If you think building a walking robot is impossible, perhaps this little guy will change your mind!

With platforms like the various flavors of Arduino, robotics has become accessible for many more people. Walking robots, however, can still be challenging. Especially when it comes to electronics and programming, one has some fairly complicated mechanisms to figure out. Perhaps none is more frustrating than four-legged walkers, as they seem very stable, but that all changes when one foot is removed from the ground.

QuadBot aims to change this with an Arduino-compatible robot that, with clever cutouts for servo motors and plug-in headers on its main board, should be fairly easy to set up, yet capable of being expanded as needed.

The 3D-printable, open-source bot is designed for Makers of any skill level. It works right out of the box and can be programmed using graphical blocks, ideal for beginners. Every aspect of QuadBot can be customized and modified, though, from the 3D design down to a single line of C++ code, opening it up to more advanced users as well.

QuadBot was made for you to do real deal robotics. This means that you learn coding techniques that are scalable to bigger and better projects, rather than an oversimplified and limited alternative (such as Lego Mindstorms). A robotics platform that sets up young and experienced Makers like this has not existed until right now.

QuadBot doesn’t just walk either, it can dance, light up, and with sensors, can follow you, avoid obstacles, and even play songs. The project is the brainchild of Jack Scott-Reeve and Josh Elijah, who graduated with master’s degrees from the University of Manchester’s School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Interested? Head over to Scott-Reeve, Elijah and the team’s Kickstarter page to learn more or back QuadBot for yourself!

Unlike most cars today, deepsyx’s old Opel Astra did not have a tachometer. So what’s a Maker to do? Build your own, of course.

To accomplish this, deepsyx used an Arduino Uno along with a few LEDs. The first LED turns on at 4000 RPM, while the others light up with every 500 RPM increment. At 5800 RPM, however, all the LEDs flash as a warning. There’s even a serial output of the RPM value, so logging real-time data can be a possible enhancement down the road.

I started by cutting a 5cm x 1.5cm piece of an old credit cart, drilled 4 holes in it, painted it black and glued 4 LED diodes to it. Then I soldered 220ohm resistors to each positive LED pin and used a common ground. I connected them to an Arduino via 5 x 30cm jumpers and hid the Arduino in a hole under the wheel. I connected the Arduino data pin via voltage divider to the signal pin of the coil and used an old phone charger to power the Arduino. In order to work, I shared the phone charger and Arduino’s grounds.

Intrigued? You can read more about this project on deepsyx’sGitHub page and over on Hackaday.

In the Harry Potter series, a Muggle is a person who lacks any sort of magical ability. Growing up reading these books, one can only imagine what it would be like to cast spells using a wand. Well, wonder no more as a group of NYC Muggles decided to build their own smart wand that can ‘magically’ control devices over Wi-Fi.

The 3D-printed wand is equipped with a voice recognition module that lets users cast spells of their own with a flick of the wrist, like ordering takeout from delivery.com, turning the lights on and off, as well as playing and silencing music.

Other components include (what appears to be) a MKR1000 board, a LiPo battery, a PowerBoost, a microphone, a switch, and a vibrating motor that indicates when a command is recognized.

Those wishing to buy one are out of luck, as the creators reveal this was merely a fan-made project to celebrate the Harry Potter prequel “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”  You can read more about the Muggle Wand here! 

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]