If you were a youth in the 90s, odds are good that you were a part of the virtual pet fad and had your very own beeping Tamagotchi to take care of, much to the chagrin of your parents. Without the appropriate amout of attention each day, the pets could become sick or die, and the only way to prevent this was to sneak the toy into class and hope it didn’t make too much noise. A more responsible solution to this problem would have been to build something to take care of your virtual pet for you.

An art installation in Moscow is using an Arduino to take care of five Tamagotchis simultaneously in a virtal farm of sorts. The system is directly wired to all five toys to simulate button presses, and behaves ideally to make sure all the digital animals are properly cared for. Although no source code is provided, it seems to have some sort of machine learning capability in order to best care for all five pets at the same time. The system also prints out the statuses on a thermal printer, so you can check up on the history of all of the animals.

The popularity of these toys leads to a lot of in-depth investigation of what really goes on inside them, and a lot of other modifications to the original units and to the software. You can get a complete ROM dump of one, build a giant one, or even take care of an infinite number of them. Who would have thought a passing fad would have so much hackability?

A feature-rich microcontroller especially designed for Halloween and other multimedia projects.

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The post Adafruit’s HalloWing, an MCU Optimized for Halloween Projects appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

There’s a lot going on our virtual spaces, and anyone with a smart phone can attest to this fact. There are pop-up notifications for everything you can imagine, and sometimes it’s possible for the one really important notification to get lost in a sea of minutiae. To really make sure you don’t miss that one important notification, you can offload that task to your own personal dinosaur.

The 3D-printed dinosaur has a rack-and-pinion gear set that allows it to extend upwards when commanded. It also has a set of LEDs for eyes that turn on when it pops up. The two servos and LEDs are controlled by a small Arduino in the base of the dinosaur. This Arduino can be programmed to activate the dinosaur whenver you like, for an email from a specific person, a reply to a comment on Reddit, or an incoming phone call to name a few examples. Be sure to check out the video below the break.

With this dinosaur on your desk, it’s not likely you’ll miss its activation. If you’d like something that has the same function but with less movement and more lights, there’s also a notification 3D cube made out of LEDs that’s sure to catch your eye as well.

If you thought that automatic wire bending was solely the purview of expensive industrial machinery, think again. How To Mechatronics has come up with a bender that not only twists wire left and right, but can rotate to create three-dimensional shapes.

The heart of the system is an Arduino Nano, which controls three stepper motors for wire manipulation via DRV8825 driver boards. A servo motor is also implemented in order to push a piece of copper tubing into place to physically bend the wire. 

As noted, the device does have some trouble moving the wire when its straightening rollers are tight, but this likely could be perfected with a little more work. If you’d like to take a crack at it, code and build files are available here.

Part of what makes flamethrowers fun is their inherent danger. This is what makes a lot of things fun, though, from snowboarding to skydiving to motorcycle riding. As with all of these sensible hobbies, though, it’s important to take as much unnecessary risk out of the activity as possible to make sure you’re around as long as possible to enjoy your chosen activity. With that in mind, [Stephen] decided to make some improvements on his classic wrist-mounted flamethrower.

To start, he ditched the heavy lead-acid battery that powered the contraption in favor of a smaller 5 V battery. In fact, the entire build is much more compact and efficient. He was also able to use the same battery to run a tiny taser that acts as an ignition source for the flamethrower’s fuel. The fuel itself is butane, and the modified flamethrower is able to launch flames much further than the original due to improvements in the fuel delivery system. These improvements also include “Finding a way to prevent butane droplets from lighting and landing on [his] hand” which seems like a necessary feature as well.

The entire build now is very well refined and professional-looking, which is also a major improvement from the first version. It’s also worth watching the video after the break as well, which includes a minor run-in with the New York City fire marshal. And, it still retains some of the danger and all of the fun of the original builds which is something we always like to see.

Halloween is just around the corner, and to celebrate, fadecomic decided to set up a trio of singing animatronic pumpkins to belt out scary songs. 

The project uses a Raspberry Pi for high level control and browser interface, and sends animation commands to an Arduino Uno via USB serial.

The Uno takes this data and translates it into actual pumpkin movements coordinated with music. The resulting trio of pumpkins each use their own servo to lift the top of the foam gourd up like a gigantic mouth, and also feature PWM-driven LED eyes. A light show controlled by SSRs completes the spooky musical effect. 

