Retro/Robot/Software/Hardware Things.
Continuing the trend of making GLSL Shadertoy shaders from my favourite films, the next on my list was The Abyss (1989).
I was stretching myself a bit with this one, practising my reflection/refraction/caustics skills whilst (as always) trying to keep a decent frame rate.
I would have loved to make the ‘face’ as good as the one in the movie, but alas the effort needed to model out far outweighed my GPU.
The GLSL shader source can be found here, and a 360° VR view here.
There’s a new Dune movie coming out soon, so I thought I’d make a ‘Dune’ shader (based on the 1984 version).
Nothing too complex in this scene. It’s the first time I’ve used polar coordinates in an SDF (for the teeth and mouth segments), but the landscape is just a simple FBM noise. Ripples are added outside of the SDF to keep the frame rate higher.
The GLSL shader source can be found here, and a 360° VR view here.
I’m currently making a self balancing robot, powered by an Arduino Nano, and decided to use NEMA 17 stepper motors to power it.
The DRV8825 motor drivers are great, but cannot be driven using a PWM signal. Consequently the Arduino code must send a ‘step’ signal to the correct pin many times per second – Easily in the thousands if you require a decent amount of speed, especially if you’re micro-stepping.
Performance is critical…
Continue reading “Arduino Code – Performance”In most of my Arduino projects I find myself in a situation where two things apply:
void loop() function needs to run very quickly.Unfortunately outputting to the serial window can add significant performance problems, so to keep the speed up I choose to only output every n milliseconds.
This requires a timer…
Continue reading “Arduino Code – Timed Events”My current Arduino project is a self-balancing robot, which requires repeatedly reading angle and acceleration values from an MPU-6050 gyro.
These values can be quite ‘noisy’ – fluctuating considerably when vibration is added into the system – so I found myself in need of some simple code that helps smooth out the values…
Continue reading “Arduino Code – Complementary Filter”Needing to write output to the Arduino IDE’s ‘Serial Monitor’ is something you might find yourself doing a lot. It’s one of the easiest ways of giving feedback on variables, and is invaluable when it comes to debugging.
To output content you can use code like this:
Serial.println("Hello world");
All good so far. How about if you want to output a variable? That’s slightly more work…
Continue reading “Arduino Code – Logging”I have been coding for the Arduino for a while now, and over time I have written a small collection of routines that can be reused in different projects.
I will share some of this code in future posts, but I thought it would be useful to show how you can add code to your project without ‘bloating’ the main source file too much. Continue reading “Arduino Code – Header Files”