Arduino research:

• Found many links regarding the Arduino electronics platform:

1. Explanation of different version:    http://www.ladyada.net/library/arduino/unofaq.html
2. Tutorials: http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/HomePage
3. 414 Arduino projects and counting: http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/
4. Search engine for chips: http://www.findchips.com/
5. Ada’s Store: http://www.adafruit.com/
6. Sparkfun Store:  http://www.sparkfun.com/

• I determined that the version we want is the Arduino Uno.  I believe that all latest versions have similar specs, but this one is probably the best for our stage of prototyping.  A smaller one, which mounts onto a board may be better once the electronics are finalized.
• Due to the recession, DIP chips are getting hard to find because many producers are cutting costs by only make SMTs, which have higher demand.  This is making it so the arduino’s main chip is becoming increasingly rare.  There is a SMT version now to help keep up with demand.  I figured we should stick with the DIP chip while we still can.
• The Arduino cannot directly control our amplifiers.  This can possibly be done using a gate to route the current through a volatage spliter maintaining a Float, open or close the gate with a second pin to bypass the voltage splitter to make a High and turn off the main pin to make a Low.  This may be easier to program then the current method because you just have to control 2 pins.  That said the Arduino can communicate with i2c devices like the rheostats
• The Arduino is very easy to program.  Basically you just initialize and loop.  Communication to the device works very similarly to communication with the usb-i2c master chip.  Just set the arduino loop to listen to the com port and do various things depending on what it is sent.  On the PC side its identical to the i2c program, since the Arduino has more memory, I believe the commands can be in the form of char arrays as opposed to hex only.
• When we were looking at ladyada.net you asked where do people get the time to do all this stuff?  The answer is MIT.  All the students are required to have a website.

Other Electronics

• I’m going to call the murata company and see if we can get some samples of http://www.murata.com/products/catalog/pdf/p82e.pdf.   They are finger tip sized full-ranged peizoelectric speakers.  Currently I can only find them in quantities of 2000….  They really look perfect for our application but don’t think we will need 2000 til we start production.  (not to mention its still $5 each at this quantity)
• There are some other options for speakers but I haven’ sen any that look as good as those.  Most speakers this size have a far more limited range of sound.

Amplifier Circuit:

• Waiting on a few capacitors that were not at the electronics store.
• Found a small portable break-out board to play audio with. http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9534.  Its has somewhat of an amplifier but only 7 volume settings so our amp chips will still be needed.
• Needed a bigger breadboard to prototype this circuit.  Not nearly enough room on the one I have
• Audio will be driven by the aurdino.

2-17-2011

• Got to a point with the audio amplifier controller which I cannot pass without testing my assumptions on the chips operation.
• Chips came in but no adapter boards to mount them on yet
• Resumed work on the OpenGL articulated hand.
• Got one finger working, mirrored it to make sure all my assumptions were true.

2-18-2011

• Still no adapters for chips continued to work on the articulated hand.
• Added Camera function.  Had a lot of problems getting this working.  Almost all of these problems had to do with me putting things in the wrong place.
• Noticed that there are some flaws with the current method of rotation.  Found this site http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2758501/rotating-in-opengl-relative-to-the-viewport which explains that you need to use quaternions to make it so you can spin the object without its coordinates flipping.  There is some example classes in java on this site.  Will look for a c++ class or transcribe this once I get the hand drawn.
• Experimented a bit more with various OpenGL functions as  prepared to move the current work out of the sandbox.

2-21-2011

• Moved out of the sandbox.  Set the stage, made a finger class with parameter(x,y,z,length)
• Had many many problems getting this to behave properly mostly due to forgetting to initialize variables and other simple things eventually got it to draw right.
• Was having a problem with the animation that it was jumping all over the place.  Thought this might be a real-time issue since the animation method was no longer in the top level glut program.  Read a bit of the chapter on real-time then I realized yet again  forgot to initialize yet another important variable….
• All the animation I did so far was 2D.  I experimented with animating in 3d since the thumb is going to need this.
• Random Thought:  It may be good to put a force based joy-stick on the thumb to help give it a greater degree of freedom then can be achieved with strain gauges alone.  The thumb has a great amount of 3-dimensional freedom that is essential to being able to pick up small objects.  I think this would work best if the surface is flat and it disables the extra freedom when you press in so that the thumb does not move around when you try to grab something.