Arduino RFID project talk tape lost

Just got informed by one of the organizers of newline conference of the whitespace hackerspace that they can't find back the recording of my talk Bringing logic to a gym.

BUMMER

So I guess that I should have brought my own recording material.

Standing desk - part 2

So what to do with your old desk when you made yourself a new standing desk?  Throw it away?

Nope,
just put a board underneath it,
add some wheels,
throw some file cabinets on the board,
put your tools on the cabinets

and TADA!!!!!!

a small work bench that you roll out whenever you need some extra space and you don't want to clutter up your standing desk :-D

Standing desk - part 1

Just finished the base version of my standing desk.  It still needs some finishing touches and I still have to throw my gear back onto the desk.  But here are some shots of my new *achum* work of art.

The base is mostly made up of some 2by4s and some angle iron and the top is a door I had laying around.

It's dimensions: Height 105cm, Depth 78cm & Width 200cm
Follow up of this blog post is here.

Ongoing work

Hello all

I'm currently over my head in work and preparing for my exam japanese, so I have been unable to find time to blog about anything.  However these are the projects that are currently ongoing/just started and for which you can expect some posts in a week or two:

• My Arduino security system project (I recently got an arduino Mega so I can expand my project a bit)
• A standing desk project from a door I had laying around from my house renovation
• A 19" 12U server rack made from two-by-fours
• An attempt for a home made aluminium pan and skillet organizer
• A small solar energy harvesting project

I'm still waiting for some people to post the talk I gave about my Arduino project at Newline on youtube, so I can share it with you.

So, I hope to be blogging again soon.

My first Arduino project - part 7

I have currently split up the logic in two parts:

• one sketch contains the logic for the RFID reader, checking the administrative data on the SD card and logging to the SD card
• a second sketch to manage the content of the SD card (work ongoing for the moment)

These two sketches are uploaded to my github account.

I needed to split up the logic over two sketches as I ran into problems while trying to keep everything in one sketch.  My Arduino seemed to grind to a halt when I started to call some of the data management logic that I already implemented.  In the future I'll attempt putting all the logic back in one sketch, but for now I'll try to keep the development up to speed as much as possible

I haven't posted in a while as I was preparing to talk about my project on the newline event at the whitespace hackerspace in ghent.  You can find my presentation, in openoffice format, in the doc directory on my github repository.

In the coming week I hope to complete the data management sketch.  I'll keep you posted 

My first Arduino project - part 6

Using NewSoftSerial

Until now, each time I had to upload the latest sofware to the Arduino I had to disconnect the RFID reader as it used the RX pin.  Using NewSoftSerial library I can emulate RX and TX on other pins.  So I use digital pin 8 & 9 to do this. Pin 9 is not really used as no data is send to the RFID reader, but the NewSoftSerial constructor only seems to take both RX and TX.

This change is also needed as I am going to try and interface the arduino with my laptop using USB.

You can download this latest version from my github repository:
git://github.com/NAVNi-stuff/arduino-rfid-datalog.git

Stats

compiler

Binary sketch size: 20692 bytes (of a 30720 byte maximum)

pins

Currently I'm using digital pins 2, 7, 8, (9), 10, 11, 12, 13; analog pins 4 and 5 and the 5V pin.

So 6 digital pins left and a few analog pins

My first Arduino project - github repository

Just a quick blog.  From now on, the code for this project will be hosted on github.

Check it out at:

git://github.com/NAVNi-stuff/arduino-rfid-datalog.git

This will be a lot easier than copy-pasting my code and will make my blog post a bit more concise.

Have fun