Are you a Bitcoin miner or trader, but find yourself lacking the compulsive need to check exchange rates like the drug-fuelled daytraders of Wall Street? Fear not – you too can adorn your home or office with a Bitcoin Price Ticker! The post is in Italian but you can read a translated version here.

It’s a straightforward enough build – an Arduino compatible board with an onboard ESP8266 is hooked up with an HD44780-compatible LCD. It’s then a simple matter of scraping the Bitcoin price from the web and displaying it on the LCD. It’s a combination of all the maker staples, tied together with some off-the-shelf libraries – it’s quick, and it works.

What makes the build extra nice is the use of custom characters on the LCD. The HD44780 is a character based display, and this project appears to use a screen with two lines of sixteen characters each. However, a custom character set has been implemented in the display which uses several “characters” on the screen to create a single number. It’s a great way to make the display more legible from a distance, as the numbers are much larger, and the Bitcoin logo has been faithfully recreated as well. It’s small touches like this that can really set a project apart. We’d love to see this expanded to display other financial market information and finished off in a nice case.

If you’re wondering what you can actually do with Bitcoin, check out the exploits of this robotic darknet shopper. Oh, and Microsoft will take them, too.

This weekend at the Bay Area Maker Faire, Arduino in conjunction with SiFive, a fabless provider of the Open Source RISC-V micros, introduced the Arduino Cinque. This is a board running one of the fastest microcontrollers available, and as an added bonus, this board includes Espressif’s ESP32, another wonderchip that features WiFi and Bluetooth alongside a very, very powerful SoC.

Details on the Arduino Cinque are slim at the moment, but from what we’ve seen so far, the Cinque is an impressively powerful board featuring the RISC-V FE310 SoC from SiFive, an ESP32, and an STM32F103. The STM32 appears to be dedicated to providing the board with USB to UART translation, something the first RISC-V compatible Arduino solved with an FTDI chip. Using an FTDI chip is, of course, a questionable design decision when building a capital ‘O’ Open microcontroller platform, and we’re glad SiFive and Arduino found a better solution. It’s unknown if this STM32 can be used alongside the FE310 and ESP32 at this point.

We’ve taken a look at SiFive’s FE310 SoC, and it is an extremely capable chip. It was released first at the HiFive1, and our hands-on testing revealed this is a chip that outperforms the current performance champ of the Arduino world, the Teensy 3.6. Of course, with any new architecture, there will be a few problems porting the vast number of libraries over to the FE310, but SiFive has included an Arduino compatible SDK. It’s promising, and we can’t wait to see SiFive’s work in more boards.

The Arduino has inspired many a creative projects that can be beneficial to humanity. The Arduino Hamster Wheel Pedometer by [John Mueller] on the other hand is a creation that is meant for the cute furry rodent pets. When [John Mueller]’s daughter wanted to keep track of her hamster’s night-time strolls, her maker-dad saw it as an opportunity to get her involved in technology. The project consists of a hamster-wheel with a magnet that triggers a reed switch on completing a revolution. The entire assembly is custom-made and [John Mueller] does an excellent job documenting the build with a lot of clear images.

The wheel is affixed to a shaft with a ball bearing at one end and the entire thing is mounted on the side of the cage so that it can be removed with ease for maintenance. The reed switch is embedded in the wooden mounting block such that the connecting cables pass from inside the assembly. This prevents the hamster from coming in contact with the cabling or damaging it in any way. An LCD and the Arduino Uno are placed outside the cage and are used to display the revolutions of the wheel as well as the equivalent miles travelled.

The code for the Arduino is also supplied for anyone who wants to replicate the project and the video below shows the working of the project. The project could also be extended to count calories burned as well as running speed. This project is a prime example of how technology can be used to assist and is similar to the IoT Hamster Wheels that tweets every movement of the Hamster Life.

Primary image

I will use these components:

Arm:
https://www.conrad.nl/nl/velleman-ksr10-robotarm-bouwpakket-uitvoering-bouwpakketmodule-bouwpakket-079655.html

Tracked Platform:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Damping-balance-Tank-Robot-Chassis-Platform-high-power-Remote-Control-DIY-crawle-shock-absorption-SINONING-for/32470872532.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000013.1.Dcv7Fa&scm=1007.13339.81019.0&pvid=49c3b489-fda0-4e41-9786-032c47b265a5&tpp=1

read more

Primary image

I will use these components:

Arm:
https://www.conrad.nl/nl/velleman-ksr10-robotarm-bouwpakket-uitvoering-bouwpakketmodule-bouwpakket-079655.html

Tracked Platform:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Damping-balance-Tank-Robot-Chassis-Platform-high-power-Remote-Control-DIY-crawle-shock-absorption-SINONING-for/32470872532.html?spm=2114.10010108.1000013.1.Dcv7Fa&scm=1007.13339.81019.0&pvid=49c3b489-fda0-4e41-9786-032c47b265a5&tpp=1

read more

A self-balancing robot is a great way to get introduced to control theory and robotics in general. The ability for a robot to sense its position and its current set of circumstances and then to make a proportional response to accomplish its goal is key to all robotics. While hobby robots might use cheap servos or brushed motors, for any more advanced balancing robot you might want to reach for a brushless DC motor and a new fully open-source controller.

