Jonathan's Curiosity Page

"Doing curious things with technology in Ipswich"

Documentation relating to Curiosity Collective projects. Yes, guilty - that slogan is a light rework of one used by the Dorkbot people, but then the Curiosity Collective has its Dork side when all is wired and soldered. Oh, and the Ipswich I'm talking about here is the one in the UK - sorry if you live in one of the others and were getting all excited there for a moment.

Links page (links to distributors, manufacturers, etc)

Programmable LED

The first Curious thing I did was to make this 'programmable' LED. It has a light sensor which you can use to teach it a sequence to display on its single LED. It's based on an Instructables project by Alex Weber which I've reworked for a PIC microcontroller, so might be of interest if you have the gear for working with PICs rather than the Atmel device Alex went for. I chose to use a PIC12F683 - no special reason, just had a couple lying around. The light sensor was an LDR (light dependent resistor) that I bought at the Maplin store here in Ipswich - you may need to adjust the 6k8 resistor to get the sensitivity right with a different device. The 1k resistor sets the LED current and is a compromise between brightness and battery life. The coin cell was a 3V lithium type (a CR2032, or something like that). Make sure you get it the right way round because if you don't you WILL blow up the PIC. Many thanks to Dave for introducing me to the idea when he showed one at the Curiosity Collective show in April '07.

PIC assembler (asm 9k)
PIC hex file (hex 2k)

MIDI Interface Board (CC01-01)

This one was developed for the robot orchestra project. The board acts as an interface between a MIDI cable and the physical bits and pieces, such as solenoids and motors, that control the instrument. The manufacturing files are in the form of Gerber files that most PCB manufacturers should be able to work with. We had 10 boards made successfully from this data using a prototyping service (PCBTrain) here in the UK. (The zip file is exactly as sent to the pcb manufacturer except that I've removed my contact details from the readme.txt file.) If you want to examine the files, something that is always good practice even when it's your own design, you'll need a Gerber viewer program. I use gcpreview. Most of the components came from Rapid Electronics (see the parts list for their order codes) but you should be able to easily source them from elsewhere. One exception might be the 5-pin DIN connector since different manufacturers seem to use different footprints for these. Although I've given you the pcb files, in practice if you only want one board it makes much more sense to just wire it on a piece of stripboard - that's how I did the original circuit.

Circuit Diagram (pdf 88k)
Board Assembly (pdf 53k)
Design Notes (pdf 21k)
Board Manufacture Files (zip file 132k)
Partslist - not complete (txt 2k)
PIC Firmware c0001-01-03 (asm 21k)

This project is still on the go and there will be more documentation whenever I get around to it. I'm intending to do a guide to driving solenoids, motors, relays, etc, with the board, and there will be further revisions of the software as we gradually build instruments.

Licensing

The examples of my code linked to from this page are released under the GPL. See the header text, in each case, for more details.

All other documentation is released under the following Creative Commons licence:

Disclaimer

These designs should be regarded as one-off prototypes for personal use: none of them would be suitable, as they stand, for commercial production here in the UK, even if the licensing allowed it. There is no warranty and no support, so if you don't feel confident that you can fault-find any problems then they probably aren't for you.