The Dancing Birds

RE: The Dancing Birds

BigG — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:56:38 GMT

Wow what a creative project. Thanks for sharing and well done.

RE: The Dancing Birds

dixonselvan — Tue, 16 Oct 2018 04:20:36 GMT

Nice fun project [mention:2136c4649d3b47f78653b7e97ac61f69:e9ed411860ed4f2ba0265705b8793d05]

I liked the workaround for the button in the monkey’s belly! The birds also are interesting to watch.

RE: The Dancing Birds

Workshopshed — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 09:09:30 GMT

Enrico, another fantastic project. I love how the birds have sprung bodies.

RE: The Dancing Birds

kk99 — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 19:28:31 GMT

Hi Enrico,
It is awesome project. Congratulations.

RE: The Dancing Birds

DAB — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 19:10:13 GMT

Great fun project.

DAB

RE: The Dancing Birds

mcb1 — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 15:52:08 GMT

nice work Enrico.

I'm sure you had a lot of fun with the baby toy before you decided to rip it apart [View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-283817a3-8f18-47a7-b708-2dc988b50163/contentimage_5F00_3.png:16:16]

The use of the leaves as a cover is a great way to tidy up the scene without going overboard.

mark

RE: The Dancing Birds

genebren — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 19:50:20 GMT

Hi Enrico,

Looking at the scope traces (and relying on your observation that the PWM is effected without the servos connected), it sounds like the way in which the ports are being written to (from firmware?) might be causing the problem. Almost like there is a clear before set logic working. The spikes are occurring when other pins are changing, which seems to support this. One of the things that i do when driving servos is to only have once pulse at a time active. This works well, as most servos need a long 'low' period after the pulse as part of normal operations. Depending on servo types, I usually have a 1-2ms pulse on a 25ms repeat rate. I then have the pulses occur, on at a time, within the 25ms frame.

Good luck!

Gene

RE: The Dancing Birds

jw0752 — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 19:39:31 GMT

Hi Enrico,

Very nice and well done project. I enjoyed your explanation of the complexities that you encounter when you worked to integrate the different systems.

John

RE: The Dancing Birds

genebren — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 17:38:49 GMT

I very cool project. You have such a good grasp on the whimsy aspect of projects. Everything you create seems fun and creative.

Well done!

Gene

RE: The Dancing Birds

shabaz — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 13:06:05 GMT

Hi Enrico,

This is a really nice project. Amazing! This could be in shop windows, using touch controls through the glass maybe, for kids to control : ) They would have hours of fun. This project is really cute.

Incidentally, regarding the PWM, I'm wondering if it could be an issue with voltage spikes or glitches. If the trace from Bitscope is being monitored on the digital channels, then sometimes it looks like the software has done a logic pulse, but in reality it could be a small voltage spike or drop in voltage. To confirm that, it would need the analog Bitscope input to be used. If that is the case, then some beefy electrolytic caps (e.g. something betweeen 100uF-470uF maybe) could be tried near each servo, to give them each a small reservoir of energy. This is a guess though, it could be a PWM library issue too. I once had glitches that bugged me for weeks, I could not figure out what was wrong in the software, and in the end it turned out that the problem was the decoupling, because some CMOS circuitry (I was not using servos, just CMOS, but the brief load causing spikes in demand is similar) was using way more energy in short bursts than I expected (it was some camera board from ebay).

RE: The Dancing Birds

neilk — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 10:45:58 GMT

Hi Enrico

A super amusing project[View:/resized-image/__size/16x16/__key/commentfiles/f7d226abd59f475c9d224a79e3f0ec07-283817a3-8f18-47a7-b708-2dc988b50163/5123.contentimage_5F00_1.png:16:16]. Tough call on the BBC micro:bit issue with the Bluetooth Library - it has caught out out lots and lots of people, including me!

Great that you cracked it and got the whole system working.

Neil

RE: The Dancing Birds

14rhb — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 10:11:13 GMT

Hi Enrico,

Another delightful and top quality project from you - thank you for sharing and brightening up my day.

Good luck with the issues you mention at the end, although they didn't detract from the overall fun for me - sounds like the PWM for the servos are software generated. Perhaps you could offload the task to a dedicated servo IC or even another Micro:bit ?

Rod