Back in 2014, Josef Holmner built his own DIY quadcopter with a flight time of 30 minutes. Impressively, he also developed a wearable controller that enabled him to maneuver his device through the air using just one hand.

As you can see in the video below, pitch and roll are dictated by the angle of his hand, yaw is handled by two push buttons in his palm, and throttle is achieved through the bending of his index finger.

To get started, Holmner needed a transmitter and receiver, an Arduino Nano, a digital potentiometer, a flex sensor, a pair of push buttons, an IMU, and a glove, of course. The Maker had torn apart the transmitter, replaced the regular potentiometer with a digital one that could be controlled by the Arduino. After taking out the electronics from its original enclosure, he housed them inside a 3D-printed box, and reused the old battery holder by gluing it to the bottom of the case. Velcro straps are used to keep it around his forearm.

The flex sensor was sewn to the index finger, while the buttons were placed in the palm and the IMU set on the back of the hand. He also made a connector between the glove and the box, and added four LEDs that illuminate to show the angle of the glove.

Holmner has made the Arduino code and schematics available online. Be sure to see it in action!

[Rob Bailey] likes to build things and he likes ham radio. We are guessing he likes mints too since he’s been known to jam things into Altoids tins. He had been thinking about building a code practice oscillator in a Altoids Smalls tin, but wasn’t sure he could squeeze an Arduino Pro Mini in there too. Then he found the TinyLily Mini. The rest is history, as they say, and 1CPO was born.

The TinyLily Mini is a circular-shaped Arduino (see right) about the size of a US dime. most of the pads are arranged around the circle and there is a small header that takes a USB programmer. A small rechargeable battery can run the device for a long time.

If you’ve ever written Morse code software, one challenge is to compute the actual sending speed in words per minute (WPM). If you are doing a serial port, for example, the speed is easy because the sent elements are the same length. However, with Morse code, some things are very short (like an E, for example) and some are much longer (like a zero). In fact, the code tries to reflect the frequency certain letters occur. E is the shortest character and the most common in English texts.

You might think [Samuel Morse] was responsible for this, but his original code was only numbers. The idea is you would get numbers and look them up in a code book. Presumably, some of the codes would have been single letters forming an early coding like ASCII, Baudot, or EBCDIC. [Alfred Vail] expanded the system to include letters and other characters and assigned lengths based on the examination of type cases at the local newspaper. That code also used dots, dashes, and long dashes, but it is almost recognizable as the Morse code in use today.

So [Rob] looked for a way to determine the speed and found that the ARRL uses the timing of the word PARIS as an average word. [Rob] wasn’t quite convinced that was the right way to go, so he compiled a list of the 1,000 most common English words, the 100 largest cities in the word, and a few other groups of words and computed the average element length of the words. PARIS has 50 elements total. The average of [Rob’s] list was 49.489. Pretty close.

If you think Morse code is dead, there are still a number of hams who enjoy it. Also, the US Air Force trains 10 Morse code operators every year. Morse has been used to transfer data over cell phones cheaply, and we’ve seen plenty of larger practice devices.

In preparation for Makerfaire, [hwhardsoft] needed to throw together some demos. So they dug deep and produced this unique display.

The display uses two synchronized peristaltic pumps to push water and red paraffin through a tube that switches back over itself in a predictable fashion. As visible in the video after the break, the pumps go at it for a few minutes producing a seemingly random pattern. The pattern coalesces at the end into a short string of text. The text is unfortunately fairly hard to read, even on a contrasting background. Perhaps an application of UV dye could help?

Once the message has been displayed, the water and paraffin drop back into the holding tank as the next message is queued up. The oil and water separate just like expected and a pump at the level of each fluid feeds it back into the system.

We were deeply puzzled at what appeared to be an Arduino mounted on a DIN rail for use in industrial settings, but then discovered that this product is what [hwhardsoft] built the demo to sell. We can see some pretty cool variations on this technique for art displays.

Graduation season is now underway across America, and Western Carolina University student Michael King wanted to be sure he’d stand out from the crowd during his commencement ceremony. So being a computer science and electrical engineering major and all, naturally he decided to do some tinkering. He equipped his mortarboard with a 32×32 LED array, an Arduino Mega, three SPDT switches, a 2000mAh li-ion battery, and lots of wire, along with plenty of code. This enabled him to display a running Super Mario, Pac-Man, his school’s logo, a “Hire Me Google” message, and several other animated images on top of his cap.

I used three SPDT switches — one for LED grid power, one for Arduino power, and another to break out of the loop and display a static “WCU” logo. LED grid is powered via a 3.7V li-ion battery. 9V battery to power the Arduino Mega.

Lots and lots of Arduino code. I could convert bitmaps to arrays to use in the code. For those that would understand, I had a script written in Processing that could read a 32×32 pixel image, parse and convert it into an array of hex values, and literally format/write it out to a header file that I could just copy and paste into Arduino IDE… And yes, I am working on programming pong. Yes the actual, playable game.

