color treatment.

I have been interested in natural energies for a long time. Even back before it was the cool, “in” thing. I am being a touch snarky as I hate how the media can dictate a fad. “Red is the new orange” and all that. I guess this is not really the point is it? So, yeah, I have been interested in natural energies for a long time. I used to live in California. There was a rather steep hill in our back yard. From the top, I could see the wind farm that was close by. There were so many great shapes and methods of working. If you drove east, there were stretches of  windmills that went on for miles. They were so massive. I think that this was some sort of testing ground as there were the traditional designs in a variety of forms. But then, there were these oddball designs unlike I had ever seen. They looked like a bastardized carrot peeler stood up on end, and a big one at that. These things captured my imagination. They were VAWTs or Vertical Axis Wind Turbines. It was not immediately obvious how they worked. We moved from Ca. and I quickly forgot all about them.

A couple of years ago we went to Disney World. I hate to admit it, but it was a freaking amazing vacation. Worth every penny. More, I would do it again (yeah, I drank the Kool-Aid). Walt has always been one of my inspirations. Here you have a guy who wanted to build cool stuff, and needed a way to fund it and more, a place to put it. So he creates Disney Land. Uh… your loosing me… how does this relate? Right… The day we went to EPCOT, I saw all sorts of windmills all over the park. They were used as more moving sculptures, not as electricity generating devices, but they were beautiful. They moved so effortlessly in very little wind. This was my spark.

When we returned home from DW, I went in search for info on windmills. Initially, I was reading about horizontals. I did not know what to name the verticals. In my mind they were just windmills.  I checked one of my web hang outs “Instructables”. There were several DIY how to’s. Some had links to YouTube vids. After watching the vids, I was lured into other streams of vids. I traveled up and down all of these little bits of education, trying to scrape just a little more detail that someone else had left out. This seems to be my pattern for new interests. Eventually I found my VAWTs, and so it began. I finally had a name to put to the thing. VAWT. You know, as far as acronyms go, VAWT just looks intimidating. Right, never mind.

I started looking for a design to settle into. There are so many great ideas out there. Some that were super simple to rather complex and overly engineered. Hmmmm. While I do appreciate overly engineered, I did not want to go too crazy right out of the gate. There’s plenty of time later for that. Right now, I needed a proof of concept for myself. I am sure I have said this elsewhere, I do not like to make a photocopy of someone else’s idea. If that’s all I was interested in, I might as well just go out and buy one. I saw a post somewhere about Jay Leno. Apparently he is very interested in all types of green energies. This video shows one of his earlier windmills. It is built by a company called Enviro Energies.

The shape of that windmill was well within my doing. It was head out to home depot in search for metal that would not rust. I found some galvanized flashing sheets. I got 2 sheets for $6. I would not supposed to though. When I went to pay for it, the lady said that it they would be 28 dollars. I told her that it was $6. We went on a walk back to the shelf where I found them. Apparently this was the price of an old item and had not been updated. She said that it was their fault and gave it to me for the price that was listed. Woohoo!

The trick here is precision folks (cough). I used only one sheet of the flashing, cut it into 4ths with the angle grinder. I had some PVC tubing in my garage. I cut a small length. I drilled 4 holes at 90 degrees to each other (eyeballed), and attached the sheets with rivets. I am sure that there was some serious math taken into consideration when Enviro Energies were developing their model. Aside from trying to keep the thing balanced, this thing was built on the fly. It was a rough draft. I wanted to see it work before I put mass abounts of energy into it.

I used several lengths of screw rods (need name for this stuff) to hold the blades in place. I decided to keep the full height of the blades unlike the blades on Jay’s. There very well may be a reason to swoop them off like that, but it seems like you would loose too much surface. I purchased some bearings off eBay. These fit perfectly into the PVC tubes. I scrounged the center shaft out of an old printer that my son and I took apart.

I like the idea of mag lev to reduce friction. I went out to ACE in hopes to find some magnets. I found some fairly decent 60lb. magnets. I super glued a set of bearings to the center of the magnet cap. I placed the magnets on the shaft. I put the windmill on top of that and it floated nicely. Very cool! To get some extra height, I set up a ladder on our back porch. I set the windmill on top of it, and used a ratchet strap to secure it in place.

