How did Slider come to be?
not easily.
Slider was supposed to be pretty easy to put together but after playing with a number of different moving creations I realized that I had better think about the programming side of it all.
the programming (the program)
Well the programming was difficult, because I needed to run repeat loops simultaneously for the servo motor and for trigering the voice recognition as well as having to use the delay for pulsing the piezzo buzzers, I had to use the BX-24's multitasking capabilities. The delay allong with the looping halt the entire BX normally, so at the start of the program you will see that I define a "task stack" and then call a servo task and assign it a stack. This is the multitasking. You will notice that at the end of each routine there is a sleep called, this defines how much time other processes are given to process.
I also used the timer function kind of as a hack around the multi-taksking. It is used to send a pulse out which turns on the voice recognition chip to start listening every 4 seconds or so.
the movers
I was determined to use only the things that I had, which were a computer fan a 3v dc motor, some piezzo buzzers, a couple of boxes and foam, and Boxman. I initially was planning on using the fan to blow things but found out that computer fans don't blow they just move air. So I decided to glue a nail to it, off center, and use it to strike a pendulum, which would swing back and forth and make something shuffle across the floor. Well I still want to try to do this, but as soon as I stuck the nail on the fan began to vibrate just enough so that it would slide across the floor, making a racket. I figured the foam would just quiet it down a bit. I also, made a wildly swinging one with a motor attached to a battery with a wire. The two things just crazily fly around each other untill they tear themselves apart. Thiswas great but not controlled enough yet but will be soon.
pretty simple but there are a lot of transistors used.
