Roman's Projects and Work

Alright, an update!

Mon, 3 May 2010 23:09 Pacific/Auckland

For the past few weeks, I have been busy with school and will become more busy as I will need to devote more of my time towards study because mid-year exams are only weeks away.

I have been squeezing a little bit of time to work on Furby, giving him a new voice and so far it's coming along pretty well. I've written up a read/write functions that allows me to read and write to the EEPROM (well still working on the write part, but thanks to my JDM Programmer, I was able to write to it from my PC).
I've been looking at code that was written for a simple Speech synthesis that can be found here

It's all written in PIC ASM so I'm slowly reading through it and making sense of what's actually going on so I can reproduce something similar and I will use that as a starting point for my speech synthesis. That site uses two 32KB EEPROM chips where as I'm using one or two 64KB EEPROM chips so if I wanted to I can increase the bit-rate of the Digital to Analogue sample rate and produce a clearer and more understandable speech.

On another note, I'd like to know who is actually reading my blog/news page, so if you don't mind, please post a comment :) (your email will remain completely confidential)

Cheers
Roman

Furby Hack Part 1

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 13:43 Pacific/Auckland

Hey guys and girls,

In my last news update, I talked about hacking a furby and making him talk and understand voice commands...
Well my initial hack of motor control is now complete and I can set the gears in furby to what ever position I need.

As you can see I'm sending commands from a simple C# program on my computer to my microchip by serial, the microchip takes the command and then forwards it onto the PIC16F630, which is the motor control.

This chip knows the current position of the gear and determines which direction to turn will get to the end result faster.
As the motor runs, there is a slotted gear inside furby that is between an IR LED and a IR Photo Diode, every time one of the four slots passes the IR beam, the motor control μC gets a signal pulse and indicates that the gear has moved. The μC counts how many times it gets a pulse and stops the motor when the count is equal to or greater than the input.

The Schmitt hex inverter was used to clean out the signal from the IR Beam but in the end i realised I had forgotten to give power to the logic circuit in furby and I now no longer need the hex inverter.

Stay tuned as my next step is to implement the IR receiver (between furby's eyes) and later I will work on Speech synthesis.

Please comment and bookmark this site.

Cheers
Roman

Up Comming Projects

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 11:41 Pacific/Auckland

For the past few months, I've been busy with a few things, school being an important one. But it's time I update my site with a bit new news.

I've got a few projects planned that I'm hoping to have done this year.

First off is a Furby hack. I've been given an older Furby and the first thing I did was took its skin off looked at its inner workings. I've Googled around a bit and found plenty of information on the circuitry and how it works which then gave me an idea of what I could do to it.

I'm going to replace his micro-controller with a PIC micro-controller and interface him with my computer (USB or RS232) and have him announce any new emails, new weather updates or important events.

This is going to be my first fully documented project and completely open-source so you guys can get a taste of it too.

My next project will hopefully be a 3D printer... Yes you heard me right. a 3 dimensional ink jet printer.

I'm aware that there are other 3D printers out there already being used by many hobbyists such as Rep-Rap and Fab @ Home. This one is different, instead of extruding molten plastic layer upon layer, this spreads out a very thin layer of powder for each layer then the print head goes over each layer and prints a image causing the powder to stick together.

After the process has been done, the fragile 3D model is extracted and finished with a epoxy to make the model solid and usable for everyday tasks.

Thanks for reading and please comment!!! :P

Cheers
Roman

Interfacing a Touchpad via PS/2 on a PIC16F628A

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:49 Pacific/Auckland

Hey everyone,

I have just added a new project, it is interfacing a touchpad with a PIC16F628A via PS/2

Check it out

Cheers
Roman

RSS 2.0 is now supported!

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:18 Pacific/Auckland

Hey, just a quick update to let you guys know that this site now uses RSS 2.0

So go ahead and subscribe to it so you can have the latest updates to this site

Cheers
Roman

New De-soldering Tutorial posted on Instructables!

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:42 Pacific/Auckland

Hey and welcome everybody,

I have just posted a new tutorial on Instructables on how to desolder surface mount ICs.
This might not be useful to everybody, but it's something and I'm proud of it.

How to De-Solder surface mount ICs - More DIY How To Projects

Cheers
Roman

New Image scaler script

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:06 Pacific/Auckland

Thanks to ridgerunner From DevNetWork.net, he came up with a regular expression that will look up resized images on my site and replace them with a new image that gets rescaled to that size to help with loading time and makes the pictures look that little bit better.

If you want to find more information on this, look here

Thanks Ridgerunner!

Roman