Build info is available here and the Arduino code can be found on GitHub.

Rich Nelson wanted to make a unique gift for his brother, and decided on a paper-cut light box of Philadelphia’s skyline, the city where he lives. 

The resulting device is controlled by an Arduino Nano, and not only features a trio of lights and layers to represent buildings and foliage, but also a moving sun and moon display that changes depending on the actual time and date.

Timing is accomplished via an RTC module, while the sun/moon is displayed on a small TFT screen that moves across the sky using a servo motor and extension arm. The build can be seen in the video below, and code as well as CAD info is on GitHub for your perusal.

Haptic feedback is something commonly used with handheld controllers and the like. However, in a virtual reality environment, it could also be used with the other interface surface attached to your body: the VR headset itself.

That’s the idea behind FacePush, which employs an Arduino Uno-powered pulley system to place tension on the straps of an HTC Vive headset. A corresponding pushing force is felt by the wearer through the headset in response to this action, creating yet another way to help immerse users in a virtual world. 

Applications tried so far include a boxing game, dive simulator, and 360-degree guidance You can check it out in a short demo below, and read more about it in the full research paper here.

LEDs, whether single-color or programmable, have enabled makers to create a wide variety of vibrant projects at a reasonable price. Neon sign projects, which require sophisticated glass making techniques as well as high voltage for control aren’t as common, but do still have their adherents. Some have even experimented with making them sound reactive.

Up until now, sound control meant using a microphone to detect audio signals and flash accordingly. David Garges, however, is using an Arduino Leonardo equipped with an Olimex MIDI shield to individually activate three neon skulls, crafted by artist Dani Bonnet. 

His setup can be programmed via MIDI directly, or can use beat analysis software to activate the proper lights depending on audio output. 

There has been much desire in the Neon Art community for clean and responsive musical interaction with high-voltage Neon Signs. Currently, the existing infrastructure uses a microphone to detect audio and flash accordingly. Unfortunately, due to this method of processing the Neon always responds with a small delay. Clapping and shouting can also disrupt the interaction when using an on-board microphone.

This project solves that problem by transmitting musical data via MIDI protocol to a controller which activates then activates Neon Tubes accordingly. I have designed and built a system that takes a slightly different approach but accomplishes what the Neon Art community desires.

This project offers two performance modes: one that allows for electronic artists to perform seamlessly using MIDI instruments, and one that allows DJs to feed BPM analysis to the system to synchronize the Neon flashing with actual recorded music which enables Real-Time Audio-Controlled Neon.

Be sure to check out the demo in the video below!

It’s been a while since we’ve shown a DIY wire bending machine, and [How To Mechatronics] has come up with an elegant design with easy construction through the use of 3D-printed parts which handle most of the inherent complexity. This one also has a Z-axis so that you can produce 3D wire shapes. And as with all wire bending machines, it’s fun to watch it in action, which you can do in the video below along with seeing the step-by-step construction.

One nice feature is that he’s included a limit switch for automatically positioning the Z-axis when you first turn it on. It also uses a single 12 volt supply for all the motors, and the Arduino that acts as the brains. The 5 volts for the one servo motor is converted from 12 using an LM7805 voltage regulator. He’s also done a nice job packaging the Arduino, stepper motor driver boards, and the discrete components all onto a single custom surface mount PCB.

The bender isn’t without some issues though, such as that there’s no automatic method for giving it bending instructions. You can write code for the steps into an Arduino sketch, which is really just a lot of copy and paste, and he’s also provided a manual mode. In manual mode, you give it simple commands from a serial terminal. However, it would be only one step more to get those same commands from a file, or perhaps even convert from G-code or some other format.

Another issue is that the wire straightener puts too much tension on the wire, preventing the feeder from being able to pull the wire along. One solution is to feed it pre-straightened wire, not too much to ask for since it’s really the bending we’re after. But fixing this problem outright could be as simple as changing two parts. For the feeder, the wire is pulled between copper pipe and a flat steel bearing, and we can’t help wondering whether perhaps replacing them with a knurled cylinder and a grooved one would work as the people at [PENSA] did with their DIWire which we wrote about back in 2012. Sadly, the blog entries we linked to no longer work but a search shows that their instructable is still up if you want to check out their feeder parts.

As for the applications, we can think of sculpting, fractal antennas, tracks for marble machines, and really anything which could use a wireframe for its structure. Ideas anyone?