I Love Cynics!

I have it on good authority that SQUEEEEE is the sound of pure internet joy. I take it that you must also bring your hands up near your chest and wiggle them around while saying it.
Today I received my distinctive red box from SparkFun that signified that my order was here. This makes me a [...]

[Read more →]

As Greg pointed out in a comment to my last post someone has worked on a project similar to mine. I have to say, their solutions are much more elegant than my own. So, in the spirit of design, I’m gonna totally steal a bunch of their ideas. The use of a dedicated [...]

[Read more →]

Pictured here is a circuit I was working with last winter, trying to convert the RS232 signal from the Garmin eTrex GPS to the TTL signal understood by the Arduino. I made two of those damn boards and neither worked. After intensely looking them over today, I found one that was salvageable. All that needed [...]

[Read more →]

Last winter I started on a project that would integrate a camera and gps into my motorcycle. The plan was to drive the Dalton Highway and have the system snap a picture every few minutes or miles. A few things put that plan on hold. First, I changed my summer plans and drove down to [...]

[Read more →]

Just realized that this blog turned five years old a bit over a week ago. Oddly, that doesn’t add up to a ton of posts. As many promises of “posting more” as I’ve made, you’d think there’d be more! Might as well make that promise again. I will do my best to post at least [...]

[Read more →]

A while back, I posted to the Arduino Forums about the trouble I was having getting actual data from the GPS to the Arduino. If you scroll down a couple of entries, you’ll see that I was getting a ton of gibberish.
The response from the Forum was that the RS232 output was not only [...]

[Read more →]

The GPS to computer serial cable that I originally purchased for my eTrex was about six feet long. For this project, I wanted a much shorter cable, so I didn’t have to coil up a load of cable and try to find space for it on the cross bars of the motorcycle handle bars. I [...]

[Read more →]

That’s what I’m getting so far when I hook up my eTrex to the Arduino. An example is shown below:

Rather disappointing considering that when hooked up to my computer and running Hyperterminal, notorious for sucking, it works perfectly, outputting nicely readable lines. Grrrrr. Ah well. I’ll figure it out. And if not, integrated GPS units [...]

[Read more →]

The new Arduino board I ordered on the day before Thanksgiving arrived today. Talk about quick service. Not a lot to post, since all I’ve done is unpack and load a basic test program. When I ordered the Arduino Duemilanove I also purchased the USB breakout board for the Arduino Pro. Below is a picture [...]

[Read more →]

A little poking around online and then fidgeting with a multimeter and the Garmin connection cable provided the following information on the cable pinouts:

On my cable the fourth pin, Power, did not correspond to any of the serial connector pins. That’s fine, and probably to be expected. I had no plans to use it for [...]

[Read more →]