In European medieval folklore, a practitioner of magic may call for assistance from a familiar spirit who takes an animal form disguise. [Alex Glow] is our modern-day Merlin who invoked the magical incantations of 3D printing, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi to summon her familiar Archimedes: The AI Robot Owl.

The key attraction in this build is Google’s AIY Vision kit. Specifically the vision processing unit that tremendously accelerates image classification tasks running on an attached Raspberry Pi Zero W. It no longer consumes several seconds to analyze each image, classification can now run several times per second, all performed locally. No connection to Google cloud required. (See our earlier coverage for more technical details.) The default demo application of a Google AIY Vision kit is a “joy detector” that looks for faces and attempts to determine if a face is happy or sad. We’ve previously seen this functionality mounted on a robot dog.

[Alex] aimed to go beyond the default app (and default box) to create Archimedes, who was to reward happy people with a sticker. As a moving robotic owl, Archimedes had far more crowd appeal than the vision kit’s default cardboard box. All the kit components have been integrated into Archimedes’ head. One eye is the expected Pi camera, the other eye is actually the kit’s piezo buzzer. The vision kit’s LED-illuminated button now tops the dapper owl’s hat.

Archimedes was created to join in Google’s promotion efforts. Their presence at this Maker Faire consisted of two tents: one introductory “Learn to Solder” tent where people can create a blinky LED badge, and the other tent is focused on their line of AIY kits like this vision kit. Filled with demos of what the kits can do aside from really cool robot owls.

Hopefully these promotional efforts helped many AIY kits find new homes in the hands of creative makers. It’s pretty exciting that such a powerful and inexpensive neural net processor is now widely available, and we look forward to many more AI-powered hacks to come.

This device by Dejan Nedelkovski of How To Mechatronics implements both an ultrasonic sensor for range measurement and an accelerometer for measuring angles. While you’ve likely seen these implemented separately in other projects, combining them saves space, and allows the Arduino Nano onboard to use the two readings together to calculate a square area automatically.

User interface consists of a power switch, along with a single button for program interaction and to choose between the different measurement routines. Results are displayed on an LCD screen, and the electronics are encased in clear acrylic for visibility. 

Code and PCB files are available on the project’s write-up, and the video below gives a nice overview of its functionality and build process.

If you have young kids, you’ve probably realized that they don’t exactly like to sleep in. While their energy levels are enviable, if their clock-reading skills haven’t yet caught up, this device by maker “JonathonT” looks like a great and simple solution.

With help from an Arduino and an RTC module, Jonathon uses a trio of LEDs to show red for “stay in bed,” yellow for “almost time,” and green to indicate “you can get up.” While the current 7:00am starting time might still seem early to some, when compared to his son’s previous 5:30-or-so awakening, this is a huge improvement. Cleverly, the LEDs are diffused with a normal white plastic stadium cup with wax paper inside, making it a very accessible project!

GREEN MEANS GO!!! RED, STAY IN BED!!! This simple, inexpensive Arduino real-time clock can be set to light up LEDs at whatever time necessary. For us that means at 6:00am it turns RED, STAY IN BED. Then 10 minutes before 7:00am it turns YELLOW giving the indication it is almost time to come out and to play in your room. Then at 7:00am… “The light is GREEN!!!”, he says, as he bursts into our room each morning no earlier than 7:00am. What a lifesaver!!!

Sound like something you can use in your home? You can find build instructions here.

Graduate students Ben Wiener and Philip Zucker have been working on a classic controls problem for quite some time called an “inverted pendulum.” This type of device balances a stick on an axis, and in this implementation, a motor pulls the axis assembly that the pendulum—a paint stirrer—is sitting on to keep it stable.

Control is handled by an Arduino Uno, which measures the angle of the stirrer as well as the position of the axis via a pair of encoders.

The inverted pendulum or cart pole is a classic problem in control theory. It’s in OpenAI Gym of course, but we wanted to see it work in real life, not some lame simulation. 

