Would you like to create a robot that slithers from place to place like a snake? Well now you can, thanks to this bio-inspired design from Will Donaldson. 

Donaldson’s project uses 10 metal gear servos to allow his robotic snake to curl its body back and forth, sliding along on small wheels that replace a real serpent’s bottom scales. An Arduino Nano controls its 10 segments, and power is provided by an external tether from a recycled desktop power supply. 

As shown in Donaldson’s video, he’s been experimenting with several different snake builds and forms of locomotion. These include an inchworm-style gait where sections are picked up off of the ground, and a sort of hybrid configuration where a snake can move in both the horizontal and vertical planes. 

Instructions and code can be found in Donaldson’s write-up here, and you can check out the video below to see more about his design process.

If you’d like to monitor your driving habits, or perhaps keep them handy in the event of an accident, a “black box,” or more properly a “telematics” device is just what you’re looking for. 

Monitoring driving habits can be interesting, but what if you’d like to make a telematics box yourself, giving you total control over how data is collected and used?

That’s just what maker “TheForeignMan” did, using an Arduino Mega to take in data from his car’s OBD-II port, along with position information from a GPS module. Vehicle speed, engine RPM, and throttle depression are saved on an SD card, which can be removed and graphed on the driver’s computer.

DISCLAIMER: This custom-made black box may not always be valid evidence in a court of law. Some countries/states/local laws may not allow installation of custom monitoring units into moving vehicles unless authorized by an approved installation team. For these reasons, and any other associated to tampering with the OBD port, the author(s) of this article and website hold no responsibility over the outcome of your driving, your car, your car’s electronics (including on board computer), and any other incidents occurred with a custom-made monitoring unit fitted.

Instructions for this build are available here and code can found on GitHub. 

If you’re a high school student and would appreciate a vending machine in class, what’s to be done? Most of the time the answer is “not much,” but Tustin High T-Tech students were able to get one—by building it themselves!

In fact, this excellent device functioned both as a class project and as a fundraiser for their engineering program. It can be seen working in the video below, and uses an Arduino Mega for control, along with motor drivers and steppers to actuate six snack pusher coils. 

Customers simply insert a dollar into the bill acceptor, punch in the correct number in the keypad, and snacks drop out. Arduino code is published here, and Solidworks design files are also available for your DIY vending edification.

So many good speakers and projects

Read more on MAKE

The post Don’t Miss Tomorrow Night’s Hardware Didactic Galactic appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

More often than not, our coverage of projects here at Hackaday tends to be one-off sort of thing. We find something interesting, write it up for our beloved readers, and keep it moving. There’s an unending world of hacks and creations out there, and not a lot of time to cover them all. Still, it’s nice when we occasionally see a project we’ve previously covered “out in the wild” so to speak. A reminder that, while a project’s time on the Hackaday front page might be fleeting, their journey is far from finished.

A perfect example can be found in a recent article posted by the BBC about the battle with noise in Barcelona’s Plaza del Sol. The Plaza is a popular meeting place for tourists and residents alike, with loud parties continuing into the middle of the night, those with homes overlooking the Plaza were struggling to sleep. But to get any changes made, they needed a way to prove to the city council that the noise was beyond reasonable levels.

Enter the Smart Citizen, an open source Arduino-compatible sensor platform developed by Fab Lab Barcelona. We originally covered the Smart Citizen board back in 2013, right after it ran a successful funding campaign on Kickstarter. Armed with the data collected by Smart Citizen sensors deployed around the Plaza, the council has enacted measures to try to quiet things down before midnight.

Today people tend to approach crowdfunded projects with a healthy dose of apprehension, so it’s nice to see validation that they aren’t all flash in the pan ideas. Some of them really do end up making a positive impact, years after the campaign ends.

Of course, we can’t talk about distributed environmental monitoring without mentioning the fantastic work of [Radu Motisan], who’s made it his mission to put advanced sensors in the hands of citizen scientists.

[Thanks to muA for the tip.]

We recently visited NextFlex, the flexible electronics manufacturing institute in Silicon Valley, where they developed a flexible prototype based on the Arduino Mini. Their mission is to make flexible electronics mainstream, opening up all kinds of new applications.

How did you make the flexible Arduino prototype?

Some of the equipment we use is familiar. For example, automated screen printers and industrial inkjet printers. We used them to print the circuit on a 1mm thick flexible plastic ‘board’ (known as the substrate).

We then took the microcontroller silicon die, which is usually inside a chip package, and connected it directly to the substrate. For this, we used our production-level assembly equipment for precision adhesive dispense, die, and component attach.

