Brandon Switzer had a grand image in mind when he set off to create this player piano. Like most of us, he had an arduino that had been sitting there doing nothing for quite some time. He needed a project to focus his attention and learn some things. He landed […]
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While model skulls are generally relegated to Halloween, or biology class, this maker decided to construct a very unique clock out of one.
The “hands” of the terrifying timepiece are represented by two eyes—right for hours, left for minutes—that are rotated about using a pair of 360-degree (but not continuous rotation) servos. If this wasn’t freaky enough, a third servo pulls the jawbone open with a thin cable, which then snaps shut with springs to “chime” the hour.
An Arduino is used for control of the assembly, along with a DS3232 RTC module to keep things accurate. A nice octagonal frame was built for it as well, giving this otherwise strange creation a classy home in which to reside.
Code for the project can be found here and more pictures are up on Imgur.
At some point in your life, you may have wrestled over the preferred sofa cushion on which to sit, but what if these informal games of couch dominance were codified into an actual contest? That’s the idea behind the co-op game by Carol Mertz and Francesca Carletto-Leon, aptly named “HELLCOUCH.”
Unlike most “video” games, this system—which runs on an Arduino along with the Unity game engine—has no screen. Instead, it relies on lighting and audio cues to guide the players on where to sit, or as its disembodied voice puts it, “Perform the sacred butt ritual!”
The game takes around 90 seconds to play, during which time participants’ normal attitudes about giving each other space—and not bouncing around on the couch like crazy people—are thoroughly questioned.
It’s a challenge. At first glance, HELLCOUCH is designed to look like just a regular couch, so players don’t necessarily enter into it with the expectation of being silly and letting their guard down. We didn’t design an attract mode, and were careful to keep any indication of it being a “possessed” couch hidden until someone sits down. As soon as a butt hits a cushion, though, players are met with a loud thunderclap, demonic cackling, and a fiery array of lights. And when the game starts, solo sitters have to face the fact that they’re not going to be able to play alone, so they need to figure out how to get another butt or two in the game.
This theme and sound design are meant to set the stage for humor and joyful play. The first guidance players get is a disembodied demonic voice declaring that they need to “perform the sacred butt ritual,” which often makes players giggle or raise an eyebrow. The game only takes about 90 seconds to play, but often by the end folks get very comfortable embracing their role as a goofy demon liberator.
There are a lot of side effects of living with medical conditions, and not all of them are obvious. For Parkinson’s disease, one of the conditions is a constant hand tremor. This can obviously lead to frustration with anything that involves fine motor skills, but also includes eating, which can be even more troublesome than other day-to-day tasks. There are some products available that help with the tremors, but at such a high price [Rupin] decided to build a tremor-compensating utensil with off the shelf components instead.
The main source of inspiration for this project was the Liftware Steady, but at around $200 this can be out of reach for a lot of people. The core of this assistive spoon has a bill of material that most of us will have lying around already, in order to keep costs down. It’s built around an Arduino and an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit with two generic servo motors. It did take some 3D printing and a lot of math to get the utensil to behave properly, but the code is available on the project site for anyone who wants to take a look.
This project tackles a problem that we see all the time: a cost-effective, open-source solution to a medical issue where the only alternatives are much more expensive. Usually this comes up around prosthetics, but can also help out by making biological compounds like insulin directly for less than a medical company can provide it.
While you may not have a graduate degree in nuclear physics, you likely have some inkling that large amounts of radiation should be avoided. In order to monitor local levels, AdNovea has come up with a DIY Geiger-Müller counter, which displays radiation stats on a 20×4 LCD display.
The device uses an SBM-20 or STS-5 tube to measure radioactivity, with an Arduino Nano to process this input. It can be employed as a standalone unit, or transmit readings wirelessly via an Ethernet interface. Readings can then be tracked over time with a web app, or even shared with the wider world over the Internet.
This DIY low-cost ($50$/€43) C-GM Counter project provides hardware and firmware for building a Geiger-Müller counter device aka G.M. Counter for continuous measurement of the radioactivity level. It is based on an Arduino Nano, a 20 chars x 4 lines LCD display, a W5100 Ethernet card, a 400V power supply and very few components around. The number of components has been kept to minimum for easy assembling and reducing the cost.
The C-GM Counter is able to run as a standalone radioactivity counter or for ensuring long term radioactivity monitoring, the C-GM counter can be used in association with A-GM Manager (in the sequel) that is an open-source web application running on a SOHO server (e.g. QNAP sells Small Office Home Office servers). A-GM Manager is also able to publish the C-GM Counter measures on the worldwide shared map managed by GMC MAP. Finally, there is also a Node-RED version for integration of the C-GM Counter with Node-RED such as the QNAP IoT framework.
