Light graffiti, virtual reality, and motion control combine to make one amazing robotic sidekick.

Film making has advanced in a staggering way over the last 50 or even 10 years, but what if you were to augment your filming rig with a VR headset and add a camera that automatically tracks where a VR controller is? Jaymis Loveday did just this, and in the video below, you’ll see a very interesting result–he’s painting with light in thin air.

If you’ve ever tried light graffiti, you’re familiar with what he’s doing. The problem is figuring out what and where exactly you’ve painted, and his system seems to solve this.

Later in the video, he interacts with a virtual world while the real world is still in the shot, for a kind of mixed reality filming experience. The possibilities for this kind of interface are staggering, so hopefully we’ll see even more strange art in the future!

… it’s a project I’ve had in my mind since I first used the Vive over a year ago, at PAX Prime in Seattle. As soon as I waved the controller in front of my face and noticed the tracking speed and accuracy I started mentally designing camera tracking systems. I wanted a VR system in my life because I love games, but I needed a Vive for filmmaking science experiments.

You can see more about this rig on his website here or on the project’s Reddit post. You can also check out Loveday’s previous video tracking only version here.

Using eight jack-o’-lanterns and an Arduino Mega, “CrankyCoder” built his own automated pumpkin patch.

CrankyCoder’s favorite holiday, as well as his family’s, is Halloween. After creating a skull that follows people around a few years ago, he decided to take things up a notch with his “Creepy Pumpkin Patch.” His patch includes eight pumpkins on the edges of a path with homemade pressure switches in between. As trick-or-treaters walk by, the patch is activated, making the pumpkins spin creepily.

Cleverly, CrankyCoder employs two pie pans with marbles in between for each rotating pumpkin, creating ball bearings to support the weight. Also, instead of a candle or other complicated electronics, he’s using flickering LEDs from the dollar store to produce a creepy lighting effect.

With Halloween just days away, be sure to check out the project’s video seen here or its GitHub page to get started on your own Creepy Pumpkin Patch.

Les Boites Mécaniques are a set of four automated boxes that produce music out of wood and metal. These experimental instruments enable anyone to explore the magic of making sound by pressing buttons on a remote, which activate each respective device to vibrate, knock, and rub materials.

The boxes were developed by Kogumi‘s Anatole Buttin and Yan Godat for educational electronic music workshops, and can be played either solo or in unison. There’s even a mode that allows users to control it all via MIDI notes on a computer.

In terms of hardware, each box is equipped with an Arduino Uno, a TLC59711 LED driver, step motors with AccelStepper library and a 3D-printed microstep driver.

You can watch how it all comes together to create a unique sound below!

Using a rather large custom PCB, Hari Wiguna made a Sudoku board using discreet LED displays and a physical keypad.

Most people, buy a book and play Sudoku with a pencil or perhaps just get an app. Those that are really dedicated buy a standalone game, but this wasn’t good enough for Wiguna, who made his own electronic board not out of a normal LCD screen, but from 27 three-character LED modules to display the game on a glowing grid. Input is done via a keypad, which uses the grid layout to allow for two-button selection of any square.

Though extremely impressive, it doesn’t yet have a puzzle generator. Wiguna would welcome any contributions for this code-wise!

You can find out more about this project on his page, on GitHub, as well as in his detailed YouTube videos below.

Maker dad Royce Husain and his daughter Zoey have made it an annual Halloween tradition to build fun and exciting new costumes. Following in the footsteps of last year’s El Niño project and the incredibly popular Minnie Mouse stick figure from 2014, the duo is back with another elaborate getup: a Princess Cumulus thunderstorm that is admittedly “a bit impractical for actual trick-or-treating.” (But cool nevertheless!)

The costume itself consists of a cotton-covered inflatable suit along with LED strips connected to an Arduino programmed to produce a flashing lightning effect.

Be sure to check it out below!

Update 06/11/2016

Hey guys,

I sort of got the motor working. Adding a small resistance(about 2-3ohms) in series with the motor seemed to stop the Atmega reseting whenever Pin 3 was pulled HIGH (still don't know for sure what was causing this!). I'll still continue t troubleshoot this problem and completely figure out what exaclty was causing the Atmega to reset, since the resistor is not a permanent solution (wasteful energy loss). I'm really grateful for the huge amount of help from here guys!! Thanks alot! :)

Cheers!

read more

Hey guys,

I'm having trouble regarding motor control in a project I'm working on.

It uses an ATMega328 DIP package on a PCB. The motors I'm using are small coreless motors and I'm trying to control them using Si2302ds N-MOS FETs. For the power supply I'm using a 3.7V(4.2V on full charge) Lipo. I've tested this setup on a promini before and the motors turned on and off just fine.

read more

Update 06/11/2016

Hey guys,

I sort of got the motor working. Adding a small resistance(about 2-3ohms) in series with the motor seemed to stop the Atmega reseting whenever Pin 3 was pulled HIGH (still don't know for sure what was causing this!). I'll still continue t troubleshoot this problem and completely figure out what exaclty was causing the Atmega to reset, since the resistor is not a permanent solution (wasteful energy loss). I'm really grateful for the huge amount of help from here guys!! Thanks alot! :)

Cheers!

read more

Update 06/11/2016

Hey guys,

I sort of got the motor working. Adding a small resistance(about 2-3ohms) in series with the motor seemed to stop the Atmega reseting whenever Pin 3 was pulled HIGH (still don't know for sure what was causing this!). I'll still continue t troubleshoot this problem and completely figure out what exaclty was causing the Atmega to reset, since the resistor is not a permanent solution (wasteful energy loss). I'm really grateful for the huge amount of help from here guys!! Thanks alot! :)

Cheers!

read more

There was a time, not so long ago, when all the cool kids were dual-booting their computers: one side running Linux for hacking and another running Windows for gaming. We know, we were there. But why the heck would you ever want to dual-boot an Arduino? We’re still scratching our heads about the application, but we know a cool hack when we see one; [Vinod] soldered the tiny surface-mount EEPROM on top of the already small AVR chip! (Check the video below.)

Aside from tiny-soldering skills, [Vinod] wrote his own custom bootloader for the AVR-based Arduino. With just enough memory to back up the AVR’s flash, the bootloader can shuffle the existing program out to the EEPROM while flashing the new program in. For more details, read the source.

While you might think that writing a bootloader is deep juju (it can be), [Vinod]’s simple bootloader application is written in C, using a style that should be familiar to anyone who has done work with an Arduino. It could certainly be optimized for size, but probably not for readability (and tweakability).

Why would you ever want to dual boot an Arduino? Maybe to be able to run testing and stable code on the same device? You could do the same thing over WiFi with an ESP8266. But maybe you don’t have WiFi available? Whatever, we like the hack and ‘because you can’ is a good enough excuse for us. If you do have a use in mind, post up in the comments!