hi 

i have a Advanced Rover 5 Robot Platform with four shaft encoder (quadrature encoder)and im asking about if there is a libirary

arduino that makes me counts the number of revoultions and check if it is forword or reverse , if not is there eny reffrencies that

gives me information of how to code it what type of out and hot to change this output for my desired specific case 

***note that ***

the picture of the shaft is below and also the rover data sheet 

thanks in advance 

A tachometer used to be an accessory added to the dash of only the sportiest of cars, but now they’re pretty much standard equipment on everything from sleek coupes to the family truckster. If your daily driver was born without a tach, fear not – a simple Arduino tachometer is well within your reach.

The tach-less vehicle in question is [deepsyx]’s Opel Astra, which from the video below seems to have the pep and manual transmission that would make a tach especially useful. Eschewing the traditional analog meter display or even a digital readout, [deepsyx] opted to indicate shift points with four LEDs mounted to a scrap of old credit card. The first LED lights at 4000 RPM, with subsequent LEDs coming on at each 500 RPM increase beyond that. At 5800 RPM, all the LEDs blink as a redline warning.  [Deepsyx] even provides a serial output of the smoothed RPM value, so logging of RPM data is a possible future enhancement.

The project is sensing engine speed using the coil trigger signal – a signal sent from the Engine Control Unit (ECU) which tells one of the ignition coilpacks to fire. The high voltage signal from the coilpack passes on to the spark plug, which ignites the air-fuel mixture in that cylinder. This is a good way to determine engine RPM without mechanical modifications to the car. Just make sure you modify the code for the correct number of cylinders in your vehicle.

Simple, cheap, effective – even if it is more of a shift point indicator than true tachometer, it gets the job done. But if you’re looking for a more traditional display and have a more recent vintage car, this sweeping LED tachometer might suit you more.

[via r/Arduino]

Our wonderfully creative community has a penchant for clocks. We have seen so many timepieces over the years that one might suppose that there would be nothing new, no instrument of horology that would not elicit a yawn as we are presented with something we’ve seen many times before.

Every once in a while though along comes a project that is different. A clock that takes the basic idea of a timepiece and manages to present something new, proving that this particular well of projects has not yet quite run dry.

Such a project is the circular word clock made by [Roald Hendriks]. Take a conventional circular wall clock and remove the hands and mechanism, then place LEDs behind the numbers. Add the words for “Quarter”, “Half”, etc. in an inner ring, and place LEDs behind them. Hook all these LEDs up to a microcontroller with a real-time clock, and away you go with a refreshingly novel timepiece.

[Roald]’s clock has the wording in Dutch, and the brain behind it is an Arduino Uno with the relevant driver ICs. He’s provided a video which we’ve put below the break, showing the clock in operation with its various demo modes.

We’ve seen so many word clocks over the years it’s best to give you a stream of them through our word clock tag. It’s good of this one to come along and refresh the genre.

Follow along as John Park prototypes a sound and light blaster prop.

Read more on MAKE

The post Building an Overwatch Lucio Blaster appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

We’ve noticed a lot of musical groups are named after insects. Probably has something to do with the Beatles. (If you study that for a while you’ll spot the homophonic pun, and yes we know that the Crickets inspired the name.) There’s also Iron Butterfly, Adam Ant, and quite a few more. A recent art project by a Mexican team — Micro-ritmos — might inspire some musical groups to be named after bacteria.

The group used geobacter — a kind of bacteria found in soil — a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, and a camera to build an interesting device. As it looks at the bacteria and uses SuperCollider to create music and lighting from the patterns. You can see a video of Micro-ritmos, below.

Music is a bit subjective, of course. We thought the music sounded a little oppressive. Not sure how much of that is the code and how much is the characteristics of the bacteria itself.

We’ve seen SuperCollider in a banana piano, before (these are popular because for most people bananas have appeal). We’ve also seen other natural processes generating sound like this project for presenting the sunset to the blind.

[Stanley] wanted to make a laser projector but all he could find online were one’s using expensive galvanometer scanners. So instead he came up with his own solution that is to be admired for its simplicity and its adaptation of what he could find.

At its heart is an Arduino Uno and an Adafruit Motor Shield v2. The green laser is turned on and off by the Arduino through a transistor. But the part that makes this really a fun machine to watch at work are the two stepper motors and two mirrors that reflect the laser in the X and Y directions. The mirrors are rectangles cut from a hard disk platter, which if you’ve ever seen one, is very reflective. The servos tilt the mirrors at high speed, fast enough to make the resulting projection on the wall appear almost a solid shape, depending on the image.

He’s even written a Windows application (in C#) for remotely controlling the projector through bluetooth. From its interface you can select from around sixteen predefined shapes, including a what looks like a cat head, a heart, a person and various geometric objects and line configurations.

