Tag Archives: make controller

Upgrade your MAKE Controller

Upgrade

As you can see, I’ve upgraded my MAKE Controller.

I’ve long been a fan of googly eyes and of putting them in places where people don’t expect to find them. In this particular case, it’s a clear improvement, and I expect to see them included as standard equipment in future revisions of the MAKE Controller.

Along the same lines, it’s been really great to see googly eyes getting some popular attention lately in such places as the Klutz book and the Amy Sedaris Craft Challenge, which produced some amazing results– check out the flickr pool.

[Related: LabVIEW routines for the MAKE Controller]

LabVIEW routines for the MAKE Controller

MakeController

As evidenced by a growing collection of projects, the MAKE Controller has great potential as a hardware platform enabling computers to really do things.

We won a MAKE Controller for our set of Halloween projects this year, and we’re just starting to play around with it. Having spent some pondering how best to communicate with the board, it’s clear that one of the barriers to more widespread use of this and other embedded systems is the lack, or perceived lack at least, of user-friendly software for programming and communication.

A number of open-source software packages, such as processing and Ruby, can communicate with the MAKE Controller using its OSC interface. However, there has been a noticeable absence of a suitable interface to LabVIEW, a program that is commonly used for interfacing to other similar types of hardware.

So, we wrote one. It’s a simple LabVIEW “vi” routine for issuing (most) simple commands and queries to the MAKE controller. We’ve also included some example routines to help you get your blinky lights going a few minutes sooner.
Continue reading LabVIEW routines for the MAKE Controller