The Firmata protocol is used for a variety of uses, from home automation to robots. Any time a computer needs to control a low-power device you might find it being used. It's built upon MIDI, which is a very old protocol used mostly for music. Because of MIDI's simplicity, microcontrollers (like the Arduino) can parse it without much overhead. Even though it was standardized in 1983 it's still in use today in the music, theater controls, and robo…
Earlier this week we had this year's first NodeBots NYC event! Andrew and Myself were happy to host. We need to thank About.com for giving us food, space and heat.
As you may know, we share our library of electronics with ScriptEd, a non-profit which teaches programming in under-resourced schools around the city. So we were quite overjoyed when the NYC conference, Empire Node, donated their Arduino kits from their conference this past Fall. Thes…
I was recently helping Sara debug an issue with a project for an upcoming book she's writing a chapter in. She was using Johnny-Five and a Spark Core to remotely control a boat with JavaScript.
The setup was a sparkfun motor driver and a standard servo hooked to A0 and A1 of the Spark Core.
Sara had one submersible thruster on the boat hooked up to the motor driver and a rudder hooked up to the servo. She was using VoodooSpark with Jo…
I've been asked a few times what to buy when starting with electronics, especially when it comes to micro-controllers and sensors. You're going to end up buying a ton of parts while exploring. You'll have a hard time using a lot of these components until you're comfortable with their conventions. It's also important to make sure your everything works together.
For starters, lets go with a kit - the SparkFun Inventors Kit.
It comes with a wonderf…
Yesterday marked the end of a several week sprint to improve tests around Johnny-Five. My goal started with fixing an inconstantly failing test, innocent enough. Today I'm proud to say we have cleaner code, a faster suite runtime, and a further decoupling of objects and libraries within the project. I learned a lot about testing in javascript, and I'm finally able to publicly share code I've written with regards to testing. A lot of this I'd love…
