Musings on the Human Condition

Getting Angular to Play Well With HTML5 ContentEditable HTML5 introduced a cool new attribute, which can be attached to any element to make it editable ( contenteditable="true" ). However, that's just the theory. To make that work, you have to use a data binding library (e.g. AngularJS, BackboneJS) or build your own using JavaScript. I recently created a todos application using pure JavaScript (with jQuery) with a Node/Mongo backend, i.e. without using any data binding framework. This is a good exercise to ensure that you understand JavaScript well enough before you start leaning on hefty frameworks that obscure a lot of what goes on behind the scenes. If you understand JavaScript, you'll be better able to troubleshoot and fix issues that come up when you're using frameworks. My pure JavaScript app is deployed on Heroku here . The code is on GitHub here . Once I was happy enough with the pure JavaScript application, my next goal was to redo it using Angul...

[Everything in this robot is built from scratch, no kits used (except for the chassis).] Click here to view the previous steps in this series. Step 1 (Basic Operation) Step 2 (Remote Controlled) Further to adding the remote control feature, I added the L293D H bridge chip to allow the Arduino to reverse motor direction. This also allows for the removal of the 2N2222 transistors that were previously managing the power supply to the motors based on signals received from the Arduino. As you can see from the video and the schematic, using the L293D chip significantly reduces the complexity and bulk of the circuit. On the other hand, you now need to respond to one more remote key press (down/reverse) and issue two more pin signals (reverse action, one for each motor).

[Everything in this robot is built from scratch, no kits used (except for the chassis).] I finally found the time to add remote control capability to the robot I had created around this time last year. Check out my earlier blog entry for details on how I created the core robot . After building the core robot (see link above) and getting it working, I decided that the next best step would be to add remote control capability to it so that it could be moved around as desired. I decided to try the Vishay TSOP4838 infrared remote receiver/sensor. I first created a proof of concept for the remote and the receiver. Even though I have several remotes at home, I decided to buy a cheap and simple remote just for the robot so that I could do all of my testing without interrupting those at home who wanted to watch TV. As it turns out, any infrared remote can be made to work with the robot. Just get your program to spit out (to the serial console) the received raw codes from the remote ...