Here is a little plug for an excellent product a friend is co-directing…
The Essential Elixir For Tattoo Longevity! 100% chemical and cruelty free….
This revolutionary tattoo tonic has been designed to nourish, regenerate and bring out the natural luminosity of your skin, especially when it is placed under duress (winter, wind/sunburn and tattoos etc) and in need of extra protection and a little healing promotion.The ingredients used in this product will NOT (as many other recommended tattoo products on the market will) block your skin’s pores, (which will obviously delay natural skin healing), strip colour from your tattoos (lanolin - used in most tattoo products!), harm the planet or any of the creatures living in it. Pure reassurance in every tin.
Missy Le Pink’s Tattoo Tonic is a soothing, healing, restorative balm, thoughtfully hand made with 100% natural, Vegan and high grade Organic (wherever possible) ingredients. It is completely FREE of Petroleum, Lanolin, Parabens and Preservatives (other than 100% natural ones!) so will not block pores and strip colour (as practically ALL other brands - including Bepanthen will.)For your safety, this product has been extensively researched AND tested (on people and fresh tattoos), and has passed all E.U. safety regulations necessary for it to be available on the market.
Note the jump cables.
Sparkfun decided to link the Clk and Data pins to the same ones the Ethernet shield uses.
Fixed now.
Burgervan tadpole?
Maybe.
The screen is alive!
What a fun Saturday (given the standard of entertainment in Reading)
At the moment I’m just setting the text as gibberish, hence standards: low, that doesn’t actually mean the standards are low. Each string has to be mapped to the screen to stop it overlapping or running over. At this time it wasn’t even connected to the server. That is where I will place the server information though so it’s a good place to put it now. I don’t think I’ll put the burgervan tadpole information anywhere because there is no burgervan tadpole. Although, maybe there is?
Please put a severe Government health warning on any use of Strings on the Arduino main reference pages, or remove Strings completely from the reference - there must be hundreds of people being sucked into using them by advertising Strings there.
Of which I am one. I completed coding a massive portion of this new project just over a week ago and I was set for the downhill glide into coffee heaven.
While testing the code I find the memory clogs up after between an hour and five hours of receiving and interpreting information from the twitter web server. All demo sketches on this subject supplied with the libraries used Strings to handle the bulk of the work. With this and the lack of warning supplied, I now find myself rebuilding sections of code with language not even documented on the Arduino Reference page. If you have not encountered this project or maybe you’re not sure why you’re arduino crashes after a few hours… There is a bug and here is as much documentation as I can offer you, including some commands not displayed on the reference page to help you work around it.
^The problem
^The lack of warning
^The recent thread explaining it
^An older thread explaining it
^What to use instead (c string)
^Useful c string commands
^ Some other useful modules Arduino Reference never told you about
I found no documentation about it until I started a thread concerning a crashing problem. I think it definitely needs to be made clear that String is currently unstable. If you don’t ask, you generally don’t find out… Which is the opposite of what I need as I’m, for the most part, a visual learner. For that reason I’m sharing this information now to hopefully save some of you the same problem in the future.
I’m a little worried that perhaps this is out of the hands of the open source community as no one seems to be able to fix this nasty problem.
Top is the working relay test. I can controll it from my twitter with keywords.
bottom is pink EL wire.
You cant really tell on this camera but the pink EL wire has a two tone effect, violet cable with a neon pink casing.
I recommend this over green, yellow and blue.
Today is hardware day!
The code cannot progress without its physical counterpart.
Im going to attach a relay here to allow it to be controlled by the Arduino.
I just need to make sure the relay can handle the voltage. Mains tops at 240v but I dont know if this device lowers that voltage internally or not. I could do with a multimeter right now.
I think this means the LCD is faulty.
This is an irritating set back, maplin is way out of town and I will need a replacement.
The arduino now reads, compares and responds to tweets with some slick, saftey measures I’m pretty damn proud of.
I used the randomseed() on A5 to stop repeat tweets. I wanted to use the time from worldweatheronline.com’s XML but it was really hit and miss at loading the page. Sometimes it wouldnt load past the first couple lines of information. The best way around this would be to remove a third party and build my own time XML data. I will update it in the future when I get some webspace. For now each tweet will have a random number between 1 and 1000 attached.
After the Serial is printed to the LCD I will connect it to the Device it will control and set up the variable functions and transistor.
In other news I have an interview with Loxone tomorrow for a tech support role. Home automation all the way!
Oh… and we now have a kitten.
I have successfully made my Arduino tweet from a button press for the first time.
Minor excitement.
Now I need to
- Date each tweet
- Read Twitter for @me triggers.
Example-
@stusarduino, ‘turn the lights on’> lights turn on - Then get it to reply like so…
lights turned on > @stu, the lights are on now (22:24, 05/03/2013) - Allow only certain twitter accounts to access the twitterbot (to stop you from fucking with it)
- Set the eTape to tweet water levels as a variable resistor like so…
water level is low> tweet ‘water level is low (12:45, 07/05/2034) ’
water level is high> after tweeting level is low?> tweet ‘thanks for the refill (12:52, 07/05/2034)’ - Set the arduino to tweet when inactive for an hour to remind people to use it.
- fit LCD Screen and send serial monitor to screen for ease of use
- Burn my eyes out by overfilling my body with hot coffee.
- Construct hardware
- Test
- Test
- Remember something I’ve forgotten right now and do that.
The lovely people at Proto-pic sent me some free EL wire with my order for my new project. This is perfect as the only light switch for the stairs and landing light is at the top in our new, old, poorly designed townhouse. So I’m going to build a touch triggered safety light strip under the hand rail. For when we come home drunk.