Thumbs up or thumbs down? This robotic arm skims social media to let you know if you're viewed positively or negatively.

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The post Read the Room with This Social Media Skimming Robotic Arm appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

If you’ve ever wanted to add biometric security features to your Arduino project, you’re in luck. That’s because Nick Koumaris of educ8s.tv has put together a quick tutorial on how to integrate a fingerprint sensor module with an Arduino Nano and a 1.44” color TFT display.

The fingerprint sensor module is small, nicely built, and it uses some advanced DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chips inside. The sensor works like this. It is an optical sensor, which means it analyzes the photo of a finger. It then renders the image, makes some calculations, finds the features of that finger and then searches in its memory for a fingerprint with the same characteristics. It can achieve all that in less than a second! This module can store up to 1,000 fingerprints in its memory and its false acceptance rate is less than 0.001% which makes it pretty secure!

As you can see in the video below, the project requires a valid fingerprint in order to unlock. If it recognizes the user, which in this case is Koumaris or his girlfriend, the fingerprint icon on the display turns green along with a kind greeting, e.g. “Welcome, Nick!”

Is it something in the water, or have there been a lot of really cool servo projects lately? Mechaduino is a board that sits on a regular stepper motor and turns it into a servo with a closed loop control of 0.1degree.

Whenever we post something about using cheap brushless motors for precision control, someone comments that a stepper is just a brushless motor with a lot of poles, why not just control it like one. That’s exactly what the Mechaduino does. They also hint at doing something very clever with a magnetic encoder on the board which allows them, after a calibration routine, to get the accuracy they’ve promised.

T
he Arduino-sounding bit of the name comes from their full compatibility with the Arduino development environment. The brains of the board is the compatible,  SAMD21 ARM M0+  chip. They wanted the board to be as accessible as possible. On top of this, it also allows the user to use any control algorithm they want for the board. Most industrial controllers are limited to PID control, for returning to the last sent position. Opening up the control allows for interesting applications, such as motors that behave like mass spring damper systems, or electronically gearing the input of one stepper to the output of another.

The board supports lots of standard communication protocols, but the acceptance of regular stepper inputs make it extra interesting. It can become a drop-in replacement for the motors on a normal CNC or 3D printer, which have full closed loop control as shown in the video after the break.

They intend to keep working on the project until it gets to a level where they could kickstart it. However, rather than vaguely promise an open source release sometime after the launch like some have done, interested readers can skim all the design files off their GitHub and get to playing with it today. Firmware and Hardware.

A few years ago, Integreight set out to turn your smartphone into more than 40 different Arduino shields. Now, the creators of the 1Sheeld have launched an open-source, fully-customizable home automation kit that will enable you to control your door locks, light switches and power strips using that very same mobile device.

“Togglit” can be assembled without any programming, wires, or hassle — only a screwdriver. For its debut at Maker Faire Bay Area, the connected interface was based on an Arduino Uno and 1Sheeld; however, the startup’s founder Amr Saleh notes that it can run on virtually any hardware platform, ranging from Raspberry Pi to other Wi-Fi products.

At the moment, Togglit is compatible with typical toggle light switches, standard deadbolts, as well as American and European power outlets. Ready to make your house smarter? The DIY kit is currently available for pre-order.

With school just about out for the summer, Brian Fitzgerald’s son was throwing a party to celebrate the end of exam week. Like any cool Maker dad would, he decided to build awesome lights made out of a few old soda bottles, the “gooey innards” of glow sticks, and some other supplies he had lying around the basement.

Fitzgerald used a wooden plate for the base and a playground post bracket for the mount, along with an Arduino Leonardo (though any Arduino would do) and three NeoPixel rings for the colorful effects.

Fill the Coke bottles with water. Alternatively, you can add a drop of milk to get a cloudy effect — it makes the liquid translucent and gives the impression of solid light, but you loose the little bubble and scratch effects that clear water highlights, which we thought was cooler. We put a black Sugru cap on the bottles to avoid a drunken accident involving water and electronics. And filled the countersunk bolt holes with Sugru to hide the bolt heads as well.

I attached the plastic Arduino casing with double-sided velcro to the base unit for easy removal. It’d look nicer if I’d put the whole unit inside the base, but as we’re planning to pull the board out and modify for music sensitivity, I opted for convenience over beauty. If anybody has any cool Arduino code that gets an Adafruit auto-gain mic and NeoPixels jamming via FFT, I’d love to see it. There are some great color organ projects out there, but I can’t seem to find this particular combo. So we may have to write it ourselves!

Plug the 9v wall wart into the Arduino and BOOM. You got yourself a classic party light that’s mesmerizing to look at, throws patterns on the ceiling that look like Hubble images of distant nebulae, a fine conversation piece, and a bunch of cast off junk transformed into a thing of beauty.

Intrigued? You can check out the entire project on Instructables, as well as see it in action below.