Matt Taylor

Hi All,

Does anyone own or ahve owned a USB occiloscope similar to this?

I think an oscilloscope would be useful to have, but I don't have the budget for a 'real' one.

Also having a portable one that I can use with my netbook seems like a good idea.

Hi,

I've been trying to get my netbook setup so that I can work on my netduino stuff away from my PC.

I have installed C# Express 2010, .Net micro framework 4.1 and the Netduino SDK from the netduino.com downloads page, in that order (as they are listed).

I am able to write my program in C#E2010 fine, but when I come to deploy to the device, It is not available in the list of options for the target. MFDeploy.exe also does not find my netduino, and it is not listed in the System -> Device Manager window.

Also, there are no 'you just plugged something in' chimes when I plug the board in, which do get on my Desktop PC (running Win 7)

My netbook spec:

• DELL Insperon 1010
• Intel Atom CPU Z520 @ 1.33GHz
• 1GB RAM
• running Windows XP Pro version 2002 Service Pack 3
• Device manager sais that there's 3 USB and 1 USB2 ports, althugh there are only 3 physical sockets, so i think it may be that the USB2 port is shared.

two of my USB sockets have this logo and the other one has that with one solid and one dashed line beneath it, making me thing that it's the USB2 port, as its different. That might not mean anything or not though. I'm not 100% sure how USB ports work

I've tryed plugging into all of them anyway, no luck.

Is there anything in this spec that would stop my netbook recognising the Netduino, any more info I can provide that may be helpful or anything that I should try?

Apart from this (and I strongly suspect its something wrong with my laptop rather than the SDK) it's a brilliant little device, and I'm having loads of fun

Cheers,
Matt

Hi All, Here's the first actual thing I'm doing with the Netduino. I'm working on a short film, and we need to do a shot where I get shot in the shoulder. We did a trial run of the pyro side of the effect this afternoon, and now I'm working on the best method of sequencing the real effect. What the scene requires is that I will be running away from the bad guys, when I get shot through the sholder, with a small blood pack on the back, and a larger one on the front as entry/exit, and then maybe another dust/sparks pack on a wall about 6 feet in front of me. The camera will be wide, from the side of me, So I want to sequence the blood/dust packs so it looks like the shot goes in my back, out my front and then hits the wall. Here's the circuit I'm planning to build to trigger the blood/dust packs (called Maroons in the UK). I'll have 3 of these all running off the same safety key, I just drew one cos i'm lazy I would appreciated some feedback on the circuit design, and the project as a whole. I'll add a vid of the test as soon as I get it, and put up code/hardware as I design it. Thanks for reading! Matt

I think it would be cool to put an accelerometer in a punch bag and calculate the force of punches and kicks, maybe to give a score Has anyone done this or anything like this? What accelerometer modules would people recommend for this? The ones I've looked at all seem to max out at about 6g, I'm not sure if this would be high enough (although I'm not Chuck Norris)

Hi All, This is my first post, So I'll introduce myself. I'm Matt, I'm a games software engineer, a tinkerer, and I just got a Netduino While I'm finding parts for a larger mobile robot, I've been looking at ways of implementing autonomous navigation around my garden. My ideal end goal is to have something like an automatic wheelbarrow that I can use to cart stuff around the place. I'm starting small - I have a small RC car, and driving that with the Netduino is my immediate goal. What I want to discuss here is using active beacons placed around my garden as reference points, and then using triliteration to calculate the position of the robot (robots?) from this. The area the robots would be active in is about the size of a football pitch, and is almost totally level, but has trees and hedges that I think rule out line of site based triangulation using retro-reflective beacons and a robot-board laser scanner. So I have a few thoughts, and a few questions. My first idea was using GPS, however, from using the GPS on my phone, satnav, etc, and then checking the wikipedia article, I think that he accuracy of this will not be fine enough. Ideally, I'm looking for something under 30cm resolution (the paths between my vedgedables are about 60cm). That said, I'm informed by a non-technical archaeologist friend that they use a GPS (in that they have a hand-held magic gizmo) system that is cm accurate. So my second thought was using local radio beacons and time of flight. However, the Netduino, and I expect nothing I can get at radioshack can deal with the minuscule time intervals that I'd be dealing with over the distance of 10-100m. I've heard of methods of using the phase difference between beacons of same the frequency to calculate TOF over smaller distances far more accurately, but I think I need to read up on the limitations of this approach further. One interesting way of fixing errors here is by having known location beacons that send out a signal, a known location base station that receives them, and sends out a phase-error signal, and the unknown location receiver that uses both of these to calculate it's distance from the beacons. I cant find the paper for that, as soon as I stumble across it I'll post a link. I've wondered if ultrasonic beacons would work. What is the range of a consumer ultrasound transducer in air? Would this cause problems with the local wild-life? I'm also dubious about using a sound-based aproach, as there's a cold-store near by that generates a lot of noise. The other biggie is Timing. With radio, and to a lesser extent ultrasound, the timing would be critical to the TOF calculation. Would a crystal oscillator be accurate enough to keep timing over a long time (say 1 month, or better a year)? Ultrasound could be synchronised with a radio signal though. So there's my current embryonic thoughts on this. Hopefully there's some people out there that are also interested in similar systems, and we can get some discussion going and hopefully find a Netduino based solution Thanks for reading, Matt EDIT: Here's some links: The NASA Robotics Paralax QuadRover is actually something very like what my long-term goal would be. Here;s the homepage: http://www.parallax....97/Default.aspx and a demonstration of waypoint navigation here: http://www.youtube.c...u/2/-d-u9ShZIxA Interesting to note that on the parallax product page, only GPS and accelerometers are mentioned, which would suggest that is's using just GPS and dead reckoning... hmm, that's food for thought. Actualy, on second thought, I may be misunderstanding this, and the NASA guys are using a beacon system on-top of the paralax rover. This has turned out to be an excellent source of info. http://www.doc.ic.ac...al/vol2/jmd/#rf The Motarola Mini-Ranger Falcon solves the short TOF by bouncing the signal back and forth a few times .. interesting. Sorry BTW for readers that this is a bit of a rambling stream of consciousness post. If anyone finds it useful, cool beans. http://www.doc.ic.ac...al/vol2/jmd/#rf