Roots Multi Touch Tangible Installation Teaser

Freeduino

I just ordered my new Freeduino! :-) Looking forward to building a drawbot with it, but thats a whole new project. Will post the project details as I go.

Dual Boot Vista with XP, and other OSs

This is not something i came up with, but rather something i had a problem doing, and found the following site useful , i will post the url link and the tutorial.

enjoy

http://apcmag.com/5485/dualbooting_vista_and_xp

Interface the Velleman K8055 USB board with Matlab

After much time spent struggling to find some kind of tutorial to interface Matlab with a Velleman K8055 USB I/O board, I finally gave in and tried it myself. It actually wasn't all that hard. All that was required was the initial connection using the boards DLL. Here are the source files to download .

Included in this RAR file are the following:

• K8055 User Manual containing all the commands that can be used
• The M-File for Matlab
• The Dll and header file needed to access the board
  

For those of you who don't know much about this really useful I/O board, check out the Velleman site.

Basically what I did was write a short M-File to connect to the board, and display, in a separate window, all the commands present in the DLL. Once the function 'K8055_Connect' is called in Matlab, the user is prompted to supply the address of the board. This is selected by placing jumpers on the board, but check the manual to see how this is done. Then, Matlab tries to connect to the board. If it is a success, a separate window will pop up giving the user a list of all the functions that can be called to access the board's many digital and analog inputs and outputs.

These functions can be called by using calllib in Matlab:

Eg: calllib('K8055D', 'SetDigitalChannel',0);

This sets the first digital output high.

The nice thing about having such a board is you can now get data live from the real world and interface it directly to Matlab. You can get your program to sense, do some calculations, plot some graphs etc, then react. The perfect toy for all your Mechatronics projects involving matlab.

If you have any problems with the code or have any improvements to the code, just let me know. Oh, and please let me know about your project using this info.

Enjoy!