Darryl Lai

Today we will be looking at the internal components of the control box for my motorized slider. My last post looked at the slider itself, with some photos and video of how it works. Hopefully you get a decent idea of how all the parts come together. The real genius though is behind How the servo works and is controlled.

I started out with a project box I got from Fry’s and an Arduino Duemilanove. To power the Arduino, I bought an 8 AA battery holder and used this to power both the Arduino and servo motor. Heres a brief list of components inside the box:

• Arduino Duemilanove
• Power switch
• 8 AA battery holder
• Control knob / potentiometer
• Lots of wires
• A button
• 6V voltage regulator

So how it works is the 8AA batteries provide 9.6 volts directly to the Arduino and runs a program that interacts with the control knob, button, and servo. The power switch disconnects the circuit directly from the batteries and the Arduino. Typically servos are suggested to only run with a maximum of 6 volts, and Arduino provides a 5volt output. this works but I want to get a 6 volt source, so I used the 9.6 volts from the Arduino’s VIN pin and applied a 6 volt regulator with then outputted to the servo. To connect to the servo, my brother had some pin connectors that i simply hot glued to a carefully drilled part of the project box. Note that with servos you have power, ground and PWM connectors. The reason I chose to use an Arduino is because the PWM allows for great accuracy and reliability of timing and speed.

Lastly, the button I mentioned is used to switch to a time lapse mode, moving a slight bit every ten seconds, right now I haven’t worked on making this time variable but changing it is as easy as changing a couple values in the program on the Arduino.

A couple things if you’re wanting to do something similar and haven’t done it much before. Take your time and plan out your attack, know how long wires have to be and where grounding will come from. Also be careful with shorting connections and blowing up electronics. I blew out 2 servos before getting it down correctly. Remember to do your research ahead of time to prevent any unwanted accidents! If you’ve any questions, let me know. Hope the pictures are helpful if this wasn’t!

So here’s the first of a couple of posts about my motorized slider I’ve made. In this post I’ll cover the slider aspect of it; what I used and what holes I drilled, etc. After that, I’ll explain a bit about the control unit that is powered by Arduino and future plans. I won’t exactly outline what I did, but more of the concept of it so you get an idea of it all.

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After a several weeks of on again, off again work I’ve finally got a functional motorized slider. So the first thing I do is to take the slider for a ride in front of my window for about 2 hours, taking a photo every 10 seconds. The result is a nice sunset timelapse. It definitely isn’t the best or the fullest potential the slider can do (that’s to come soon), but it makes me happy to see that the thing works as I designed it. I’ll be writing a post about the slider itself soon, but there’s a lot of resources out there on the Internet as it is.

In short, I’m using an IGUS slider kit with parts from McMaster-Carr for the slider itself. For the motor and controlling unit, I’m using an Arduino and continuous servo. A lot of credit go to my brother for the electronics part.

So here it is in all its 30 seconds of glory:

For my New Media Visualization class, our final project was to demonstrate what we learned in the course through video. I produced two pieces for the class, both loosely connected. I spent a couple days shooting and editing these pieces, although I will admit I procrastinated quite a bit.

Unlike my work at University Web Communications, I was able to use copyright music. I probably used this assignment more to use certain music than anything; I think I want to direct a music video in the future (like Evan did).

Special thanks go to Alexa and Lyndsay for helping me out on this; they were too kind in helping me with this project.

Some neat facts:

• I recorded the unzipping sound of my pants separately by standing in front of the microphone at crotch level; you can hear it in the first video in the bathroom shot.
• Cooking the egg was incredibly cheesy, but I think me leaning forwards in the second video takes the cheese cake for sure.
• If you look at my butt in the second video while I climb up the train, you can see that I am wearing monkey pajama pants under my jeans. So basically I’m acting like a monkey, while wearing monkey pajamas.

Video #1 – Morning Routine

Video #2 – Bike Ride

A while back near the end of September 2010, I had the opportunity to work up in Portland to cover OSU’s Rally in the Square downtown in Pioneer Square. Only recently was I able to use the footage for something tangible, but I am very happy with the result.

For my work with OSU Web Communications, I was asked to produce a short 30 second clip summarizing the event in spirit and in premise. This was to be used for the University’s Portland Business Roundtable address in Portland that happened on January 19th, 2011. To get an idea of the type of event this was, this was where many stakeholders of the university and Portland business leaders were in attendance. I was thrilled to be able to present a piece of my work to this group.

A couple of neat facts about the video:

• All of the audio was recorded on a small but extremely capable audio recorder known as the Zoom H1
• There is nothing like seeing so many people come together for an event like this, there was so much orange!
• The band is not the Oregon State marching band, rather they are a group of OSU alumni that used to be part of the band

This is the video in all it’s glory, I hope you do enjoy!