There is a sort of curving of the lines wherever the image consists of two lines forming an angle, as if the steppers are having trouble with momentum, but that’s probably to be expected given that they’re steppers controlling relatively large mirrors. Or maybe it’s due to twist in the connection between motor shaft and mirror? Check out the video after the break and let us know what you think.

The video’s in three parts: looking at the laser beams in action as you’d see them on a dance floor, then watching the projected images while looking at an insert of the Windows application, and then watching the steppers and mirror doing their rapid movements.

As for the expensive galvanometer scanners we mentioned above, check out this impressive laser projector that uses them. Another method is to use a spinning wheel with mirrors set to different angles, like this one that draws a marquee using a pill box as the wheel. And how about one with no mirrors at all, instead attaching the laser directly to servo motors, though that one does take longer to draw.

RC flying is one of those multi-disciplinary hobbies that really lets you expand your skill set. You don’t really need to know much to get started, but to get good you need to be part aeronautical engineer, part test pilot and part mechanic. But if you’re going to really go far you’ll also need to get good at electronics, which was part of the reason behind this Arduino servo tester.

[Peter Pokojny] decided to take the plunge into electronics to help him with the hobby, and he dove into the deep end. He built a servo tester and demonstrator based on an Arduino, and went the extra mile to give it a good UI and a bunch of functionality. The test program can cycle the servo under test through its full range of motion using any of a number of profiles — triangle, sine or square. The speed of the test cycle is selectable, and there’s even a mode to command the servo to a particular position manually. We’ll bet the build was quite a lesson for [Peter], and he ended up with a useful tool to boot.

Need to go even further back to basics than [Peter]? Then check out this primer on servos and this in-depth guide.

[via r/Arduino]

“Since there isn’t a supermoon everyday, make one for your bedside table!” This is exactly what G4lile0 set out to do using a 3D printer, an Arduino and some open-source tools.

The result was a moon phase clock consisting of a 3D-printed model and an LED strip to create the lunar phases. The lights are driven by an Arduino that precisely calculates which phase to show, as well as controls a 0.96″ OLED display revealing the date and time. Other electronics include an RTC module, a DTH11 sensor, a buzzer, and three push buttons.

The clock also features several modes, including an alarm, a wake-up light, a lamp, a thermometer, and a hygrometer. It can even help set the mood or start your next lunar rave with its relaxation and party-like special effects.

You can read all about this project on Thingiverse and find its code over on GitHub.

In the Red Dwarf TV series, Talkie Toaster is a monomaniacal talking toaster that tries to steer every conversation to the subject of toast. Now, YouTuber “slider2732″ has gone ahead and built a chatty appliance of his own.

To accomplish this, the Maker embedded a PIR sensor into the toaster’s lever that communicates with an Arduino Pro Mini whenever someone is nearby. The Arduino then reads sound files loaded onto an SD card and plays them through a 3W amplifier out to a speaker underneath. The replica is also complete with a circular panel on front, made out of “laptop screen material” with a sour cream tub’s lid, and equipped with a couple LEDs.

The Arduino code uses the TMRpcm library and is a simple case of responding to the PIR sensor going high or low. The samples are loaded from the SD card. The front grill area has the speaker underneath, with two white 5mm LEDs that are connected to the Pin 9 output from the Arduino. The former laptop screen material was cut out and then fitted. The main surround is from the lid of a sour cream tub, sprayed with a Krylon brown rattle can paint. The our legs are from a window blind, cut to the right sizes and similarly sprayed, then glued with Fix-All.

The samples were recorded in Audacity, normalized and saved out as 11025Hz, 8-bit WAVs due to buffer constraints of the Arduino Pro Mini.

slider2732 walks through the entire build and shows it off in the video below!

This model satellite is both strange and mesmerizing with folding solar panels and a FM transmitter.

Media artist Dmitry Morozov, aka ::vtol::, is back with his latest kinetic sound object, this one resembling a satellite. The Orbitalochka hangs from the ceiling and broadcasts sound via an FM transmitter and a built-in speaker. These noises are based on the position of the satellite in space, and it can even transmit a pre-recorded lecture by Sergev Kasich, who appears to reside in the satellite’s clear bubble.

::vtol:: bases the sound signals on the generative sound processes created with Patchblocks, a modular mini-synth kit. The signals also react to a light intensity sensor, which responds to how the satellite’s position in space changes.

This happens due to mass redistribution as the solar cell changes location. The solar cells operate as sensors and produce CV (control voltage) to change sound program parameters.

Aside from its unusual sounds, what is really interesting about this synthesizer are the solar panels, which autonomously move around via four servo motors. The Orbitalochka is equipped with an Arduino Nano as well.

You can see the apparatus in action below, and read all about it on ::vtol::’s page here.

(Photos: ::vtol::)