Building the Rodentometer – Part 1: An Introduction

The Setup

(Part One is not going to have anything exciting and technical in it.  If you’re a geek, and let’s be honest, why would you be here if not, skip to Part Two).

So I live in a house with a Hamster.  Syrian hamsters are pretty great, as pets go: they are fairly tidy*, fairly quiet*, don’t need taking for walks* and don’t poo on the carpets*. The thing about them is, though, that they are active.  During the day they are just fat little lazy potato-shaped furballs, but come evening, like gremlins, the start scurrying, chewing and running about like hopped-up little crazies. The question is – how far does our hamster run?  Is she an athlete, or a lazy good-for-nothing? Read on to see how I plan to find out…

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A (very) late update to the GLCD debacle

As I explained in my previous post, back in July I embarked on a journey to try and get a nice new 128×64 pixel graphical LCD display to play nicely with my Arduino projects.  I hit some fairly big problems with this, in areas I maybe didn’t expect… Continue reading

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Arduino and the SparkFun Serial Graphical LCD Backpack

I’m trying my hand at controlling a 128×64 pixel Graphical LCD screen (GLCD) from my little Arduino Uno.  Now, this thing uses the fairly common KS0108B parallel interface, which is great, but requires about 20 pins to control.  In order to bring this down to a more manageable level, I also bought a Sparkfun Graphic LCD Serial Backpack, which provides a nice simple serial interface.

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