It works great. In wind that is barely perceivable, it just spins. It is not super fast, but it is continuous. This one was not designed for electricity. Again, it is a test of design (or lack there of). The next one will be larger and placed on something a lot higher. It was quite impressive to watch.

This post ends with a small bit of bad news. We got a storm one night. I love storms and this was a good one. The wind was fairly extreme. I was in the kitchen and had not thought about the fact that the wind mill was up. I heard a sickening whomp from the back of the house, then about a second later, a sad little clang. I ran to the back porch and found that the ladder was there, but no windmill. The ladder on it’s side leaning against the rail. I went down stairs, and into the back yard, and there lay my poor little windmill in a heap of bent metal. It was sort of funny, and sort of sad, but more funny.  I am excited about building another one.

SAFETY NOTE: (Both galvanized steel and the disks from the angle grinder can produce substances that “may cause cancer” in the state of California. It is what the label said. Now, I am no genius, but I have a hunch that it might also be harmful in other places too. Hmmm. Seriously though, be safe and wear some sort of respirator, or at least a face mask if you are using this stuff.

Edit:(New Info) – I have recently found some info that states that friction reduction via mag lev may actually not be helping that much. It appeared to make things run more smoothly on mine, but I have no real way of testing aside from what I saw visually. The article I read had all sorts scientific proof blah blah blah using all sorts of high math blah blah blah, with all sorts of symbols clearly found in the reverse engineering of a UFO (or something not human). Ok, I admit it, I also suck at math. I do ok when I have something to apply the math to. I tried to follow this guy, but come on… Really?  so I have not settled into a new design yet.

We had a staff meeting at work. The topic of discussion was Relay for Life. Our department usually participates in some way. This year, there was the challenge of making a car out of boxes which would be carried around the track at midnight in a race. requirements were simple. It had to make it out of a box (duh), and it must have headlights. Seeing mass geek potential, I volunteered to build the car. I am not one to go to if you just want dirt simple.

I started to plan a rugged, heavy duty, off road kind of thing. Soon after we got a fairly massive UPS. The box was perfect. It was this crazy heavy duty cardboard. There was also this wonderfully shaped packing foam in the box, so that got grabbed as well.

One of the women who would be carrying the car is a cancer survivor. So, this was a custom build, just for her. She said that her car was going to be pink. Pink? Really? um… ok then. She said that we could also have purple trim if we liked. I decided on duct tape, and gaffers tape for the construction and vehicle color. Inspired by the shape of the foam, I set out to build her a hummer. A BIG PINK AND PURPLE HUMMER!

For the headlights, I wanted to go over the top. I decided that this thing needed a operational lighting system. Sure, we could throw in some flash lights, but I wanted bigger, and far brighter.

I have been experimenting with white LEDs for a camera flash system I have been working on. I decided to make panels of LEDs for the head lights. But really, how safe would a car be if there no brake lights, and blinkers? So, I made some LED panels for the rear too with real working blinkers and brake lights. This was all connected to an Arduino (Boarduino) through some FETs. I used 2n2222 for the left, and right blinkers as there was not as much amperage to worry about (Only 16 LEDs). There are 40 LEDs on the each brake light and and 40 each on the headlights. I got hit in the eye a few times with one of the head lights, and it was a wee bit painful. The brakes are each on PWM pins on the Arduino so that they could be slightly lit (because they are on when you turn on your headlights, right?), but then have the ability to go full bright during left and right blinking, as well as braking, all of which was controlled from a little button box. On the back wall of the car I made a LED ribbon out of pink LEDs. My initial intention was to do a 4 channel chase with the ribbon, but there was just not enough time.

The Relay night came. They took the car out to the track. They kicked on the lights and the 80 10,000 mcd white LEDs in front really lit the place up. They had a good time racing the pink beast around the track. Our car won for design.

This is a test… It is only a test. Had this been a real explosion… Dude in the truck would be toast. This is a composite that I made in AE some time back. Occasionally, I’ll challenge myself to re-create something I see. I saw a number of clips on YouTube that were IR camera recordings of aerial bombing missions. While I was looking for reference clips to study, I found it interesting how much they varied. I built my HUD in AE (Not saying much as it was really not very complicated). The rest was made with nothing more than the photo below. The explosion was made with 4 separate partial systems. All are Trapcode Particular. The glows are Trapcode Star Glow.