South Korean LEGO Certified Professional Wani Kim, with the help of Olive Seon, has created an incredible replica of the Death Star Trench Run scene from Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope.
The LEGO diorama—which measures 2,680mm (8.79 feet) long, 1,370 mm (4.49 feet) deep, and stands 1,100 mm (3.60 feet) tall— features defensive turrets, along with Luke’s X-Wing, the wreckage of another Rebel ship, and Vader and two TIE Fighters in pursuit.
The build required 80,000 LEGO bricks to complete and even includes a cutaway of the back, revealing the insides of this astronomical object. If that wasn’t enough, an Arduino was used to coordinate flashing effects to further enhance this iconic recreation.
Additional images of this impressive project, plus some of Kim’s other work, can be found on his Instagram page.
After going through what not to do when building an electric longboard, Electronoobs is now ready to show us how to control one of these devices. For his project, the YouTuber used a 6S battery pack, an ESC, a brushless motor, and an Arduino Nano, along with a handheld RC transmitter and receiver.
Underneath the deck, he’s broken up the hardware mounting into two parts—a front compartment contains the unit’s ample battery, while a rear enclosure houses the rest of the components.
The Arduino Nano receives PWM signals directly from the receiver, then translates them to ESC inputs, allowing for better handling of how the board starts and stops.
You can find more details on Electronoobs’ page here and in his video below!
When you pick up a book, the text inside is normally the point, but what if the book itself was the story? That’s the idea behind Alistair Aichison’s Alt.Ctrl.GDC exhibition called “The Book Ritual.”
Aichison’s work is told through an interactive computer installation, where an onscreen book talks about loss and change, but also encourages you to add your story by creatively modifying a real book.
The process involves cutting and marking the book, and even requires the user to tear out pages to put it through an actual shredder—this is meant to evoke feelings of loss and regret, ultimately leading to the formation of new memories.
Control is accomplished using infrared sensors that verify page destruction, along with an Arduino that interfaces with the computer running this Unity-based game.
The Book Ritual is a narrative game played using a real book and a real shredder. Your book becomes a character talking to you through the screen. It has a story to tell, but it wants you know your own story too. It asks you to write in its pages and deface it in creative ways to reflect your feelings. The book also needs you to tear out its pages and put them through a shredder.
This is where the custom hardware comes in: the shredder is attached to the computer by a USB cable and detects when paper’s going through it. So, you actually need to shred pages in order to progress.
The shredder itself is dressed up as a character, with big cartoon eyes and teeth. Because the subject matter is quite melancholic, I want the player to feel welcomed in by something innocent, childlike and friendly.
More details on the project can be found in Gamasutra’s recent article and on Aichison’s website here.
The Arduino Mega is a useful tool for the maker. Generally, once one has come up with plans for blinking LEDs that require more IO than is available on the Arduino Uno, one graduates to the Mega and goes for broke. However, it’s not typically what we’d consider as our first choice for video work. [Stephane] begs to differ, and coded this Bad Apple!! demo for the Arduino Mega 2560.
For those unfamiliar, video on the Arduino is actually somewhat of a solved problem – merely requiring a pair of resistors and some nifty code. The real meat of this hack is the video storage itself. It’s been done before, but by streaming data off an SD card or serial link. [Stephane] was determined to store everything on the Arduino itself, and thus the hack begun. Video data is stored as 1 bit per pixel, as it’s a simple black and white video as per the original inspiration. LZ77 compression was used to cram the data down without requiring too much RAM, which is a limited resource on the Mega. It’s video only, as the Mega is tapped out handling 3 minutes and 39 seconds of video storage, but future work may include syncing with a second Arduino to deliver the soundtrack.
It’s a hack that shows off [Stephane]’s ability to get impressive performance out of limited platforms. We’ve seen this before, with his excellent Star Fox port to the Arduboy. Video after the break.
Back in June 2017, Sam Battle (aka LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER) released the Synth Bike 3.0, a stationary bike with handlebars adorned with a functional synthesizer. This was promptly put on display at the Science Gallery Dublin, where it was ridden by approximately 130,000 people over six to eight months.
In his latest video, Battle decides to open up the control panel to revive it for an upcoming tour. The good news is that the system is still mostly functional, though a couple of the device’s Arduino—it’s run by a dozen Nanos along with four frequency central boards, a SparkFun WAV trigger, and a bunch of stripboard circuits—are missing.
After deciphering what he was thinking well over a year ago, considering what he might do differently today, reattaching wires, and tinkering, he’s able to get things functional. This is, of course, followed by the requisite solo synth-bike performance.
More details on how Battle’s beat-banging bike can be found here.