Have you ever wanted to have a light show that reacts to what you play through you’re favorite electric instrument? Georgia Tech grad student Wil Roberts has, and so he created a guitar-controlled LED display–an impressive project that combines both his Maker and musical chops.

To accomplish this, Roberts used an Arduino Uno along with an Adafruit 16×32 RGB LED matrix panel that responds to the guitar’s signal. The bottom rows are always blue, while the top ones progress from green to red the louder he shreds. The top rows remain red depending on the length of the note being played.

Want one of your own? Roberts has made all of the display’s circuitry and code available on Instructables. In the meantime, be sure to see it in action below!

[gocivici] threatened us with a tutorial on positional astronomy when we started reading his tutorial on a Arduino Powered Star Pointer and he delivered. We’d pick him to help us take the One Ring to Mordor; we’d never get lost and his threat-delivery-rate makes him less likely to pull a Boromir.

As we mentioned he starts off with a really succinct and well written tutorial on celestial coordinates that antiquity would have killed to have. If we were writing a bit of code to do our own positional astronomy system, this is the tab we’d have open. Incidentally, that’s exactly what he encourages those who have followed the tutorial to do.

The star pointer itself is a high powered green laser pointer (battery powered), 3D printed parts, and an amalgam of fourteen dollars of Chinese tech cruft. The project uses two Arduino clones to process serial commands and manage two 28byj-48 stepper motors. The 2nd Arduino clone was purely to supplement the digital pins of the first; we paused a bit at that, but then we realized that import arduinos have gotten so cheap they probably are more affordable than an I2C breakout board or stepper driver these days. The body was designed with a mixture of Tinkercad and something we’d not heard of, OpenJsCAD.

Once it’s all assembled and tested the only thing left to do is go outside with your contraption. After making sure that you’ve followed all the local regulations for not pointing lasers at airplanes, point the laser at the north star. After that you can plug in any star coordinate and the laser will swing towards it and track its location in the sky. Pretty cool.

Redditor SexyCyborg–who you may recall from her Hikaru Skirt last year–is back with another Arduino-driven, open-source wearable project. Inspired by traditional Chinese armor, the aptly named Infinity Skirt features an array of LED-lit mirror tiles that together form a flexible, reconfigurable matrix. Safe to say, she’ll certainly turn some heads at this October’s Maker Faire Shenzhen.

Every tile measures 66mm on each edge, and has four magnetic electrical conductors that can link it to it’s neighboring tile. So long as each row and column gets power, there is endless variations that can be tried. With an Arduino and LED matrix controller, each individual tile can be controlled so complex patterns can play across the surface. This is just a first prototype though so all the lights get power continuously and there is no matrix control.

You can find more pictures of her build on Imgur, download all the skirt’s 3D files on Thingiverse, as well as read Adafruit’s original article here.

We’re not sure if [Derek Lieber] is messing with us or proving a point. Why are you doing this [Derek]? We know there’s technically enough information to build the clock. You even included the code. Couldn’t you have at least thrown in a couple of words? Do we have to skip straight to mediaglyphics?

Anyway, if we follow the equation. The equation… If you take a gps module, a 7 segment display with an HT16K33 backpack, a digital potentiometer, a piezo, and a boarduino we suppose we could grudgingly admit that these would all fit together to make a clock. We still don’t like it though, but we’ll admit that the nice handmade case was a nice touch, and that the pictures do give us enough details to do it ourselves.

It was also pretty cool when you added the Zelda theme song as an alarm sound. Also pretty neat that, being GPS corrected, there’s no need to ever set the time. We may also like the simplicity of the only inputs being the potentiometer, which is used to set the alarm time. It’s just. Dangit [Derek]. Nice clock build, we like it.

The brainchild of artist Neil Mendoza, the Robotic Voice Activated Word Kicking Machine is described as the “ideal device for anyone that feels that their verbal communication needs a little extra kick.”

The piece consists of four bells of baritone horns, tubing, microphone, speakers, a mechanical foot and a projector, while its software is written in openFrameworks. When the software starts, it launches a web browser and creates a WebSocket connection to it. As soon as someone starts speaking, the software sends a message to the browser to tell it to start speech recognition. Once the person finishes talking, the browser sends words back as text back over the WebSocket connection. Each word is then added to a Box2D physics simulation as a series of rectangles linked together with springs. There’s a mesh for each letter and shadows are created in GLSL with a shadow map.

