Holidays are always good for setting a deadline for finishing fun projects, and every Valentine’s Day we see projects delivering special one-of-a-kind gifts. Why buy a perishable bulk-grown biological commodity shipped with a large carbon footprint when we can build something special of our own? [Jiří Praus] certainly seemed to think so, his wife will receive a circuit sculpture tulip that blooms when she touches it.

This project drew from [Jiří]’s experience with aesthetic LED projects. His Arduino-powered snowflake, with LEDs mounted on a custom PCB, is a product available on Tindie. For our recent circuit sculpture contest, his entry is a wire frame variant on his snowflake. This tulip has 7 Adafruit NeoPixel in the center and 30 white SMD LEDs in the petals, which look great. But with the addition of mechanical articulation, this project has raised the bar for all that follow.

We hope [Jiří] will add more details for this project to his Hackaday.io profile. In the meantime, look over his recent Tweets for more details on how this mechanical tulip works. We could see pictures and short videos of details like the wire-and-tube mechanism that allowed all the petals to be actuated by a single servo, and the components that are tidily packaged inside that wooden base.

Need more digital expressions of love? We have no shortage of hearts. Animated LED hearts, illuminated acrylic hearts, and talking hearts. We’re a little short on flower projects, but we do have X-ray of a rose among others to accompany [Jiří]’s tulip.

If you ever wondered about building your own multimeter, YouTuber Electronoobs shows us just how to do so with an Arduino Nano.

Aside from the Nano, he’s using a 128×64 OLED screen to display stats and battery level, and a 16-bit ADC for precise measurements. Power is provided by a small onboard LiPo battery, and he’s even included a charging module to help keep things topped off. Everything is housed inside a custom 3D-printed case. 

The device doesn’t just measure voltage, resistance, and current, but is capable of reading capacitance and inductance as well—measurements that you wouldn’t necessarily expect on a commercial meter. If you’d like to create your own, the schematic and code are available on Electronoobs’ site.

Powering small robots could be considered the specialty of Arduino boards, but what if you want to control something much bigger? There are, of course, ways to do this, but larger motors are naturally more difficult to source. This hasn’t deterred YouTuber The Post Apocalyptic Inventor, however, who has been exploring the use of European-style washing machine motors to drive a large steel tubing robot chassis.

While the project is not yet finished, he’s turned to an Arduino Uno for experimental control along with a variety of other components to provide the proper power. 

Be sure to check out video below of this robot-in-progress if you’re interested in “beefing up” your next project!

Giving away buttons at Maker Faires or trade shows is a great way to promote your brand, but what if you want to dispense these trinkets in style? That was the idea behind this automated button dispenser mechanism from Jeremy S. Cook, which drops buttons one at a time, and uses a capacitive sensor to detect when someone presses a marked “activation circle” on its base.

When triggered, the Arduino Uno commands two servo motors in sequence to release the lower button, while holding the other stacked buttons in place. The button-in-motion then proceeds down a 3D-printed slide, shooting out into the receiver’s hands—or floor depending on one’s reflexes! 

Be sure to check out the build process in the video below, and you can find code/print files on GitHub if you’d like to make your own!

Fluoride can be healthy in certain concentrations, but above a certain level it instead has the opposite effect, causing serious dental and bone diseases. While the cost and benefit of any substance use has to be carefully weighted, up until now, verification that water source isn’t contaminated—above just 2 ppm—has been the purview of well-equipped laboratories.

Researchers at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, however, have come up with a technique that can accurately determine fluoride concentrations using only a few drops of water. The key to this development is a new compound known as SION-105, which is normally luminescent, but darkens when it encounters fluoride. This means that instead of more expensive laboratory equipment, UV LEDs can be used with a photodiode to quantitatively measure the substance’s appearance, and thus the quantity of fluoride in drinking water. 

From the images in EPFL’s write-up, the prototype test apparatus appears to utilize several commonly available components, including an Arduino Uno and small OLED display for user feedback.

Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), the device is named SION-105, is portable, considerably cheaper than current methods, and can be used on-site by virtually anyone.

The key to the device is the design of a novel material that the scientists synthesized (and after which the device is named). The material belongs to the family of “metal-organic frameworks” (MOFs), compounds made up of a metal ion (or a cluster of metal ions) connected to organic ligands, thus forming one-, two-, or three-dimensional structures. Because of their structural versatility, MOFs can be used in an ever-growing list of applications, e.g. separating petrochemicals, detoxing water, and getting hydrogen or even gold out of it.

SION-105 is luminescent by default, but darkens when it encounters fluoride ions. “Add a few droplets of water and by monitoring the color change of the MOF one can say whether it is safe to drink the water or not,” explains Mish Ebrahim, the paper’s first author. “This can now be done on-site, without any chemical expertise.”