It took a few iterations, but we eventually found a system that works well. Our cart is 3D printed PLA driven by a DC motor via a toothed belt. The pole itself is a paint stirrer. One of the longer type, about 24″. A rotary encoder opposite the motor acts as a pulley for the belt and allows us to track the motion of the cart, while a second rotary encoder on the cart is a pivot for the pole and measures its angle. The motor is controlled by a 32 amp Sabertooth motor controller. It’s overkill, and pretty expensive at about $120, but we already had it for another project. We monitored the encoders with an Arduino. The foundation of the system is a piece of extruded aluminum rail called V-Slot, on which the cart slides and the motor and encoder are mounted. Our rail is 1.5 m long, from a company called  .

Code for the setup can be found on GitHub and be sure to see it in action in the video below, as it swings the wooden stick from rest into a vertical position.

Farmers have long been known for their ingenuity, able to accomplish urgent repairs with whatever is on hand. Now with the help of an Arduino, maker “rscholten” has even figured out how to automate his chicken coop.

The device uses an Uno and a real-time clock module to schedule his automated coop door’s movement, while a servo and linkage system physically flips the door open and closed. A solenoid then locks the door in place when not in motion so that the servo doesn’t have to constantly maintain a position. 

User interface is provided by a 7-segment LED, along with dials to set the current time and when it should be opened and closed. As shown in the video below, the coop can also be activated with a keyfob style remote when needed.

I built this automatic chicken door to save me the twice daily task of opening and closing the door in the morning and evening. Chickens are great providers of eggs, manure and entertainment, but getting up early to let them out the coop – especially in winter – was drudgery. And then making sure I was home in time to close them in really restricted my freedom to come home late.

Chickens follow a daily routine of returning to a coop around sunset and waking up around sunrise. The times they go in and out is not exact and is influenced on the weather of the day and ambient light. Should a chicken be seen to be too late to enter after the door closed, the door can be remotely opened then closed. The door can be closed during the day should the owner need to stop broody chickens from entering.

As sunrise and sunset times vary throughout the year and depend on the latitude, any door controller needs to track the time of day, the day of the year and know the latitude of the location. This requirement can be accomplished with software or a sun tracker, but in this design uses manually adjustable open and close time settings to keep things simpler.

It’s a problem common to every hackerspace, university machine shop, or even the home shops of parents with serious control issues: how do you make sure that only trained personnel are running the machines? There are all kinds of ways to tackle the problem, but why not throw a little tech at it with something like this magnetic card-reader machine lockout?

[OnyxEpoch] does not reveal which of the above categories he falls into, if any, but we’ll go out on a limb and guess that it’s a hackerspace because it would work really well in such an environment. Built into a sturdy steel enclosure, the guts are pretty simple — an Arduino Uno with shields for USB, an SD card, and a data logger, along with an LCD display and various buttons and switches. The heart of the thing is a USB magnetic card reader, mounted to the front of the enclosure.

To unlock the machine, a user swipes his or her card, and if an administrator has previously added them to the list, a relay powers the tool up. There’s a key switch for local override, of course, and an administrative mode for programming at the point of use. Tool use is logged by date, time, and user, which should make it easy to identify mess-makers and other scofflaws.

We find it impressively complete, but imagine having a session timeout in the middle of a machine operation would be annoying at the least, and potentially dangerous at worst. Maybe the solution is a very visible alert as the timeout approaches — a cherry top would do the trick!

There’s more reading if you’re one seeking good ideas for hackerspace. We’ve covered the basics of hackerspace safety before, as well as insurance for hackerspaces.

This week, Arduino announced a lot of new hardware including an exceptionally interesting FPGA development board aimed at anyone wanting to dip their toes into the seas of VHDL and developing with programmable logic. We think it’s the most interesting bit of hardware Arduino has released since their original dev board, and everyone is wondering what the hardware actually is, and what it can do.

This weekend at Maker Faire Bay Area, Arduino was out giving demos for all their wares, and yes, the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000 was on hand, being shown off in a working demo. We have a release date and a price. It’ll be out next month (June 2018) for about $60 USD.

But what about the hardware, and what can it do? From the original press releases, we couldn’t even tell how many LUTs this FPGA had. There were a lot of questions about the Mini PCIe connectors, and we didn’t know how this FPGA would be useful for high-performance computation like decoding video streams. Now we have the answers.