When a word is near the foot, the computer sends a message to an Arduino telling it to kick. The foot is actuated with a linear actuator driven by a Pololu Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield. There is also a foot polygon in the physics simulation. Every time the mechanical foot starts to kick, the virtual foot in the physics engine is animated with a timeline that has been matched to the actual movement of the mechanical foot.

Intrigued? Be sure to check out its official page here.

Although automated pet feeders seem to be a dime a dozen these days, Benjamin Millam’s project is on a whole ‘nother level. Last year, the Maker created a system that caters to the primal instincts of his indoor cat, Monkey, by training him to look for plastic balls hidden around the house and then drop them into the machine. Once the apparatus recognizes the RFID-tagged balls, food gets dispensed into the bowl.

The system is comprised of a modified Super Feeder, an Adafruit RFID reader, a remote antenna, a few relays and an Arduino Uno. Millam writes that he conceived the idea after learning why cats repeatedly scour the same area.

What if my cat, while out on patrol, actually found its prey? Surely this would bring him one step closer towards a more fulfilled and self-actualized indoor kitty existence. I imagined hiding little bowls of food around the house… then I imagined me actually refilling these bowls. Then I imagined having to move them around to different hiding spots, spilling, forgetting, and every so often, perhaps only after following a trail of ants, finding one undiscovered and rancid. Hmmm, maybe there’s a way to hide something else, a way to hide something other than food, a way to make something not-food = food…

Throughout the day, the feline seeks out a series of embedded balls and plops them into a blue bowl on top of the makeshift device. From there, gravity takes over. As the ball makes its way down the shoot, the RFID tag is scanned and and the program is initiated. The Arduino switches on the relay that closes the feeder’s power circuit, and voila!

The Maker does note, however, that a little training is needed in order for this method work. While we’ll have to wait and see if this becomes an actual product, you can watch Monkey go after some Wiffle Balls right meow!

Tim Deagan does seemingly everything — fire effects, metalworking, painting, leatherworking... Is there anything this man doesn't make?

Read more on MAKE

The post Maker Spotlight: Tim Deagan appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Anyone who owns their own pool knows it’s not as simple as filling it up with water and jumping in whenever you want. There’s pool covers to deal with, regular cleaning with the pool vacuum and skimmers, and of course, all of the chemicals that have to be added to keep the water safe. While there are automatic vacuums, there aren’t a whole lot of options for automating the pool chemicals. [Clément] decided to tackle this problem, eliminating one more task from the maintenance of his home. (Google Translate from French.)

The problem isn’t as simple as adding a set amount of chemicals at a predetermined time. The amount of chemicals that a pool owner has to add are dependent on the properties of the water, and the amount of time that’s elapsed since the previous chemical treatment, and the number of people who have been using the water, and whether or not the pool cover is in use. To manage all of this, [Clément] used an ORP/Redox probe and a pH probe, and installed both in the filtration system. The two probes are wired to an Arduino with an ethernet shield. The Arduino controls electrically actuated chemical delivery systems that apply the required amount of chemicals to the pool, keeping it at a nice, healthy balance.

[Clément] has all of the Arduino code available on his project page, as well as information about all of the various sensors he used. This should make this project re-createable for anyone who is tired of dealing with their own pool or paying a pool maintenance company to do it for them. [Clément] is no stranger to home automation projects, either, and we look forward to his next (often unconventional) project to automate something we might not have thought of before.

Most of North America has been locked in a record-setting heat wave for the last two weeks, and cheap window AC units are flying out of the local big-box stores. Not all of these discount units undergo rigorous QC before sailing across the Pacific, though, and a few wonky thermostats are sure to get through. But with a little sweat-equity you can fix it with this Arduino thermostat and temperature display.

We’ll stipulate that an Arduino may be overkill for this application and that microcontrollers don’t belong in every project. But if it’s what you’ve got on hand, and you’re sick of waking up in a pool of sweat, then it’s a perfectly acceptable solution. It looks like [Engineering Nonsense] got lucky and had a unit with a low-current power switch, allowing him to use a small relay to control the AC. The control algorithm is simple enough – accept a setpoint from an encoder, read the temperature sensor, and turn the AC on or off accordingly. Setpoint and current temperature are displayed on an OLED screen. One improvement we’d suggest is adding a three-minute delay between power cycles like the faceplate of the AC states.

This project bears some resemblance to this Arduino-controlled AC, but it seems more hackish to us. And that’s a good thing – hackers have to keep cool somehow.