Using these techniques, we’re able to create flexible wire connections with a resolution of 50um (that’s 0.005 cm, roughly the thickness of a human hair).

Silicon die inside a standard microcontroller package. (Image credit: NextFlex)

What kind of conductive inks are you using to connect components?

Conductive inks are not new, however we focus our efforts on making these materials very reliable and resilient.

We are using advanced formulations of silver ink with strong adhesion to the base substrate, uniform particle distribution, and the ability to bend and flex after curing — all without degrading the electrical performance.

Some components you use are rigid. When will they be flexible too?

We use some rigid components, which is why we call it “Flexible Hybrid Electronics,” but aim for them to be as small and thin as possible.

The unpackaged die can be thinned to 30um or less. At these thicknesses the silicon becomes flexible and allows for 10mm or smaller bend radii (roughly the radius of your thumb).

Some passive components we use, like capacitors and resistors, are rigid today. Eventually we will print these components, so they are flexible too.

When will flexible electronics be used in every day products? 

The technology is already here! Over the next couple of years, we think it will reach prices that make it widely adopted in consumer products. Before then, by working on projects like the flexible Arduino implementation, we hope we can soon put development tools into the hands of more students, makers and product designers to innovate with.

MCU silicon die bonded to the flexible Arduino prototype. (Image credit: NextFlex)

NextFlex will be talking more about this project at the Sensors Expo & Conference in San Jose, California on June 26th, during the “Democratizing IoT” session.

If you have an unused Teddy Ruxpin lying around, you’re in luck. This hack from “Jayden17” turns the iconic ’80s toy from a fancy tape player into your own talking bear assistant!

The build started out with obtaining one of these vintage bears and fixing up the internals, as well as equipping it with a new speaker. An old smartphone was then added, running Google Assistant to take and answer queries. An Arduino Uno is tasked with translating the amplitude of incoming sound into mouth movements with the help of a motor shield.

If you can get your hands on one of these animatronics toys, it’s a relatively simple hack and something that could work with any sort of voice assistant or audio input. Check it out in the video below! 

After being inspired by an Old Spice commercial where actor Terry Crews plays music with his muscles and EMG sensors, hacker Julio David Barriga decided to do the same thing using an Arduino. 

While Crews’ setup involves an entire one-man band, Barriga’s system is greatly simplified, detecting the amplitude of the electrical signals emanating from his bicep. An Arduino Uno is then used to translate this signal into output notes on a small speaker, either as varying frequencies in the first video below, or as actual notes on the C major scale in the second.

The project write-up outlines a simple to implementation with a pre-built MyoWare sensor assembly, as well as a way to build own if you’d like to learn more about this technology.

While building a walking robot especially with less than six legs can be quite a challenge, maker “Skill Mill NYC” decided to construct a quadruped robot named DoggoBot using cardboard for its body.

Four micro high torque servos power the legs, which are able to move the robot around with the help of unpowered knee joints.

DoggoBot is controlled by an Arduino, and it takes movement commands via a computer USB-serial connection or from a Bluetooth module. 

Ever since I started programming Arduinos, I wanted to build a robot using one. I also want a dog. However, living in NYC makes it tough to take care of a dog. So after hours of watching videos of robots and dogs, I decided to put my phone down and build myself a pet!

Although what’s seen in the demonstration below is an impressive feat of “cardboard engineering,” its creator has a few more ideas for it, such as adding sensors and getting Doggo’ to turn.

In the United States, TV and radio stations have to give the opportunity of equal airtime to all candidates. In that spirit, we thought we should show you [Jayden17’s] hack that puts Google Assistant into a Teddy Ruxpin. You can see the hacked bear do its thing in the video below.

Teddy was the best-selling toy for 1985 and 1986, and is still available, so over 30 years there are a lot of these hanging around. If you never looked at how they work, the original ones were quite simple. A cassette player routed one stereo channel to a speaker and used the other channel to control servo motors to move the mouth and eyes. The cassette was eventually replaced with a digital cartridge, and newer versions of Teddy only use two motors instead of the three in the original.

[Jayden17’s] bear was an original “Worlds of Wonder” bear which means it is from the 1985-1990 time period. If you have a newer bear, you might have to work things out a little differently. These bears often have stuck motors, which can be fixed and broken cassette mechanisms. The cassette isn’t used with this project, so that’s not a problem.

The real key to the project is an Arduino that listens to the audio coming in from a smartphone or other source and drives the motors. The project just uses a cable for the phone, although we would have been tempted to put a cheap Bluetooth receiver in there. However, because of the way it is set up, you could easily do that. You could also use a Raspberry Pi or even switch to Alexa. The Arduino doesn’t know anything about the source audio.