Washington City Paper article

John Metcalfe did an article on me for the Washington City Paper this week.

DTMF generation for Audacity

I've been using Sound Forge to geneate DTMF tones to synchronize animatronic movement with audio files. However, now you can get a DTMF generator plug-in for Audacity here (along with instructions). On the same page are cool notch filters, stereo panners, flangers, comb filters, and more!

Coverage in the Sydney Morning Herald

RoboBaby and the rise of the machines in the Sydney Morning Herald.

MAKE Magazine Blog / Dug / BoingBoing

Phillip Torrone was nice enough to post "Blame" to the MAKE Magazine Blog. Yey!

Adding coolness, the MAKE Blog entry was dug on Digg, and also featured on BoingBoing.

Or Maybe AVR?

I'm slowly becoming convinced that AVR chips may be preferable to PIC chips, especially if you are going to use a high-level language like C.

The EDTP Easy Ethernet AVR board has an ATmega16 AVR risc microcontroller with 8 channels of 10-bit A/D. It looks like you only get access to port A (8 pins) and port C (8 pins). Port A is the A/D port, but the Easy Ethernet AVR says there is a 4HCT573 Octal Transparent Latch on port A. I'll have to ask them if they can do analog input on Port A, or else is it a non-starter. The price is OK ($64 kit, $84 assembled).

There also is the Ethernut Board that has an ATmega128 microcontroller. The Ethernut has 20 I/O pins (8 of them A/D). But the price is a little steaper, $138.

Haptic: Ethernet solutions

I fired up my old Pontech SV203 servo controller. It takes serial (RS-232) input to control a bunch of servos, and also has five A/D converters on board as well. After going through pain trying to get my VB6 compiler working with the PC serial port on my Win98 art box, I decided to bite the bullet and load up Python (to some extent because my wife is learning Python right now). Adding on the Python Win32 Extensions and then the PySerial module, I finally was able to talk from Python to the SV203 servo controller.

I found a great deal on a Wiznet serial to Ethernet gateway, but then came the surprise that the SV203 isn't made any more, and I need to have one on each side of the network connection for the haptic interface to go across the Internet.

So that leaves me looking at Ethernet-enabled microcontroller boards. If I continue in the PIC direction, there is a board from Modtronix with Ethernet, RS232, many digi I/Os, and 5 A/Ds. To program this board, I'd have to learn PIC C. I know C, but using it to control a PIC is a bit of a learning curve.

On the other hand, there is also the RVHE board, which is programmed in a simple BASIC. Besides Ethernet, it has 6 A/Ds, 26 digi I/Os, and two PWM I/Os (though I'd still need to program my own using the digital I/Os if I wanted to control 5 servos). It costs more, but I am sure the development time would be much less. Supposedly it can do 500,000 BASIC instructions per second and is interrupt driven, so I should be able to control 5 servos in addition to everything else. I've never heard of this board before, it must be pretty new. It is more expensive than the PIC Ethernet boards, but probably worth it.

Haptic Chicken

I had a breakthrough concept for my haptic interface project yesterday! It is going to have to wait a while to be revealed, but I can assure you it doesn't have anything to do with remote chicken fondling.