Construct an Arduino guitar pedal stompbox with easy-to-find parts and you'll be having fun creating your own sounds in not time.
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It seems like the multimeter is never easy to see during a project. Whether it’s troubleshooting a vehicle’s electrical system and awkwardly balancing the meter on some vacuum lines and the intake manifold, or installing a new solar panel and hoping the meter doesn’t fall on the ground while the leads are in both hands, it seems like there’s never a good way to see the meter while actually using it. Some meters have a small magnet and strap that can be used to hang them temporarily, but this will only get you so far.
[Alain Mauer]’s entry into the Hackaday Prize looks to solve this glaring problem. Using a heads-up Bluetooth display mounted to a pair of safety glasses, a multimeter can be connected to the device in order to display its information directly to its user. Based on his original idea which used a normal pair of prescription glasses as its foundation, [Alain]’s goal is to reduce safety hazards that might arise when using a multimeter in an awkward or dangerous manner that might not otherwise be possible.
The device uses an Arduino Pro Micro to connect to the multimeter and drive the display. [Alain] notes that the real challenge is with the optical system, however. Either way though, this would be a welcome addition to any lab, workspace, or electrician’s toolbox. Be sure to check out the video of it in action after the break.
All over the world, in particular in underdeveloped countries, people die every year by the thousands because of floods. The sudden rise of water levels often come unannounced and people have no time to react before they are caught in a bad spot. Modern countries commonly have measure equipment deployed around problematic areas but they are usually expensive for third world countries to afford.
[Benne] project devises a low-cost, cloud-connected, water level measuring station to allow remote and central water level monitoring for local authorities. He hopes that by being able to monitor water levels in a more precise and timely fashion, authorities can act sooner to warn potentially affected areas and increase the chance of saving lives in case of a natural disaster.
At the moment, the project is still in an early stage as they are testing with different sensors to figure out which would work best in different scenarios. Latest version consists essentially in an Arduino UNO, an ultrasonic distance sensor, and a DHT temperature/humidity sensor to provide calibration since these characteristics affect the speed of sound. Some years ago, we covered a simple water level monitoring using a Parallax Ping sensor, but back then the IoT and the ‘cloud’ weren’t nearly as fashionable. They also tested with infrared sensors and a rotary encoder.
They made a video of the rotary encoder, which we can see below:
Four creators fixed an Arduino powered LED binary clock inside a wooden model of a Parisian building to create a fancy addition to any home.
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USB chargers are everywhere and it is the responsibility of every hacker to use this commonly available device to its peak potential. [Septillion] and [Hugatry] have come up with a hack to manipulate a USB charger into becoming a variable voltage source. Their project QC2Control works with chargers that employ Quick Charge 2.0 technology which includes wall warts as well as power banks.
Qualcomm’s Quick Charge is designed to deliver up to 24 watts over a micro USB connector so as to reduce the charging time of compatible devices. It requires both the charger as well as the end device to have compatible power management chips so that they may negotiate voltage limiting cycles.
In their project, [Septillion] and [Hugatry] use a 3.3 V Arduino Pro Mini to talk to the charger in question through a small circuit consisting of a few resistors and diodes. The QC2.0 device outputs voltages of 5 V, 9 V and 12 V when it sees predefined voltage levels transmitted over the D+ and D- lines, set by Arduino and voltage dividers. The code provides function calls to simplify the control of the power supply. The video below shows the hack in action.
Quick Charge has been around for a while and you can dig into the details of the inner workings as well as the design of a compatible power supply from reference designs for the TPS61088 (PDF). The patent (PDF) for the Quick Charge technology has a lot more detail for the curious.
Similar techniques have been used in the past and will prove useful for someone looking for a configurable power supply on the move. This is one for the MacGyver fans.
Running an open source hardware and software company has its rewards. But it also has its challenges. Espruino is no different.
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Ernest Warzocha is a Polish maker who loves using Arduino in his projects. One of his favorites, Musi, uses space to create music.
