Inspired by The Goonies movie and The Room game, Guido Bonelli has constructed a piece of Arduino-controlled interactive furniture to entertain his guests.
After what appears to be a massive amount of work involving 3D printing, laser cutting, wiring, and programming, Bonelli has come up with a puzzle box that shouldn’t need any explanation. Using button presses and other interactions with it, participants are able to unlock a treasure box in the bottom, a working wooden safe!
Additionally, the box tells time in a very unique way. It has an hourglass that is automatically flipped to indicate minutes, and Roman numerals at the top to reveal hours. You can see how it works and how it was assembled in the videos below!
I wanted to create a unique piece of furniture for my home which my guests could interact with. This time however, I wanted it to be something which I wouldn’t have to explain how it worked. Instead, I wanted mysterious scriptures scribed all over the sculpture to intrigue my guests.
At the heart of GoonieBox is of course an Arduino… Effortlessly whisking away my artistically written 0’s and 1’s into a symphony of movement, sound and game play. Taking approximately 800 hours of build time, GoonieBox is my greatest accomplishment by far in the world of Arduino.
Inspired by The Goonies movie and The Room game, Guido Bonelli has constructed a piece of Arduino-controlled interactive furniture to entertain his guests.
After what appears to be a massive amount of work involving 3D printing, laser cutting, wiring, and programming, Bonelli has come up with a puzzle box that shouldn’t need any explanation. Using button presses and other interactions with it, participants are able to unlock a treasure box in the bottom, a working wooden safe!
Additionally, the box tells time in a very unique way. It has an hourglass that is automatically flipped to indicate minutes, and Roman numerals at the top to reveal hours. You can see how it works and how it was assembled in the videos below!
I wanted to create a unique piece of furniture for my home which my guests could interact with. This time however, I wanted it to be something which I wouldn’t have to explain how it worked. Instead, I wanted mysterious scriptures scribed all over the sculpture to intrigue my guests.
At the heart of GoonieBox is of course an Arduino… Effortlessly whisking away my artistically written 0’s and 1’s into a symphony of movement, sound and game play. Taking approximately 800 hours of build time, GoonieBox is my greatest accomplishment by far in the world of Arduino.
2PrintBeta solves the problem of cutting multiple cables with an innovative scissors setup.
At times, the 3D printing and engineering company 2PrintBeta needs to cut wires and other assorted materials to length. Sure, they could simply cut them by hand, but that takes time and their business is growing. An industrial cable cutter is quite expensive, so being an engineering company, they decided to make their own using a rather rugged pair of scissors actuated by a bolt attached to a drive disk.
For this operation, wire feeding is done by a pair of 3D-printed wheels, and the “brains of the operation” is provided by an Arduino Mega using stepper motor drivers.
The ideas ranged from razorblades to a holder for a dremel with a cut sheet. But a short test showed: scissors are sufficient. So why not use scissors?
2PrintBeta solves the problem of cutting multiple cables with an innovative scissors setup.
At times, the 3D printing and engineering company 2PrintBeta needs to cut wires and other assorted materials to length. Sure, they could simply cut them by hand, but that takes time and their business is growing. An industrial cable cutter is quite expensive, so being an engineering company, they decided to make their own using a rather rugged pair of scissors actuated by a bolt attached to a drive disk.
For this operation, wire feeding is done by a pair of 3D-printed wheels, and the “brains of the operation” is provided by an Arduino Mega using stepper motor drivers.
The ideas ranged from razorblades to a holder for a dremel with a cut sheet. But a short test showed: scissors are sufficient. So why not use scissors?
The “Navigation Thing“ was designed and built by [Jan Mrázek] as part of a night game activity for high school students during week-long seminar. A night-time path through a forest had stations with simple tasks, and the Navigation Thing used GPS, digital compass, a beeper, and a ring of RGB LEDs to provide a bit of “Wow factor” while guiding a group of students from one station to the next. The devices had a clear design direction:
“I wanted to build a device which a participant would find, insert batteries, and follow the beeping to find the next stop. Imagine the strong feeling of straying in the middle of the night in an unknown terrain far away from civilization trusting only a beeping thing you found. That was the feeling I wanted to achieve.”
The Navigation Things (there are six in total) guide users to fixed waypoints with GPS, a digital compass, and a ring of WS2812 LEDs — but the primary means of feedback to the user is a beeping that gets faster as you approach the destination. [Jan] had only four days to make all six units, which was doable. But as most of us know, delivering on a tight deadline is often less about doing the work you know about, and more about effectively handling the unexpected obstacles that inevitably pop up in the process.
The first real problem to solve was the beeping itself. “Beep faster as you get closer to the destination” seems like a simple task, but due to the way humans perceive things it’s more complex than it sounds. We perceive large changes easier than small incremental ones, so a straight linear change in beep frequency based on distance doesn’t work very well. Similar problems (and their solutions) exist whether you’re controlling volume, brightness, or just about anything else that humans perceive. Instead of encoding distance as a beep frequency, it’s much more effective to simply use beeps to signal overall changes: beep noticeably slower as you move away, but beep much faster as you get close.
A “piezo” buzzer that was assumed to have no significant magnetic field, but in fact contained a magnet.
