If you’ve ever walked around West Oakland, farming probably doesn’t come to mind. That’s because it’s the fifth busiest shipping port in the United States. But that hasn’t stopped maker Eric Maundu from feeding himself with locally-grown food from his aquaponic gardens, a combination of fish farming and hydroponic planting. Frequently proclaiming, “I am not a farmer,” Eric has applied his robotics and software background to making gardens smart.

“I feel knowledge of electronics and software programming makes me a better farmer than just having a hoe. Gardens that can communicate for themselves using the internet can lead to exchanging of ideas in ways that were not possible before. I can test, for instance, whether the same tomato grows better in Oakland or the Sahara Desert given the same conditions. Then I can share the same information with farmers in Iceland and China.”

His company, Kijani Grows, sells kits, components, installs gardens throughout the Bay Area, and teaches classes on aquaponics. This inspiring video from fair companies gives an epic walkthrough (note the length of the video – how leet!) of his various indoor & outdoor systems and designs:

follower posted a new project up on Labradoc: an <a href="“>LED matrix display connected to an Arduino Mega ADK and an Android phone:

I was working to get things working for the evening of Sat 19th (NZ time) but noticed an issue during the afternoon that stopped much in the way of new feature development.

Once I had the the display working okay I added a couple of features:

• One permanent message (hardcoded into the sketch) to display.
• Four “slots” used to store the last four SMS messages received. When a new message is received the oldest message is overwritten. (The display order doesn’t change however–i.e. the message in slot 1 is always displayed after the permanent message, even if it’s not the most recent/oldest.)

Project: SMS Text Scroller by follower

We keep seeing a lot of RGB lamps, but they’re also constantly increasing in size and complexity. Take this rendition, which uses a lot of RGB LEDs and has smartphone control (translated).

The lamp itself uses 31 RGB LEDs arranged in a sphere that organizes them into three vertical rings. They’re all ganged together (not individually addressable) with one transistor per color. An Arduino board is responsible for control, and the build includes a Bluetooth module for incoming commands.

As you can see above, the Android app driving the device is really quite good. In addition to sliders for color mixing there is a separate window with a color picker. [Remick] included options like favorite color combos, color scrolling, and a timer that will shut the lamp off. We couldn’t embed it here, but you’ll find some demo video at the link above.

Can you Please teach me How to make a controlled Arduino Robot via Bluetooth by using an Android Device :D 

I found some Application in Play Store about the Bluetooth controller, it is called Bluebots ,a Bluetooth remote control for robot. (see below)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=blue.bots.free.matt&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImJsdWUuYm90cy5mcmVlLm1hdHQiXQ..

read more

In his blog, Charalampos describes his experience with SeeedStudio’s Grove Ear-clip Heart Rate sensor and Cosm (former Pachube) cloud service. The employed sensor is quite cheap and can detect heart pulses from the ear lobe, by measuring the infra-red light reflected by the tissue and by checking for intensity variations.

By connecting this sensor with an ADK board and, in turn, with an Android smartphone, Charalampos implemented a portable heart-rate tracker, which is used to send the recorded data to Cosm cloud service.

For more information and sample code, see here.

[Via: Building Internet of Things]

Ben Heck is always thinking up gadgets that make life easier, from completely hands-free luggage to a sensor system for improved cycling safety. His latest mod is meant for those of us who have burnt Ramen a few too many times. His so-called Ben-Stur Remote Control Android app works with a pot-stirring device, freeing users to stray from the kitchen while their meal is cooking. The app works via Bluetooth, and the pot-stirrer consists of an actuator arm, a chip clip, a timing belt and, of course, a wooden spoon. Heck used a Google ADK and an Arduino Uno for the control mechanism that communicates between the app and the stirrer. In the tablet app, users can check their food's temperature and control the speed of the the spoon's stirring. If that whets your appetite, click the source link for more info -- and check out our Maker Faire interview with Mr. Heckendorn himself.

Ben Heck's Android-controlled pot-stirrer does (most of) the cooking for you originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 22 May 2012 05:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Happy to see the KegBot Project adding a new fancy Android shell as casing.

“If you are looking for an exciting hardware project, KegDroid deserves a look. It is a sophisticated system that involves Android, Arduino, NFC, plumbing and — beer. Perhaps the final stroke of genius is to package the whole thing in a Droid body. Some how the little green fella looks at home on the bar. You have heard of desktop and laptop apps now we have bartop apps to add to the list“

via [SlashDot]

Last week I decided to buy some stuff from local reseller of Arduino. I bought a Kyto Heart Sensor that transmits heart pulses to a receiver via radio frequency. The RF receiver can then be interfaced to an arduino and then pass the results to an Android device for visualization.

If you’ll try to create a sketch using the Android ADK library on  the latest version of Arduino (1.0 as of this writing), you will get several errors just like this:

This is because they renamed some header files and also changed the signature of some commonly used functions. Initially I thought it will take [...]

So I’ve made a little not-so-challenging game that uses a tricolor LED, mini buzzer, arduino and of course our Android device. The mechanics of the game is that you need to choose a color, red, green or blue from the Android app and then the accessory (arduino) will randomly pick a color after [...]