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diVA Balloon Controller

Balloon At Home
The full diVA balloon controller

Balloon Housing
The controller housing

Balloon Winding Close
The winding for the balloon's tether

diVA Interface
The diVA interface

Balloon Floating
A balloon under diVA control

Balloon Full
The full system

2006
by Shaun Mavronicolas [www.twoc.ca]

Project Description

Our first Make Controller Kit project was to create a fancy balloon controller. We've spent a fair bit of time creating new firmware specific to making this work with our existing product called diVA for the purpose of motor control - closed loop, open loop, stepper and servo.

Sequences are stored in the controller and can be called by our external program, or we can create our own external sequences and feed this to the controller via diVA. The idea is to have several of these (we can run two closed loop motors per controller) with much larger balloons attached to create something fun. We can trigger the sequences based on what people do in the environment, via a mobile phone or through a web page or touch screen.

This little project will be the first of many we hope. We've tried to make it look fun by keeping the case clear, next thing likely is we'll add some nice LED lighting. We've also used two clear CDs to make part of the reel that holds the fly fishing gut.

The Make Controller Kit is one element that can be integrated into the diVA system - a system of devices and content that can be used to create interactive spaces and environments.  Check the diVA site for more info.

Xbee

Posted by Michael Hartman at 2007-03-11 20:11
I'm curious, how did you connect the Xbee to your porject? It looks like you connected it to the App board somehow.

Hi Michael

Posted by Shaun Mavronicolas at 2007-03-31 06:22
There is a small adapter board we fabricated for another project that happened to fit a connector that we were able to plug directly onto the MT board without soldering anything. All we had to add was a pin header onto the MT board, into this we plugged our modified PCB onto which the XBee radio plugged into. Sparkfun seems to have just released a great little board that would make the XBee radio much easier for you to use, and the price is really low compared to the time and effort we had to go through at the time. Here is a link - http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=8276