The other interesting problems were less straightforward and were related to the digital compass, or magnetometer. The first problem was that the piezo buzzers [Jan] sourced contained no actual piezo elements. They contained magnets – which interfered with the operation of the digital compass. After solving that, still more compass problems arose. When testing the final units in the field, the compass readings were not as expected and [Jan] had no idea why.
After careful troubleshooting, the culprit was found: the AA cells on the other side of the circuit board. Every AA cell has a faint (and slightly different) magnetic field, and the proximity and placement of the cells with respect to the magnetometer was causing the deviation. Happily, the fix was simple once the problem was understood: calibrate the compass every time new batteries are inserted.
If you’re interested in the Navigation Thing, check out the github repository. And on the topic of actual piezoelectric devices, piezos are implemented in a variety of clever ways. There are even piezo transformers and piezo vacuum pumps.
For less than $1,000, Keran McKenzie programmed his car to drive itself… or did he? That is the question, which has led to much debate online over the last couple of hours. (Although Hackaday has revealed the truth, it was one heck of an ad for Arduinos!)
Hoax aside, as hackers begin to see autonomous vehicles in various phases of testing, the question of “why can’t I do that?” is bound to come up. McKenzie seemingly attempted to do just that with an array of five cameras embedded in his 2012 Ford Focus where ultrasonic sensors were formerly mounted. While details of the project are slim (and now we know why), he does mention ‘using’ an Arduino for each camera, interfaced with a master board to put everything together. He also went on to ‘add’ a SparkFun MicroView inside the car for visual feedback of the supposed control system.
Impressive hacking/editing, however, as you see just after 3:00 in the video, trusting your life to a homemade vision system is probably not the greatest idea and is a build best left to professionals.
The Ford Focus that I have has an interesting feature, it has this home button on here. Now the home button doesn’t particularly do much other than tell the navigation system to turn on and show you the route home… It got me thining though, why can’t I push that button and have it take me home?
For less than $1,000, Keran McKenzie programmed his car to drive itself… or did he? That is the question, which has led to much debate online over the last couple of hours. (Although Hackaday has revealed the truth, it was one heck of an ad for Arduinos!)
Hoax aside, as hackers begin to see autonomous vehicles in various phases of testing, the question of “why can’t I do that?” is bound to come up. McKenzie seemingly attempted to do just that with an array of five cameras embedded in his 2012 Ford Focus where ultrasonic sensors were formerly mounted. While details of the project are slim (and now we know why), he does mention ‘using’ an Arduino for each camera, interfaced with a master board to put everything together. He also went on to ‘add’ a SparkFun MicroView inside the car for visual feedback of the supposed control system.
Impressive hacking/editing, however, as you see just after 3:00 in the video, trusting your life to a homemade vision system is probably not the greatest idea and is a build best left to professionals.
The Ford Focus that I have has an interesting feature, it has this home button on here. Now the home button doesn’t particularly do much other than tell the navigation system to turn on and show you the route home… It got me thining though, why can’t I push that button and have it take me home?
Nobody’s perfect. Sometimes you’re up late at night writing a blog post and you stumble upon an incredible story. You write it up, and it ends up being, well, incredible. IEEE Spectrum took the bait on this video (embedded below) where [Keran McKenzie] claims to have built a self-driving car for under $1,000 AUS with Arduinos.
The video is actually pretty funny, and we don’t think it’s intended to be a mass-media hoax as much as a YouTube joke. After letting the car “take over” for a few seconds, it swerves and [Keran] pretends to have hit something. (He’s using his knees people!) There are lots of takes with him under the car, and pointing at a single wire that supposedly makes the whole thing work. Yeah, right.
We were a bit bummed, though. We don’t think you can even reliably interface a sensor system with the steering wheel, accelerator, and brakes for as little as one grand, but we would have been entirely happy to see it done. We’re not saying that the software to run an autonomous car is the easy part, but we’d love to have a hack at it if the hardware were affordable.
And lest you think we’re all holier-than-thou, check out our most embarrassing post ever. We could just curl up and die. Feel better soon, IEEE Spectrum!
With Timothy Giles’ rotating digital picture frame, you’ll never have to endure black bars around your vertical images again!
Rather than accept the poor presentation of vertical images that normal displays offer, Giles instead made his own out of a discarded 27-inch LCD TV. A Raspberry Pi displays the images sideways, then uses an Arduino with a stepper shield to rotate the TV to compensate.
Mechanically, he uses a herringbone gear set to turn the TV, while the Arduino accelerates and decelerates the TV’s rotation to give a smooth transition. It’s a very cool project, and one that makes you wonder “why didn’t I think of that?”
With Timothy Giles’ rotating digital picture frame, you’ll never have to endure black bars around your vertical images again!
Rather than accept the poor presentation of vertical images that normal displays offer, Giles instead made his own out of a discarded 27-inch LCD TV. A Raspberry Pi displays the images sideways, then uses an Arduino with a stepper shield to rotate the TV to compensate.
Mechanically, he uses a herringbone gear set to turn the TV, while the Arduino accelerates and decelerates the TV’s rotation to give a smooth transition. It’s a very cool project, and one that makes you wonder “why didn’t I think of that?”