The post Maker Spotlight: Ernest Warzocha appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
While touchscreens are nice, wouldn’t it be even better if you could simply wave your hand to your computer to get it to do what you want? That’s the idea behind this Iron Man-inspired gesture control device by B. Aswinth Raj.
The DIY system uses an Arduino Nano mounted to a disposable glove, along with hall effect sensors, a magnet attached to the thumb, and a Bluetooth module. This smart glove uses the finger-mounted sensors as left and right mouse buttons, and has a blue circle in the middle of the palm that the computer can track via a webcam and a Processing sketch to generate a cursor position.
You can see it demonstrated in the video below, drawing a stick man literally by hand, and also controlling an LED on the Nano. Check out this write-up for code and more info on the build!
A while back, I wrote an article about Malduino, an Arduino-based, open-source BadUSB device. I found the project interesting so I signed up for an Elite version and sure enough, the friendly postman dropped it off in my mail box last Friday, which means I got to play around with it over the weekend. For those who missed the article, Malduino is USB device which is able to emulate a keyboard and inject keystrokes, among other things. When in a proper casing, it will just look like a USB flash drive. It’s like those things you see in the movies where a guy plugs in a device and it auto hacks the computer. It ships in two versions, Lite and Elite, both based on the ATmega32U4.
The Lite version is really small, besides the USB connector it only contains a switch, which allows the user to choose between running and programming mode, and a LED, which indicates when the script has finished running.
The Elite version is bigger, comes with a Micro-SD card reader and four DIP switches, which allow the user to choose which script to run from the card. It also has the LED, which indicates when a script has finished to run. This allows the user to burn the firmware only once and then program the keystroke injection scripts that stored in the Micro-SD card, in contrast to the Lite version which needs to be flashed each time a user wants to run a different script.
These are the two Malduinos and because they are programmed straight from the Arduino IDE, every feature I just mentioned can be re-programmed, re-purposed or dropped all together. You can buy one and just choose to use it like a ‘normal’ Arduino, although there are not a lot of pins to play around with. This freedom was one the first things I liked about it and actually drove me to participate in the crowd-funding campaign. Read on for the full review.
So the Elite board arrived as schedule and I found myself some time to look an it. Despite being longer than the Lite version, it’s still quite small, measuring roughly 4.6 cm x 1.1 cm (around 1.8 in x 0.43 in), which you can easily adapt to an old USB case, although you’ll have to cut some holes for the DIP switches and the Micro-SD card. In the crowd-funding campaign, the original sketch was for a 3 DIP switch version but the final Elite has four, which I found nice. I plugged it in to an old computer, after some consideration about which firmware it could ship with and what it could do to my laptop, and sure enough a red LED appeared. And that was it. Nothing else.
After playing around with the switches and exercising some RTFM, I realised that the firmware it ships with is probably some sort of Q.C. test for the dips, which makes the Malduino output the numbers 1 to 4 (actually simulating a keypress 1 to 4), depending on which switches are ON. So far so good, it works and I’ve seen worse PCB boards than this one. The board has holes for six pins, which I did not trace to the micro-controller and I don’t know what they are for.
Setting up the Malduino requires that you have the Arduino IDE installed and up to date. You’ll need to open up the board manager and install the Sparkfun boards since the Elite is programmed as a ‘Sparkfun Pro Micro’ running at 3.3 V and 8 MHz. Then you need to go the Malduino Script Converter website which serves several purposes:
For the Elite version, just create a simple or even empty script to download the project, since when in ‘normal’ operation you will just flash the Malduino once and then use the Micro-SD card to store new scripts.
