First off, if you haven’t watched episode #5 of The Tech Junkies, I’d have to insist you do that now:
Okay, so let’s get onto the details. As seen in the video, we hacked apart a $15 Radioshack R/C car for the purpose of outfitting it with a GPS chip. We ripped out the motor that was being used for steering and replaced it with a low-cost $10 servo. We also cut out the existing electronics so that only the wires coming from the battery and running to the drive motor we’re left. From here we took a breadboard and connected up our H-Bridge drive chip.
First I have to start with a quick explanation for people who don’t know what OpenGL is. OpenGL is NOT a language. In fact, OpenGL is merely a specification which is implemented in various languages. I have always used C++ and the GLUT library, it simplifies some things. Anyway, more info can be found with a quick google search if you are interested.
Today I am going to focus primarily on getting started using OpenGL on OS X instead of doing fancy things. A couple months ago I took a course on Computer Graphics at my university. The problem was that this professor was pretty much Windows only. Needless to say I was in trouble, I didn’t know C++ and had never worked with it. Here is what I learned about setting up a usable environment
For my latest project I wanted to build a microcontroller powered device I could hang on my wall (or pin to at the time of writing this). I decided to build a Twitter reader, but not just any old “LCD connected to a PC” setup. No, I wanted this thing to be computer independent.