First Big “Arduino” Project

I got an arduino for christmas this year since I wanted to start to get into hardware engineering a bit. After fooling around a bit with the LED functions (as many people before me) I decided to jump into it with a N64 Controller to PC mod with the help of my good friend Waffle on the arduino forums. The reason arduino is in quotation marks is because this isnt really and “arduino” as much as it is an AVR microcontroller with an arduino boot loader that I interfaced (with the help of this tutorial) with a serial to usb chip. A little assembly later and a little copy and paste from another project utilizing a gamecube controller I was able to get it working:

Theres the controller in action.

Also here’s a closeup of the breadboarded arduino. I didn’t have the right capacitor for the job so youll notice I had to make a monster bundle of capacitors to compensate but it worked!

ATMega328 with an FTDI RS232 Serial to USB breakout board from Sparkfun.

All in all things went well but the processing application I used didn’t really read the inputs from the joystick very well, it was basically only on ON or OFF there’s was no sensitivity, so Mario was either running full boar or not moving, couldn’t make him walk or tiptoe!. I think more needs to be done until its playable….

New York Winter Rally Narrowsburg NY

Jan 23rd and 24th was the Winter Rally, went up and stayed with my aunt who has a house up in Equinunk that she spends all her free time at.

15 Minute Exposure

Its in the middle of NOWHERE so the stars out at night are amazing, I’m attaching a couple pictures that my brother (who literally did NOT remove this fisheye lens throughout the entirety of the trip) took of the race and a long exposure he took of the sky that came out pretty nicely.

McCormack/Doyle 2nd Place AWD

There was about 2 inches of ice coating the entire rally trail so there were alot of crashes and REALLY slow driving. I think about half the racers of 16 actually finished the rally and 2 were disqualified after the fact. There was one team in a red Ford Focus who were really stepping it up, and managed to almost finish the race but were disqualified at the 3rd to last stage due to what was documented as “co-driver not present at time of inspection”. Which kind of sucks, I would have liked to seen them take home a medal. Here they are at the stage just before they were DSQ’ed

Also as a little tidbit here are the final standing of the Rally

http://www.rallynewyork.net/linked/finalresultsnywr2010.pdf