A note on flashing, if you are using a Debian-based distribution you might come across some problems like I did and not be able to flash the device. Like the user on this most useful post, my modem-manager was trying to talk with the Malduino after every reset and confused AVRDUDE to death. The solution is to add udev rules to “/etc/udev/rules.d/77-mm-usb-device-blacklist-local.rules”, kudos to [socrim]:
ACTION!="add|change", GOTO="mm_usb_device_blacklist_local_end"
SUBSYSTEM!="usb", GOTO="mm_usb_device_blacklist_local_end"
ENV{DEVTYPE}!="usb_device", GOTO="mm_usb_device_blacklist_local_end"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1b4f" ATTRS{idProduct}=="9204", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
ATTRS{idVendor}=="1b4f" ATTRS{idProduct}=="9203", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"
LABEL="mm_usb_device_blacklist_local_end"
Since I’m running Linux, a quick shortcut to run a command is the ALT-F2 combination. So I script that into a file and save it to 1111.txt. The Elite searches the Micro-SD card for a file corresponding to the current dip switch state. Lets say the dip switch 2 and 4 are ON. In this case, the software tries to find the file named 0101.txt and parse its contents (as in dip switch order 1,2,3,4 and not the binary representation of the number 2 and 4) . When it finishes, the red LED starts flashing quickly. My simple script was:
DELAY 2000 ALT F2 DELAY 1000 STRING xterm DELAY 1000 ENTER DELAY 1000 STRING id DELAY 1000 ENTER
But it was not working. Almost all commands worked but the ALT-F2 combo was not functioning properly. Close, but no cigar. No ALT-F2, no run command window. I’ve already lazy-browsed the source code a bit because I really didn’t have a lot of time on my hands but I needed to figure this out. The offending code was this:
else if(equals(s,e,"F1",<strong>3</strong>)) Keyboard.press(KEY_F1);</pre> else if(equals(s,e,"F2",<strong>3</strong>)) Keyboard.press(KEY_F2); ... else if(equals(s,e,"F10",3)) Keyboard.press(KEY_F10); else if(equals(s,e,"F11",3)) Keyboard.press(KEY_F11);
A custom equals function was receiving size 3 for the strings of the Function keys, like “F2”. It was ok for “F10”, “F11” and “F12”, but failed for the rest of the keys. Changing 3 to 2 did the trick, but my Portuguese keyboard layout started to interfere with other test scripts. So I changed the code to include PT and UK layouts, changing them in a #define at compile time.
It would be cool if it was possible to access the SD card from the computer as a regular USB volume. I don’t know exactly how feasible that is, but it does not come with the current firmware. I still wanted to be able to output the content of an arbitrary file on the SD card to the screen, so I added another script function called ECHOFILEHEX that outputs the content of a file in the SD card as escape characters. For example, if the file a.txt contains “AAA”, the script command ECHOFILEHEX a.txt would output “\x41\x41\x41”. This can be useful to echo binary files into printf or echo -e, in Linux hosts at least.
Meanwhile, I had some trouble reading the original code. You know, we all have different programming styles. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been known to write some messed-up spaghetti code. I sometimes browse old projects looking for some libs or classes I coded and wonder ‘who the heck wrote this steaming pile of code?’ Me, it was me. Anyway, I started to change a bit here and there and ended up changing pretty much the entire code. That’s the beauty and the curse of open-source. If you’re curious you can check it out here.
All in all, and despite some bumps, I’m quite pleased with Malduino. It is what I expected: an open platform for BadUSB attacks that’s in its infancy. It’s awesome that we can all tinker with it, modify it, make it better or just make it suit our needs. I hope a real community can start so we can see its full potential emerge. My short list includes simulating other USB devices, better SD card management, and expanding the device via the unused pins. What would you add?
It’s a long way to go and a lot can go wrong, so good luck with the project [Seytonic]!
What has eight legs, a tail, and is powered by an Arduino Mega? The ClearWalker, of course!
This Strandbeest-style walker employs two motors, controlled by individual H-bridge relay modules to traverse forwards, backwards, and slowly rotate to one side or another via a hesitating leg motion. You can see how the electronics (including a bunch of LEDs) were integrated into this build in the video below.
If you’d like to try a similar control scheme for your ClearWalker/Strandbeest/treaded vehicle using an Arduino and smartphone, you can find it outlined in this Arduino Project Hub post. For the rest of the steps in this quite involved build, and more rather zany inventions, be sure to check out the “Jeremy Cook’s Projects” YouTube page.