OpenDog Robot

James Burton has upgraded the micro controller on his impressive openDog robot with a Teensy 3.6.

James has been building open Dog, an open source robot inspired by the Boston Dynamics dog robots.  He recently upgraded the micro controller to the Teensy 3.6, replacing 3 Arduino MEGAs with it.  The Teensy 3.6 provides 6 serial ports, needed for the motor controllers, and allows the code to run in one place, avoiding multiple serial hops.

He’s published a multi part video series on the building of openDog that is well worth checking out.

The project is fully open source with the code published on GitHub.

LED Octopus

Mingjing Huang has developed the LEDoctopus, an expansion board to make developing your LED projects easier.

The LEDoctopus I/O expansion board makes it easy to get started on LED projects – no soldering required.  All you need is to plug in your Teensy, with pins; up to 8 WS281x LED strips using standard terminal blocks; and 5V power using a standard barrel connector.  You can also use USB power through the Teensy. Or if you have a high power application, the board includes a place to add a connector rated up to 45A.  Once you have everything plugged in, you’re ready to start using the OCTOWS2811 library to control your LEDs

This board is available on Tindie.

Data Logger

Clovis Fritzen put together a data logger to collect information from his experiments.

The goal of the project was to design an easy to use data logging device that features both analog and digital readings.  The project started with a basic sketch to ready data from an analog input and store it to an SD card.  Future ideas for the project include adding a small LCD screen and making the logging internal configurable.

Code for the project is available on GitHub.