This part of the Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer series discusses the software that will make the capacitive kitchen timer come alive. It also talks about how I implemented the capacitive touch ring and some experiments I conducted to ensure good gesture detection and user experience.
Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 3
This part of the Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer series discusses the hardware aspects of the project. In the last part, we took a look at the project idea itself, the goals, and skimmed over the theoretical principles behind capacitive sensing. So, it was now time to design a simple circuit and a PCB, which proved to be quite a bit more difficult than expected…
Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 2
A dear friend of mine recently sent me a very interesting idea for a new project, and I decided to pick it up and got working at it as soon as I could. His idea was to build a digital kitchen timer that operates like the USB volume knob I built a while ago. I didn’t just want to recycle an old design, and the USB volume knob would be pretty unsanitary in a kitchen anyway. So we came up with a new idea that involves capacitive touch sensing and an Arduino, and this series of articles discusses each part of the project from the first idea, to the theoretical aspects, all the way to the hardware and software. I decided to write this series as the project goes along (similarly to the older word clock series), so things are subject to changes. However, I think this gives you a good opportunity to see just how much trial and error goes into such a project, and I hope I can help you avoid mistakes that I make by documenting them.
Continue reading Building an Arduino based capacitive touch kitchen timer – Part 1
I’ve played my fair share of video games in the past twenty years, and ever since I played for the first time, I was fascinated with how someone could make these games work. More often than not, a special mechanic in a game left me wondering how the programmers could implement a certain feature. However, i often notice patterns in enemy behavior. Therefore, it is way too easy for the player to predict how enemies might react to certain situations. While this might have to do with limited AI design, I recently had the idea to experiment with genetic algorithms to make enemies adopt to the player’s style over time to make it more difficult for the player to achieve his goals. My theory is that this way, enemies will adapt to the player over time, and this, in turn, forces the player to try different strategies to succeed. This article summarizes my experiments and discusses the results and how they could be applied in game development.
Continue reading Use genetic algorithms to improve enemy AI over time in video games
In the last article, I summarized the process of enabling and using GPIO pins on the Okdo E1 by configuring the MCU in the MCUXpresso IDE. This time, I’ll enable pin interrupts that allow an application to react to various events.
Continue reading How to use interrupts on the LPC55S69 powered Okdo E1
Over the last couple of years, I’ve utilized a few different Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other Linux based hobbyist development boards, like the BeagleBone Black, for many of my projects. I, however, never used other microcontroller boards that weren’t Arduino compatible. Recently, I started experimenting with the Okdo E1, a development board that’s powered by the LPC55S69, a very capable NXP microcontroller.
Continue reading How to use the GPIO pins on the LPC55S69 powered Okdo E1This article discusses how user code can be uploaded to both, the MCU and the FPGA, of the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000. Some time ago, I wrote this summary of the topic which, however, didn’t include an easy to follow tutorial. Instead, it was more of an outline aimed at more experienced users. However, today I tried to re-create the steps, and I noticed that the original article wasn’t as simple to follow for beginners as I’d have liked it to be.
Continue reading Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 Verilog FPGA and MCU hello world tutorial
