Steve's Things

Well, since I posted a bit of stuff yesterday I’m gonna post a couple of other things I’ve been playing with. Since I finally have a day off. may as well.

The FPS I’m making

I don’t know what I’m gonna call it, I don’t even like FPS’s anymore. I dunno. Anyways, heres a screenshot

FPS a la' Steve

Nothing spectacular.

Arduino and ChipKit

Like I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been playin with both the Arduino and ChipKit. Frankly, I need to get over my personal bias over these arduino based things. The way I feel about them is that it’s like cheating, where very little learning is required to make some sort of result.

I am however wrong. With the progress of technology we use technologies that are based off of previous technologies. Even using MCU’s would technically be cheating by my reckoning since we should be using a CPU and related chips. Then even deeper we should be using nothing but transistors in order to not cheat. So, by that reason, I am wrong. Using an arduino and premade shields shouldn’t reduce the feeling of accomplishment at all. Now that we don’t have to worry as much about hardware, application becomes top dog.

Anyways, Here are the Arduino and ChipKit

ChipKit and Arduino

Now, as it might seem, the chipkit is quite a bit more advanced. It uses the same arduino software for compilation. It is also substantially faster. There was a comparison done, here on hackaday. It is a really neat device despite the fact that the software isn’t optimized.

The only problem though, as I have already mentioned is the voltage difference. So, it can be said that many shields would not be compatible with the chipkit. They do have similar layouts though.

ChipKit and Arduino from the top

A problem I did have with the chipkit was that the software wouldn’t write to the chip. apparently I had to download and burn the new bootloader to the MCU that was on board. lucky thing I have a pickit3 and was able to burn it, otherwise it would’ve been a brick. I think it’s odd that they didn’t test for that (apparently it was a certain batch of pic32 mcus that had a problem)

Something I do like about the chipkit is the extra IO and the fact that it uses a miniB plug rather than a massive printer usb plug.

Wireless units

At 4$ shipped per piece, these are wireless units. they have a variable frequency selectable by software and have a range of about 100m. I was going to make some of the centerpieces with them but since people take them home, it’d be pointless.

Wireless modules

Well, I’ll keep on truckin’