From the Vault: Arduino Night Writer.

Night Writer

About four years ago, I invited some friends over to try to turn a remote control car into something programmable. We had some trouble finding supplies though, so they just brought beer instead. But we were determined to build something.

I had recently seen this video, and thought we might be able to reproduce it with just a column of LEDs and a long exposure photo.

This project uses the "Persistence of Vision" concept, where the LEDs flash vertical slices of a letter or symbol, and you provide the horizontal movement. Using a long exposure camera allows you to slowly "paint" the light into your image.

First I'll show you some photos from the project. If you want to build your own, keep scrolling for rough build details. As it's "from the vault", it's not a complete walkthrough. It does give you the code you need though, and a photo of the circuit. This would be a good 2nd or 3rd Arduino project.

Results

HPC 4 Life

Simple Python Twitter Bot

Twitter Bots

Twitter has some amazing bot personalities; from celebrity impersonators, to genuinely useful automated announcements. It is also probably the first place anyone was exposed to bots and interacted with them. Some of my favourites are BIGBEN and CaptainMarkov. It is also very easy to make a simple bot, especially if you're familiar with python.

In this post, I'm going to walk you through the creation of Mirror_Bot_1000. Mirror_bot_1000 reads tweets when its username is mentioned, and then makes its own tweet with the mirror image.

It's a great example for the simple interactions with Twitter's API because it requires you to read a message, post a message, and keep track of where you left off. If you want to make your bot more complicated, you just have to modify the decision-making behind the tweets.

The entirety of the code in this example can be found on github here. An intro to python can be found here.

Account Setup

Astrophotography Manual Barn Door Tracker

Motivation

After seeing some beautiful photos of the milky way, I wanted to step up my astrophotography game a little bit. In astrophotography, you are limited to shutter speed = 500 / (focal length) before your stars get blurry from the earth's rotation. To get better photos of the night sky, you can use what is called a tracker which allows you to take much longer exposures.

They are also quite expensive, and not particularly complicated. So I decided to try making one myself. The goal was to make it simple, and cheap. In the end, the total was less than $50, and the results have been quite successful.

It was so simple to build in fact, you probably don't even need a guide once you understand the key concepts. So I'll start with the basics of how and why it works, followed by a breakdown of how I built it.

Here is the final product:

and some results:

2.5 minute Milky Way exposure

Vice City: Python Automated Sports Betting

Automated Sports Betting

Everyone knows gambling is a great way to make money (/s). I myself formed this conclusion after hearing bookies will sometimes pay out before an event even happens, which planted a betting strategy in my mind that required a bot. This very successfully and slowly lost me my $50 investment, but I had a lot of fun making it, so I thought I would share the project.

If you use this guide, please don't be stupid. Basically nobody comes out on top in the sports betting world. It's not going to be you! So maybe have some fun testing out theories, or let a robot lose money on your favourite sports team, but be prepared to lose any money you deposit in your Pinnacle account.

This is my first tutorial, so if you use this project I'd love to hear how it goes. If you manage to make a lot of money, a donation to Wikipedia would be appreciated.

Now let's get down to the coding. Taking a look at the official API documentation  at this point would be wise as well. All the source code referenced can be found at my github here, along with any future bug fixes. An intro to python can be found here.

In my bot, there are three essential stages.

1. Gather information. (Balance, Odds)
2. Check Criteria. (Find desirable bets)
3. Place bet.