Central Florida Maker groups use their diverse skills to create an interactive Bumblebee costume in only 3 weeks for a Magic Wheelchair recipient.

Read more on MAKE

The post Watch These Makers Transform a Wheelchair into an Interactive Bumblebee Costume appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Hackers seem intent on making sure the world doesn’t forget that, for a brief shining moment, everyone thought Big Mouth Billy Bass was a pretty neat idea. Every so often we see a project that takes this classic piece of home decor and manages to shoehorn in some new features or capabilities, and with the rise of voice controlled home automation products from the likes of Amazon and Google, they’ve found a new ingredient du jour when preparing stuffed bass.

[Ben Eagan] has recently completed his entry into the Pantheon of animatronic fish projects, and while we’ll stop short of saying the world needed another Alexa-enabled fish on the wall, we’ve got to admit that he’s done a slick job of it. Rather than trying to convince Billy’s original electronics to play nice with others, he decided to just rip it all out and start from scratch. The end result is arguably one of the most capable Billy Bass updates we’ve come across, if you’re willing to consider flapping around on the wall an actual capability in the first place.

The build process is well detailed in the write-up, and [Ben] provides many pictures so the reader can easily follow along with the modification. The short version of the story is that he cuts out the original control board and wires the three motors up to an Arduino Motor Driver Shield, and when combined with the appropriate code, this gives him full control over Billy’s mouth and body movements. This saved him the trouble of figuring out how to interface with the original electronics, which is probably for the better since they looked rather crusty anyway.

From there, he just needed to give the fish something to get excited about. [Ben] decided to connect the 3.5 mm audio jack of an second generation Echo Dot to one of the analog pins of the Arduino, and wrote some code that can tell him if Amazon’s illuminated hockey puck is currently yammering on about something or not. He even added a LM386 audio amplifier module in there to help drive Billy’s original speaker, since that will now be the audio output of the Dot.

A decade ago we saw Billy reading out Tweets, and last year we presented a different take on adding an Alexa “brain” to everyone’s favorite battery powered fish. What will Billy be up to in 2029? We’re almost too scared to think about it.

After purchasing a new television, maker Andreas Spiess’ remote no longer worked seamlessly with the controller his family had been using. While a universal remote could have solved the problem, in order to keep things simple to use, he instead came up with an infrared “babel fish” signal translator—named after the language translation animal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s.

The device receives infrared signals from the original remote, then uses an Arduino Nano to pass the properly translated pulses on to his TV and receiver. A 3W IR diode transmits these new signals with the help of an N-channel MOSFET, giving it enough power to control each component, even without the proper line-of-sight orientation. 

It’s a hack that could be useful in many situations, and Speiss goes over how it was made, along with design requirements in the video below.

If you’d like to visualize your music, VU meters make an excellent tool. While they are generally built into audio equipment, maker James Bruton had the idea to construct his own using lasers. His setup features an MSGEQ7 module to separate sound frequencies, sending data on seven different ranges to an Arduino Mega board.

The Arduino then uses this information to selectively lower seven shutters via servos. When lowered, these shutters hide part of the lines formed by lasers and a spinning mirror assembly to indicate each sound frequency’s intensity.

The resulting machine not only effectively projects a visual of the music playing on a nearby wall, but also looks like some sort of mythical beast or contraption, progressively waving its appendages while emitting eerie green light!

Although this kind of project can be fun, be sure to wear the proper safety equipment when dealing with powerful lasers!

Love it or hate it, for many people embedded systems means Arduino. Now Arduino is leveraging its more powerful MKR boards and introducing a cloud service, the Arduino IoT Cloud. The goal is to make it simple for Arduino programs to record data and control actions from the cloud.

The program is in beta and features a variety of both human and machine interaction styles. At the simple end, you can assemble a dashboard of controls and have the IoT Cloud generate your code and download it to your Arduino itself with no user programming required. More advanced users can use HTTP REST, MQTT, Javascript, Websockets, or a suite of command line tools.

The system relies on “things” like temperature sensors, LEDs, and servos. With all the focus on security now, it isn’t surprising that the system supports X.509 authentication and TLS security for traffic in both directions.

Honestly, we tried it and the web-based IDE couldn’t find our MKR1000 board under Linux. That could be a misconfiguration on our part, but it is frustrating how little information you get from many web-based tools. It decided we had multiple Arduinos connected (we didn’t). Then removing a multiport serial adapter made it see no Arduinos even though there was an MKR1000 Vidor attached.

Naturally, there are plenty of options when it comes to putting devices on the cloud. However, if you are only using Arduino boards, this one is going to be pretty seamless — assuming it works for you.