Watch Ben Heck Build a Remote Expedition Camera! -- Episode 20

Hi Ben,

Another great job and interesting build.  I picked up some good ideas for some of my projects, so your build will spawn some copies in various forms.  I appreaciate your well documented build steps and discussions of how to apply your ideas into working models.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks,

DAB

Ben,

After watching this episode i had to ask why you reinvented the wheel with respect to the actuation of the camera. I would think that using or hacking a motorized mirror from a car would be easier since it has actuation in two axies to allow for pan and tilt on the cameras which would come in handy for an off-roading vehicle which might want to look over the edge of a drop-off. And since it came from a car it would be setup already for 12V power plus the contoller has the ability to switch between two mirrors thus simplifying the controls (much like a KVM switch). If nothing else you could use the mirror controls to get the input for pan and tilt and use stepper motors to change the orientation of the cameras. Just a thought.

Norbert Davis

Host - Totally Cool Tech Podcast

www.totallycooltech.com

Hey Ben,

I liked this episode, but I had a suggestion to make your life easier. When you've got code that you want to remove easily from some builds (like serial debugs, or different peripheral options) of your firmware, use preprocessor defines.

There's a couple ways to to this. The easiest would be to wrap each block where you're outputting serial data with an ifdef, eg.

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  Serial.println("Hello World");

  Serial.print("Another Line, manually returned\r\n");

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then you can simple put the following line at the top of your file when you want to have the printing enabled.

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

Another more advanced technique would be to create a preprocessor function to do the printing, like follows. I don't use Arduino much, so I can't guarantee it will work, but it will in most C compilers

#define SERIAL_DEBUG

#ifdef SERIAL_DEBUG

  PRINT(X) Serial.print(X)

  PRINT(X,Y) Serial.print(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X) Serial.println(X)

  WRITE(X) Serial.write(X)

#else

  PRINT(X)

  PRINT(X,Y)

  PRINTLN(X)

  WRITE(X)

#endif //SERIAL_DEBUG

Then in your code, you can simply use those functions instead of the Serial functions, there's no need for any other diff files.

David