Tangible compass, part 3: say Hi to N810

This is an iteration following part 1 and part 2 of the tangible compass project.

The focus of this revision is an excuse to get my hands dirty with Arduino and a N810. Following the good instructions from Dave Vondle at IDEO, I was up and running quickly with an Arduino talking directly to a Flash file running on a Nokia N810 tablet. The whole process is quite simple, my biggest issue was hacking a connector for joining two USB male connectors. While waiting for my special cables bought on eBay, I took my soldering iron and salvaged a dual USB jack from a defunct Phidget board. Add a touch of electric tape and it worked perfectly!

The next step was to make the whole package a bit smaller. I used an Arduino Wee, an USB to serial adapter and the newly received micro USB cable.

After some struggles with Actionscript 3 code (I’m not used to it, or just not using it regularly enough to be comfortable), I got it working the way I wanted.

What it does: The arrow maintains a specific heading obtained from the compass module. The Arduino gets the reading over I2C, sends the value over serial, a serial to flash java server transfer the data over to the Flash movie where the graphic is updated accordingly.

Build notes: It doesn’t work everywhere. I assume the surroundings have a lot of electro-magnetic perturbations. I should maybe try it outdoors where the signal to noise ratio is probably much better. Browsing the filesystem via shell on the N810 is not totally coherent with the one available via the GUI: “Documents” is accessible at cd /home/user/MyDocs/.documents/

Next step: add some haptic feedback to the graphic output. Build a case or plate to get the external components stable and fixed.