uRaNGaTaNG » mtXcontrol

mtXcontrol meets Launchpad meets Rainbowduino

tobi — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:48:44 +0000

That’s it! I just released mtXcontrol version 1.1 with lot of updates and improvements. One major improvement is full support for Novation Launchpad: just draw your sequences and display them on your Launchpad! Even better, push the buttons to change the color, add, remove, copy & paste frames. For that mtXcontrol makes usage of the Launchpad Processing library which I released some days ago.

But Rainbowduino support improved as well. I fixed lots of bugs and implemented requested features. Now you can control the display brightness, save up to 10 frames onto the device and serial port is auto detected. In general, I defined an basic API to communicate with the devices, which allows you to add more devices easily (e.g. monome!). With that, all Rainbowduino stuff is moved in a separate Rainbowduino Processing library.

Click here to view the embedded video.

See official mtXcontrol project page for more.

mtXcontrol wins the Seeedstudio Rainbowduino Carnival

tobi — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:02:43 +0000

Yay – the voting for the Seeedstudio Rainbowduino Carnival Competition is over. And, guess what, my project mtXcontrol made the run – I won the first price! Yipheee.. that’s 12x Rainbowduinos + 100$ Shopping voucher which I’ll invest in buying Xbee Stuff.. Can’t wait to get my hands on! Stay tuned…

Thanks to everybody voting for my project!

Btw. I just released the latest version 1.02 with some bugfixes and new features in the API…

Rainbowduino Carnival Competition Voting has started

tobi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:31:47 +0000

As mentioned in earlier post, I submitted the first public version of mtXcontrol to the Rainbowduino Carnival Competition by Seeedstudio. Now it’s time to vote for the best projects:

I know, the decision will be quite hard, as a lot of other cool projects were submitted as well. Like this cool Daft Punk Helmet or this nice lipsync speaking Robot…

Please check out the Raindrop Rainbowduino Game by my friend ccb23 as well. It’s a Rainbowduino connected via I2C to an Arduino with an Accelerometer. With that you can move the red dot on the Matrix and avoid hitting the falling blue raindrops. nice!

Make your vote!

mtXcontrol 1.0 released – as contribution to Seeedstudio Carnival Competition

tobi — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 18:46:45 +0000

As contribution for Seeedstudio Carnival I’m proud to release the version 1.0 of mtXcontrol today. It’s feature list extended quite a lot, beside new frame editing features like Frame moving and Copy & Paste, it now comes with Letter / Number placer to easily draw characters. Additional the frame preview bar makes it easily to navigate between the frames. As of this, it was time to get an proper UI with lot’s of buttons for those who couldn’t remember all those keyboard shortcuts (like me )

So check out this Demo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check out it’s new project page with details, video and sources to download:
http://www.rngtng.com/mtXcontrol

RainbowDuino here it is! (and how to program it)

tobi — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:32:50 +0000

Yay – I finally got my RainbowDuino. Unluckily I did sth wrong with the external power connection (JST 2 pin jack) and smashed a capacitor. Maybe the polarity was wrong or it couldn’t stand the 12 volts? But luckily no damage to the main system so it still works using the terminal connector (right through the 5volts of the Arduino). *phew*

The first real basic problem I ran into was how to program the Rainbowduino as there’s no USB connector and I don’t have an UART interface.
But well, nothing simpler than that: Just connect your Arduino’s Tx,Rx,GND,Reset and Vcc ports with those of the Rainbowduino, choose the right controller type in your IDE and program it as usual – works perfect for me!

Check out my Rainbowduino Editor mtXcontrol here – it’s an easy way to draw shapes on your rainbowduino!

Btw. DTR on Rainbowduino is Reset on Arduino

UPDATE:
Sorry I forgot to mention, this trick does NOT work if your host arduino is a ATmega168 – you need an ATmega328 to pass serial communication through. Before that, make sure you upload this blank sketch to your host Arduino first:

/* blank sketch to upload on Arduino */
void setup()
{
}

void loop()
{
}

And, as multiple times requested, a picture of my complete setup:

Make sure you’ve selected the switch right. It has to point to the same side as the green Terminal connectors are. If you power rainbowduino through the white JST jack, flip it!