SPOKA Night Light controlled from and Android Phone

You people must have been wondering “what the heck was going on” and why haven’t I posted anything for the last 3 months or so… keep reading and you’ll find out more !

Android – IOIO – RC Servo (or ESC)

This is a sequel to my first Hello World example with the IOIO / Android setup….

Android + IOIO controlling a RC servo

FEZ Domino – .NET Micro Framework

Arduino is great !

But programming in high level languages like Java all day long at work, I was started to grow increasingly frustrated with having to worry about “details” like memory management, no multi threading, string manipulation, etc. ..

So I was really looking for a micro controller / board that could be programmed with “real” java, powerful enough so that one doesn’t have to spend 80% of the time optimising the code, etc. …

I don’t remember how, but I found this FEZ Domino board (from TinyCLR) on the internet and I IMMEDIATELY knew it was for me…

Quite pricey compared with Arduino, but I’ve had it for a month now, and it’s such a pleasure to work with it… you still have to worry about some optimisation (for example I’m having 3 IR receivers on my Toy Tank and they all use interrupts and I realised that if I’m not careful the delay introduced by each, can affect the correct timings of the others !).

FEZ Domino with the "Component Shield" on it (I don't like the JST cable, I much prefer the RC servos ones)

Now I’m upgrading the Toy Tank to use this much more powerful board.

Electric remote controlled Tiger 1 Tank toy + arduino

It all started when I found this ex-display toy in a store, for “only” 30£ (rather than the initial 90£), because it was missing its remote…

Wow, something cheap and “not working” is the perfect excuse to open and hack it straight away…

RX5_ATS305R Pin FUNCTIONS

RX5_ATS305R Pin OUTS