The main problem with brushless DC motors is that they don’t perform very well at low velocities. To combat this downside, there are a large number of specialized controllers on the market that can help mitigate their behavior. Until now, all of these controllers have been locked down and proprietary. SmoothControl is looking to create a fully open source design for these motors, and they look like they have a pretty good start. The controller is designed to run on the ubiquitous ATmega32U4 with an open source 3-phase driver board. They are currently using these boards with two specific motors but plan to also support more motors as the project grows.

We’ve seen projects before that detail why brushless motors are difficult to deal with, so an open source driver for brushless DC motors that does the work for us seems appealing. There are lots of applications for brushless DC motors outside of robots where a controller like this could be useful as well, such as driving an airplane’s propeller.

There’s an old joke where you ask someone what’s the most important thing about comedy. When they get to about the word “important,” you interrupt them and say, “Timing!” Perhaps the same thing can be said for photography. [Ted Kinsman’s] students at the Rochester Institute of Technology would probably agree. They built an Arduino-based rig to do inexpensive stop action photography.

As Arduino projects go, it isn’t very sophisticated. The circuit contains a  sound detection module and an optoisolator. The code would easily fit on a piece of notebook paper. When a loud sound occurs, the Arduino triggers the flash. Simple enough, but the resulting pictures are amazing. It also looks like a lot of fun to destroy perfectly good things in the name of art.

If you are interested in photography, there are enough photos of their setup to give you some ideas about lighting, reflectors, and camera angles. If you are not a photography fan, you still should check out the post to see more of the pictures the students took.

Interestingly, [Dr. Harold Edgerton] at MIT pioneered this technique starting back in 1937 and you’ve probably seen some of his famous photographs like the bullet through the apple or the milk drop crown. He used the same techniques to take photographs of the atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s.

You don’t have to use sound as a trigger, by the way. We’ve seen lasers do the trick. And while the Rochester group’s build was simple, we’ve seen some even more bare-bones.

Primary image

Hardware overview is in the video with a better description.

Jetson TK1 processes images from the USB webcam and the two Raspberry Pi NoIR cameras then sends commands to the Arduino Mega in order to move autonomously around the environment avoiding obstacles.

The software is custom written and uses OpenCV for image processing.  No ROS, no SLAM, no neural nets or whatever.

Hacker “MmmmFloorPie’s” senior project in college, in 1989, was a device based on the venerable Motorola 6800 chip that could record and play back sounds. It could also display these recorded waveforms on a monochrome CRT monitor. The monitor in question was purchased as a bare CRT for $20, and mounted in the cardboard box it was shipped in. Various risks aside, it’s quite an impressive setup.

As with many projects that seemed very cool at the time, this one sat in ‘FloorPie’s garage for many years, until it was finally powered up many years later. Naturally it didn’t work, but instead of giving up, an Arduino Uno shield was made in the form of the 68000 motherboard to send it the required signals.

Though it’s now much slower than the original, the CRT was brought back to life. You can find more about this build on Imgur or on ‘FloorPie’s Reddit post here.

Arduino will once again return to Maker Faire Bay Area, taking place May 19th-21st in San Mateo, CA.

As a sponsor of this year’s event, attendees will be able to meet our team, go hands-on with boards and projects, and even buy kits of their own at our pop-up shop at the Arduino booth. Makers can also learn about all of our recent developments as Massimo Banzi takes Center Stage for his annual ‘State of Arduino’ keynote on Saturday at 12:45pm.

Those who come by our booth (#2522) will have the chance to check out our new MKR family, which include the MKR1000, MKRZero, MKR2Uno Adapter, MKR Relay Proto Shield and MKR Proto Shield, along with some IoT demos created in collaboration with Officine Innesto and Fablab Bologna.

Why wait to get home to purchase your boards? The MKR lineup as well as a few special bundles–the MKR Family Developer Bundle, the UNO to MKR bundle and the Young Maker Bundle–will be on sale all weekend long. These kits will be available at a discounted price on-site and on our online store from Friday, May 19th to Sunday, the 21st.

But that’s not all. We’ll be joining our friends at Intel, where we’ll be showcasing Arduino Education’s CTC 101, a modular STEAM curriculum for schools looking to bring technology and programming into their classrooms. There, you’ll also find a preview of some projects built with the Starter Kit 101, the latest collaboration between Intel and Arduino.

Whether you have a question about Arduino, want to speak with our team of experts, or simply want to take home a board, be sure to swing by our booth and store next weekend! For more information and tickets, check out Maker Faire’s official site!