The FPGA on board the Arduino Vidor is an Altera Cyclone 10CL016. This chip has 16k logic elements, and 504 kB memory block. This is on the low end of Altera’s FPGA lineup, but it’s still no slouch. In the demo video below, it’s shown decoding video and identifying QR codes in real time. That’s pretty good for what is effectively a My First FPGA board.

Also on board the Vidor is a SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and a uBlox module housing an ESP-32 WiFi and Bluetooth module. This is a really great set of chips, and if you’re looking to get into FPGA development, this might just be the board for you. We haven’t yet seen the graphic editor that will be used to work with IP for the FPGA (for those who don’t care to write their own VHDL or Verilog), but we’re looking forward to the unveiling of that new software.

Maker Faire Bay Area is here! Get a sneak peek at all the must-see exhibits and creators. We'll be updating this post regularly throughout the weekend, so check back regularly.

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The post Live Updates From Maker Faire Bay Area 2018 appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Today ahead of the Bay Area Maker Faire, Arduino has announced a bevy of new boards that bring modern features and modern chips to the Arduino ecosystem.

Most ambitious of these new offerings is a board that combines a fast ARM microcontroller, WiFi, Bluetooth, and an FPGA. All this is wrapped in a package that provides Mini HDMI out and pins for a PCIe-Express slot. They’re calling it the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000.

Bringing an FPGA to the Arduino ecosystem is on the list of the most interesting advances in DIY electronics in recent memory, and there’s a lot to unpack here. FPGA development boards aren’t new. You can find crates of them hidden in the storage closet of any University’s electronics lab. If you want to buy an FPGA dev board, the Terasic DE10 is a good starter bundle, the iCEstick has an Open Source toolchain, and this one has pink soldermask. With the release of the MKR Vidor, the goal for Arduino isn’t just to release a board with an FPGA; the goal is to release a tool that allows anyone to use an FPGA.

The key to democratizing FPGA development is Arduino’s work with the Arduino Create ecosystem. Arduino Create is the company’s online IDE that gives everyone the ability to share projects and upload code with Over-the-Air updates. The MKR Vidor will launch with integration to the Arduino Create ecosystem that includes a visual editor to work with the pre-compiled IP for the FPGA. That’s not to say you can’t just plug your own VHDL into this board and get it working; that’s still possible. But Arduino would like to create a system where anyone can move blocks of IP around with a tool that’s easy for beginners.

A Facelift for the Uno WiFi

First up is the brand new Arduino Uno WiFi. While there have been other boards bearing the name ‘Arduino Uno WiFi’ over the years, a lot has changed in the world of tiny radio modules and 8-bit microcontrollers over the past few years. The new Arduino Uno WiFi is powered by a new 8-bit AVR, the ATMega4809. The ATMega4809 is a new part announced just a few months ago, and is just about what you would expect from the next-generation 8-bit Arduino; it runs at 20MHz, has 48 kB of Flash, 6 kB of SRAM, and it comes in a 48-pin package. The ATMega4809 is taking a few lattices of silicon out of Microchip’s playbook and adds Custom Configurable Logic. The CCL in the new ATMega is a peripheral that is kinda, sorta like a CPLD on chip. If you’ve ever had something that could be more easily done with logic gates than software, the CCL is the tool for the job.

But a new 8-bit microcontroller doesn’t make a WiFi-enabled Arduino. The wireless power behind the new Arduino comes from a custom ESP-32 based module from u-blox. There’s also a tiny crypto chip (Microchip’s ATECC508A) so the Uno WiFi will work with AWS. The Arduino Uno WiFi will be available this June.

But this isn’t the only announcement from the Arduino org today. They’ve been hard at work on some killer features for a while now, and now they’re finally ready for release. What’s the big news? Debuggers. Real debuggers for the Arduino that are easy to use. There are also new boards aimed at Arduino’s IoT strategy.

The Future of Arduino

As you would expect in the world of embedded development, the future is IoT. Last week, Arduino announced the release of two new boards, the MKR WiFi 1010 and the MKR NB 1500. The MKR WiFi 1010 features a SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller and a u-blox module (again featuring an ESP-32) giving the board WiFi. The MKR NB 1500 is designed for cellular networks and features the same SAMD21 Cortex-M0+ microcontroller found in the MKR WiFi 1010, but also adds a u-blox cellular module that will connect to LTE networks using Narrowband IoT, but the module does also support Cat M1 networks.

