The Birdometer v0.1a

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 02:18:02 +0000

The Birdometer v0.1a

Introduction

There’s an old Russian proverb: “Make a birdometer, it will be really fun.”

So I did.

My amazing girlfriend and I like birds. We have some hummingbird feeders. We have two Arduinos. We want to start taking data about our bird guests. So, we bought some sensors from the amazing Al Lasher’s Electronics Store in Berkeley. Then we made our “birdometer” by connecting an arduino to a passive infrared sensor, a small microphone, a Canon EOS 5D camera, and a PC. We then wrote some code to make the arduino trigger the camera shutter when the infrared sensor detects motion. We are also recording audio samples of the birds from the mic and sending them to the PC via USB.

Arduino & OS X Notes

Mon, 05 Aug 2013 23:25:46 +0000

My girlfriend and I spent last weekend building Arduino-controlled devices. Here are some random notes about working with Arduino (in an OSX environment)

splurge on a long USB device cable. also a breadboard and jumper wires
use stty to change baud & other settings on a device file - having access to the usual unix tools e.g. cat /dev/ttyUSB0 is a really nice thing
pyserial is always your friend. seriously it is fantastic.
the official Arduino docs are really good
don’t miss the docs for your specific model, for example, these are the specs for my old-timey diecimila
don’t miss the part about Arduino ints being 16-bits. Arduinos are little-endian but it rarely comes into play. the ADC produces 10-bit values.
this sparkfun article about using Arduino with relays will be useful to me soon
the OS X drivers for the FTDI chip on old Arduinos like mine are terrible. I’ve had 6 kernel panics in the last three days. i finally uninstalled them. luckily ubuntu has native support, so I currently program my old Arduino on the linux machine. My girlfriend’s Arduino uno doesn’t use this chip and working with it on OS X is fantastic.
the digital pin’s output mode high/low is enough to operate the coil in small low-voltage relays like this
this guy is doing interesting things with Arduino data acquisition
now i want one of these.

Arduino on galvanist

The Birdometer v0.1a

The Birdometer v0.1a

Introduction

Arduino & OS X Notes