This project displays live traffic conditions between two locations on a physical map, using an Adafruit Feather Huzzah that gathers data from the Google Maps API and then sets the color of a string of NeoPixels
The post Arduino-Neopixel Traffic Map appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Arduino Create is now available to everyone on Chrome OS devices, with $0.99 per month subscription. An Arduino account and Google ID is all you need to use it, just follow the Create Getting Started guide on your Chrome OS device. We are actively working on specific licensing and pricing for schools, so stay tuned.
The new Arduino Create Chrome App enables students and other users to write code, access tutorials, configure boards, and share projects. Designed to provide a continuous workflow from inspiration to implementation, Makers can easily manage every aspect of their project right from a single dashboard.
Developed with the classroom in mind: The Arduino Chrome App allows you to teach and tinker with Arduino electronics and programming in a collaborative, always-up-to-date environment.
Built for Chrome OS: Code online, save your sketches in the cloud, and upload them to any Arduino connected to your Chrome OS device, without having to install anything locally. All the contributed libraries are automatically included.
The following Arduinos are currently supported: Uno, 101, Mega, Esplora, Nano (ATmega328), Micro, Zero, MKR1000, MKR Zero, MKR Fox 1200, Pro and Pro Mini (ATmega328). We are actively working with the Chromium team to restore support for the Arduino Leonardo in a future Chrome OS release.
The launch of this app would not have been possible without the following open source components:
As usual if you encounter any bugs, issues, or have an idea on how we can improve the Chrome app, please open a discussion thread on this Forum page.
Please note that this app will work only on Chrome OS, if you click on the Google Store link on any other OS you will not be able to install it.
Redditor “xmajor9x” has spent several weeks building a three-legged machine to balance a metal ball on top of a plate. The device uses three servos attached to a rectangular surface with linkages that translate servo position into linear displacement of the table. This allows it to keep the ball centered, or rotate around the perimeter in a circle or square pattern.
An Arduino Due controls the ball using a PID loop, and the ball’s position is sensed not by an external camera, but by the top “plate,” which is actually made out of a resistive touchscreen. Although this adds a very unique element, it means that the ball on top must be quite heavy to be reliably tracked, and its creator is considering switching to a computer vision system in the future.
Be sure to check out the project’s GitHub page for code and more info on the build! <!–more–>
It takes a lot to win best of show at a Comic Con, but Jason Caulfield’s Tauren Frost Death Knight named “Akulva” was more than up to the task. This beautifully detailed beast, his third try at this sort of costume, not only looks good but features backlit eyes that blink automatically, as well as a voice-changing circuit to allow Caulfield to speak in this creature’s deep tone.
The 8.5-foot-tall beast is equipped with a pair of Arduino Uno boards–one to control the eye blinking and another that uses an Adafruit Wave Shield to handle voice modulation. In addition, there’s a PicoTalk servo controller, which syncs the audio to the motor movement of the mouth.
Check out the videos below for more on this impressive cosplay build!
John Edgar Park’s replica of Lúcio’s Sonic Amplifier, from the video game Overwatch, mimics the gun’s in-game ability to “shoot” music.
The post This Sonic Amplifier Replica from Overwatch Actually “Shoots” Music appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
As entertaining as watching Netflix may be, you’re not burning a lot of calories while binging on your favorite shows. In order to do both at the same time, hacker “Roboro” modded a stationary exercise bike to stop streaming if he’s not maintaining his fitness goals.
Bicycle speed is derived from the signal that’s normally sent to the built-in display. He uses an Arduino Nano to hijack the square wave, and sends this info to the streaming computer serially via USB.
Starting the Python script and inputting some information, Firefox will start to stream Netflix and display in real-time for current workout information such as round, speed, nominal speed for this round and time to next round. If the user goes below the nominal speed for too long, Netflix will pause until the user has gotten back up to speed.
If you’d like to try this yourself, you can find an Instructables write-up with all the necessary details and check out his code on GitHub. Though designed around Netflix, Roboro notes that it can be used with other streaming services with a few changes.
Feel like breaking out of your streaming-induced vegetative state but can’t seem to break the binge-watching cycle? Maybe you’re a candidate for this exercise bike that controls how much Netflix you watch.
The concept behind [Roboro]’s anti-couch potato build is simple — just keep pedaling and you get to keep watching. The details are pretty simple too and start with an Arduino monitoring the signal coming from a jack thoughtfully provided by the manufacturer of his exercise bike. The frequency of the square wave is translated into a speed which a Python script on a PC reads over USB. Once a Netflix stream is started, dropping below the user-defined speed pauses the movie. The video below shows it doing its thing.
Improvements readily spring to mind, like adding a speed buffer so that pedaling faster lets you bank some streaming time and earn a rest. Maybe it could somehow integrate with these Netflix-enabled socks, or even with the Netflix and Chill button. But those sort of defeat the purpose a bit.
Create a custom 3D printed shortcut keyboard for design and other complex programs you work in.
The post Making Your Own Custom Shortcut Keyboard appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
If you’ve seen color sensors such as the TCS34725, you may have considered them for projects that can pick out one colored object over another. On the other hand, if you were to take one of these sensors, mount them to an Arduino-driven plotter, and then take readings in an X/Y plane, you’d have all the elements needed for a simple single-pixel scanner.
In the video seen below, Kerry D. Wong does just this using his hacked HP 7044A plotter to scan a picture, recording RGB color values in a 128 x 128 grid. As the device scans, the Arduino Due used for control passes these values to a computer, which assembles them together into a low-resolution image.
You can find more details on the project, including its code, in Wong’s blog post here.
When you think of image processing, you probably don’t think of the Arduino. [Jan Gromes] did, though. Using a camera and an Arduino Mega, [Jan] was able to decode input from an Arduino-connected camera into raw image data. We aren’t sure about [Jan’s] use case, but we can think of lots of reasons you might want to know what is hiding inside a compressed JPEG from the camera.
The Mega is key, because–as you might expect–you need plenty of memory to deal with photos. There is also an SD card for auxiliary storage. The camera code is straightforward and saves the image to the SD card. The interesting part is the decoding.
The use case mentioned in the post is sending image data across a potentially lossy communication channel. Because JPEG is compressed in a lossy way, losing some part of a JPEG will likely render it useless. But sending raw image data means that lost or wrong data will just cause visual artifacts (think snow on an old TV screen) and your brain is pretty good at interpreting lossy images like that.
Just to test that theory, we took one of [Joe Kim’s] illustrations, saved it as a JPEG and corrupted just a few bytes in a single spot in it. You can see the before (left) and after (right) picture below. You can make it out, but the effect of just a few bytes in one spot is far-reaching, as you can see.
The code uses a library that returns 16-bit RGB images. The library was meant for displaying images on a screen, but then again it doesn’t really know what you are doing with the results. It isn’t hard to imagine using the data to detect a specific color, find edges in the image, detect motion, and other simple tasks.
Sending the uncompressed image data might be good for error resilience, but it isn’t good for impatient people. At 115,200 baud, [Jan] says it takes about a minute to move a raw picture from the Arduino to a PC.
We’ve seen the Arduino handle a single pixel at a time. Even in color. The Arduino might not be your first choice for an image processing platform, but clearly, you can do some things with it.
