Monthly Archives: July 2013

Update: 50% of Campaign target reached

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Great News – we have passed 50% of the minimum target, but with lots of hard work remaining to get to 100%.

We had a great weekend with the Maker Faire & coverage on the Arduino Blog. I believe we also got coverage on Adafruit yeaterday, all of which really helps to get the message out for AnalysIR.

Thanks again to our backers who shared the link to our project (see earlier post on how to) – it really helps and we can see the impact via the analytics.

We will make another update once we have fully recovered from Maker Faire (Great fun and very very hard work on the day and in preparation).

This morning we were pulling our hair out using the Leonardo platform, but it seems that unlike other Arduinos you need to properly close the serial port in the windows application before exiting, otherwise the Leonardo is visible as a COM port but unusable. It took hours to debug this and we will make a post on the Arduino forum in case others hit the same problem.

……more later and a BIG welcome to all of our new backers.

AnalysIR featured on Arduino blog for Dublin Maker Faire

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New infrared applications using Arduino at Mini MakerFaire Dublin (tomorrow!)

Friday, July 26th, 2013

AnalysIR

Here is an extract of the Arduino blog post featuring AnalysIR. Click the the link above to visit the Arduino Blog.

The power of infrared light was widely and best appreciated with invention of television’s remote controls. The signal between a remote control handset and the device it controls, consists of pulses of infrared light, which is not visible to the human eye.

Tomorrow at MakerFaire Dublin you’ll we able to see the work of AnalysIR, a project that is taking this technology to a whole new level.

They implemented a Windows application which connects to an Arduino with the addition of an IR receiver and can decode new IR signals in a fraction of the time: no need for expensive Logic Analyzers or Oscilloscopes.

Here they are with their Indiegogo campaign:

At MakerFaire they will be showing some cool demos of what you can do with IR like generating electricity, seeing the invisible -Using iPhone & Android camera to check if TV remote is working, long range TV remote Control Demo Using Optics and many more applications for a total of 10 installations. Look out for them on Saturday!

Update: Arduino Guru, Massimo Banzi tweets for AnalysIR

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We are off to the faire tomorrow, for a day of Fun  – Maker Faire that is. We are presenting 10 IR based exhibits (more later).

BanziTwitterIt has been an exciting day for us here in Dublin with the coverage on the Arduino blog. I have uploaded a screen grab from our twitter feed showing one of the Arduino founders tweeting about AnalysIR.  The blog is accessible from the Arduino website or via http://j.mp/16hAGH7 .

Video Update: Discrete Mode & Zooming

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Quick update to let you all know that we have just uploaded a new video showing some of the new GUI features of AnalysIR (Discrete Mode & Zooming). It can be found under the Gallery tab of our IGG  project or directly on Youtube via http://youtu.be/0p6cceVLYTA    – best viewed in full screen.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p6cceVLYTA

Update: Dublin Mini Maker Faire

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Welcome to our 2 latest Backers from Brazil & Ireland. Just wanted to let you all know that AnalysIR is featured on the home page of Dublin Mini Maker Faire (http://www.makerfairedublin.com/).

Over the past few days we have focused on improving the serial performance of data coming from the Arduino, which is not normally an issue with IR, except when recording Helicopter RC which can continuously send IR signals. The good news is that this interface is much higher performance now and will be published as part of the project

For the next week we will be focused on putting finishing touches to our 10 IR exhibits for the Dublin Maker Faire, which includes the addition of the Lego Mindstorms tower protocol & we may also get to meet our latest Irish backer.

You can see a list of our IR exhibits on  Dublin Mini Maker Faire

Update: Back in Dublin & new Features

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Welcome & a big thanks to our latest backers!  Back in Dublin, at last, after our latest travels and heads down in preparation for the Dublin Mini Maker Faire on July 27th. We hope to present 10 exhibits on the day, a couple of which we believe are firsts with IR on Arduino. (If we have time we will try to do some long range IR with lenses. Will have to figure out focal points & IR LED beam angles)

We have been busy working on adding support for a RC helicopter we recently found in the attic and have added support for it to AnlaysIR today. The model is the ‘old-ish’  SH SWIFT 6020-1  (not the more modern SY107 types) and should allow easy addition of other models later, if there is interest. We will have some fun at the Maker Faire at least.

It’s great having a tool like AnalysIR when decoding new IR protocols!
The good thing about this pending Maker Faire deadline is that we get to add extra features into AnlaysIR. In order to accomodate the Helicopter protocol we had to handle hundreds of IR commands in one sequence, whereas we would have dealt with a handful of signals in a sequence before. We have also added a popup window that shows the parameters of the Helicopter signals as they are processed, including slider bars visualising Throttle & Yaw.

Other features added recently include:
> Popup – showing more detailed breakdown of decoded signals in HEX & Binary
> Menu Option to exclude one or more protocols from the potential decoding attempts. (This helps when decoding intensive protocols like the Helicopter one).
> We have also added a new ‘discrete’ mode for each channel where every individual signal is recorded and displayed on its own. This was really required when receiving 100s of signals in the same sequence.

Our next effort is to decode a pair of Laser Challenge Pro laser tag units for the Maker Faire.

Remember, if you have any specific feature requests or use cases, please share them and do remember to share the link to this project via your social media channels.

Update: Maker Faire unveiling of AnalysIR

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Many thanks & welcome to our latest backer today.

We have been busy devising IR related exhibits for our stand at the Dublin Mini Maker Faire in just over 2 weeks. Haven’t been able to test out any of the ideas yet as we are still travelling abroad.

We also just realised that this will be the first public showing of AnalysIR (= butterflies :-). However, we will mainly focus on some Fun, Magic and Educational IR stuff as there will be lots of kids & non-Makers among the thousands expected on July 27th @ TCD, Dublin.

We have an unopened Toy Helicopter controlled by IR so we will have to get that decoded as well. As we go along – we hope to add a description of the demos to our Gallery for the majority of our backers who are not based in Dublin /Ireland.

Remember you can help our Project by sharing a link ( http://igg.me/at/AnalysIR/x/3752156 ) via your social media etc. Apparently you get Kudos with Indiegogo (or IGG) using your own link which is underneath the main video on the project page. The more clicks we get the more IGG promote our project.

Campaign Update: Truly international & Maker Faire

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Welcome to our latest backer, it’s turning out to be a truly international project. We are travelling until mid-next week (Asia & Europe) so may have limited access to the internet at times.

The reason for the update is to let you all know that we have just been invited to show AnlaysIR at the Dublin Maker Faire on July 27th, which is very exciting and partly due to the support we have received so far from our backers – thanks again.

We will have to do up a few interesting demos and are thinking about using a toy RC Helicopter and also putting AnalysIR head to head against an expensive Oscilloscope (Of course there will be only one clear winner!) Other ideas welcome!