Adam’s fantastic serial port roundup post has got me thinking about all of the other highly informative posts that might be buried in the depths of this forum. I would like to make tutorials (with full credit to their original authors) out of these great posts and link to them from Pololu’s Resources page. I’m putting up this thread as a place where you can suggest posts that you think would make good tutorials. And if you’ve written up something helpful and informative, don’t be too modest to nominate your own work!
Off the top of my head I remember Jim Remington has some good tutorial-style posts. Particularly I’m thinking of the ones about AVR speed measurement here and quadrature encoding here, his LCD bar graph trick here, and the one about converting midi files to play music on the Orangutan’s buzzer here. He’s also got a bunch of good stuff on motor control/feedback, and a little on servo control on his website here.
Glad to see you’re already eying Michael Shimniok’s thread on setting up AVR programming on a Mac. I don’t own one myself, but I had real trouble trying to work out a similar setup on a friend’s laptop for a group project. It was one of the new Intel-based Mac laptops, and I almost convinced him to set it up to dual-boot Windows, but we ended up Linux-resurrecting an ancient Thinkpad instead.
From my own posts, aside from the serial roundup, the only one that comes to mind as a tutorial would be this one on how to set the CP2102 chips to request more power from the USB bus (I see that the C90P2102 Pololu products have a meta-category now, nice!).
It’s not laid out in a tutorial form in any one post (spread out here and here), but a tutorial on the two resistor fixes to make an ATMega8 Orangutan compatible with an AVRISP MKII programmer would be useful. Also not really a tutorial, but the basic results of my motor testing would make a good resource for the Tamiya gearboxes that use the FA-130 motor.
And of course you should make a tutorial covering your bootloader code! By the way, here’s the kit-robot from the Chalmers University Robot Association that uses it now. They’re working on wireless programming and English documentation, but if you can speak Swedish you can read all about it here.
Other than that there are code examples for interfacing the Pololu serial devices with lots of different programs/languages/platforms strewn throughout the forum. If you were really ambitious you might set up a link index by platform. One step at a time of course.