But IoT isn’t the only thing Arduino has been working on. On the leadup to the World Maker Faire this weekend, I had the opportunity to speak with Fabio Violante, CEO of Arduino, and Massimo Banzi, Co-founder of Arduino, and what I heard was remarkable. There’s going to be an update to the Arduino IDE soon, and real debugging is coming to the Arduino ecosystem. This is a significant development in Arduino’s software efforts, and when Fabio was appointed CEO last July, this was the first thing he wanted to do.

Also on deck for upcoming bits of hardware is a slow upgrade from ARM Cortex-M0 parts to Cortex-M4 parts. While this change isn’t exactly overdue, it is a direct result of the ever-increasing power of available microcontrollers. The reason for this change is the growing need for more compute power on embedded platforms, and simply the fact that more powerful chips are cheaper now.

Massimo, Fabio, and the rest of the Arduino team will be showing off their latest wares at Maker Faire Bay Area this weekend, and we will be posting updates. The FPGA Arduino — the MKR Vidor 4000 — will be on display running a computer vision demo, and there will, of course, be fancy new boards on hand. We’ll be posting updates so keep your eye on Hackaday!

We’re excited to kick off Maker Faire Bay Area by expanding our IoT lineup with two new boards: the MKR Vidor 4000 and the Uno WiFi Rev 2.

The MKR Vidor 4000 is the first-ever Arduino based on an FPGA chip, equipped with a SAM D21 microcontroller, a u-blox Nina W102 WiFi module, and an ECC508 crypto chip for secure connection to local networks and the Internet. MKR Vidor 4000 is the latest addition to the MKR family, designed for a wide range of IoT applications, with its distinctive form factor and substantial computational power for high performance. The board will be coupled with an innovative development environment, which aims to democratize and radically simplify access to the world of FPGAs.

“The new MKR Vidor 4000 will finally make FPGA accessible to makers and innovators,” said Massimo Banzi, Arduino co-founder. “And we are looking forward to changing the game yet again.”

“Maker Faire Bay Area is always an unparalleled opportunity to interact with the Arduino community and makers,” added Fabio Violante, Arduino CEO. “This year I’m extremely excited about the launch of the most flexible Arduino ever, the MKR Vidor 4000 and the development environment vision around it. With this new product we aim at putting in the hands of professionals, makers and educators the electronic equivalent of a resourceful Swiss Knife to bring their creativity to the next level. The applications are countless.”

Co-developed with Microchip, the Uno WiFi Rev 2 is built around the new ATmega4809, u-blox Nina W102 WiFi module, and an integrated IMU. The Uno WiFi will make it even easier to deploy products that need connectivity using the classic Arduino form factor, and is ideal for emerging IoT industries such as automotive, agriculture, consumer electronics, smart home, and wearables. Among its other features, the ATmega4809 provides 6KB of RAM, 48KB of Flash, three UARTS, Core Independent Peripherals (CIPs), and an integrated high-speed ADC. Combined with Microchip’s ECC608 crypto chip on the Uno board, the microcontroller also provides hardware-based security for connecting projects to the cloud including AWS and Google.

“As we grow, partner and invest, we will fuel the vast IoT and software markets across the industry,” said Banzi. “Inspiring the Arduino community with easy to deploy solutions that enable our users to have access to larger both flash and RAM memory for more demanding IoT projects.”

“Arduino aims at supporting professional developers, makers and educators during the entire lifecycle of IoT product development, from the initial learning phases to mass deployment,” noted Violante. “Being based on the popular AVR technology, but on steroids, and with an enhanced WiFi connectivity, the UNO WiFi Rev 2 is a big step forward for all users that want to leverage the vast ecosystem of shields and libraries available for the traditional UNO form factor, in connected use cases.”

Those heading to Maker Faire this weekend are invited to attend Massimo Banzi’s semi-annual ‘State of Arduino’ talk, where you can learn more about our latest developments including the MKR Vidor 4000, Uno WiFi Rev2, and our Arduino Day releases.

Both the MKR Vidor 4000 and Uno WiFi Rev2 will be available on the Arduino online store at the end of June.