How many wires on your stepper?

4 = bipolar only
5 = unipolar only
6 = bipolar or unipolar, depending on wiring
8 = bipolar or unipolar, depending on wiring

http://people.ece.cornell.edu/land/courses/ece4760/FinalProjects/f2012/asj42_gs368_ln226_awh49/asj42_gs368_ln226_awh49/index.html for how to massage piezo signals. You can amplify and detect anything -- the question is how many false alarms you'd get.

Check Youtube for the "Ford ka commercials." Might give you some (bad) ideas particular to handling cats on your car.

 

Your assumptions are not correct. Generally a peripheral device like a motor or fan will run at a voltage different than the "logic" voltage. In your case, you're supplying four 1.5V batteries to power the Uno, which it converts to 5V to run both boards' logic signals, and then you're supplying a second four-battery pack to power the motor which then runs on the full 6V. If you were to run a fan it would be connected in parallel with either the board or motor's battery pack and then be switched using a transistor. Wired in parallel both the motor and fan would still be seeing 6V.

The 5V / 3.3V switch is so you can match the voltage of the logic signals between the controller (your Arduino) and the stepper board. You're using it with an Uno so it should be set at 5V. Some of the Arduino clone boards sold by Iteadstudio, the maker of this stepper driver board, are switchable between 5V and 3.3V logic signals hence they probably added it to stay compatible with their own products.

The "FET Switches" board is for DC only. Unless you have a specific need to be able to "dim" a DC light then the second board, with electromechanical relays, would be preferred.

The relays on the second board are designed to be powered by a 5V supply, but anything ~5V to 12V should be fine.

Yourduino.com has an excellent tutorial for both types of boards: http://arduino-info.wikispaces.com/ArduinoPower

With your previous program you were toggling the MS1 and MS2 pins (which set the microstepping) along with your STEP and DIR pins. Apparently that rapid toggling of those pins causes the chip to overheat. Otherwise, the heat should be controllable by adjusting the trimmer to a lower current setting.

The chip has overheat protection and should shut off at 165^oC, btw. Not that you want to push it.

Your stepper motor has four wires so it's a bipolar stepper motor. Your shield is designed for bipolar stepper motors. The CustomStepper library and your code is written for unipolar motors -- this is bad.

You need a different library, for example the AccelStepper library. Using that library the constructor for two motors (I'm assuming you'll add a second one later) would look like:

Code:

AccelStepper stepper1(AccelStepper::FULL2WIRE, 2, 3);
AccelStepper stepper2(AccelStepper::FULL2WIRE, 6, 7);

If you can put your finger on the chip (or the motor) and hold it there for a couple seconds it's not "too hot", but a heatsink would still be a good idea.

http://rcarduino.blogspot.com/2012/01/how-to-read-rc-receiver-with.html

The QTR-1A is a combined IR emitter and IR phototransistor pair. It's everything in one package.

I was just playing around tonight trying to attach a LED bead like yours to an aluminum bar using "alumaloy" to tin the surface. Alumaloy (AKA "Durafix") was a popular product back in the late 80s for welding (not the right word) aluminum together using just a propane torch. I bought a 1/4 lb pack off eBay for under $10 and that included shipping.

It seems to work OK -- I got it one to stick on plenty tight enough -- but still need to do more testing. It appears to be specific to leaded solder (or pure lead) and rosin flux. I tried plumbing solder and flux and it didn't seem to want to stick. Need to scratch some rosin off my spruce tree tomorrow and fiddle with it some more.

As an aside you can buy 1W and 3W LED beads at sureelectronics.net for much, much less than at Electronic Goldmine.

The Openlog is a general purpose device designed to make it easy to use SD cards. You still need an Arduino to read from your GPS device and communicate to the Openlog; you cannot directly connect the GPS to the Openlog.

You might also want to consider the Raspberry PI. It's essentially an inexpensive, low power computer running Linux.

The smaller 8 pin chip might be a receiver, but i can't see how the antenna is connected to it (i do see where the antenna is supposed to be).
The larger 14 pin chip might be a controller like your Arduino.
The 4 transistors on the other side have the motors connected to them would be the "power stage".
This power stage is controlled by the 14 pin chip through the transistors that have "LF" printed on them.

I'd agree with that. Pins 1 and 14 on the 14 pin SOIC look like left and right (or vice versa) and 12 and 13 are forward/reverse. Stick some wires on those four pins and hook them into four PWM-capable pins on the arduino and go nuts.

I just have not be in the US for very long. Is This "Papa" John considered negatively by the public?

During the last election, the CEO John Schnatter went on the air in a big way to campaign against the affordable care act, in which he said if he had to provide health care coverage to more of his workers, he would reduce their hours so that they were under the limits where the employer has to provide the benefits.

He didn't say that (or claims he didn't say that) and blames it on a reporter for misquoting him. He was giving a speech to a business class at a Florida college -- not knowing a reporter was present -- and was asked how franchise owners would react to the requirement to provide health insurance to employees working more than 34 hours a week. He stated that most owners would just cut hours.

From those statements it's quite easy to see how an unethical reporter would twist his words, and obviously it paid off because it hit national news. If you have any reference to him campaigning against Obamacare I'd be surprised to see it.

Not hating on anyone here, mind you. Very easy to get tricked by the media these days

It reminded me of Robocop by the way.

What about Han from Enter the Dragon?

The eggs are turned to prevent the embryo from sticking to one side of the shell. A typical turner will flop a tray of eggs over about 90 degrees, pointy end down, every two hours (example). Some smaller, bowl-shaped units will use paddles rotating from the center to "roll" the eggs around the bottom. And of course sometimes you do it by hand (not fun). The eggs will be taken out of the turner a couple days before hatching date so the chicks have time to reposition themselves for hatching -- seeing them break out of their shells is an amazingly precise process.

IMHO the easiest way to schedule events like this is with the TimeAlarms library. It's a bit overkill but certainly keeps your code nice and tidy.