Unlike many cars today, Aykut Celik’s 2014 Volkswagen Polo didn’t have Bluetooth connectivity or an elaborate touchscreen navigation system. So, the Maker decided to take matters into his own hands and swapped out his “useless” radio for a Samsung tablet, putting Google Maps, Spotify and other apps right in his vehicle’s dashboard.

In order to accomplish this, Celik needed an amplifier (to replace the one attached to the prior radio), a CAN bus shield from Seeed (so he could use the steering wheel’s volume buttons), a Bluetooth module, and an Arduino Mega 2560 (for parsing data and sending it over to the Android device).

A CAN-BUS shield is necessary to be able to read CAN-BUS commands from the CAN bus line… I used this shield for detecting wheel button commands like volume up, mute and volume down. Behind the car radio there are two CAN bus cables. One of them is CAN bus – HIGH and the other is CAN bus – LOW. These cables must be connected to green sockets on the shield.

Using the SeeedCAN bus shield, you can sniff you car’s CAN bus data.

The info which is gathered from CAN bus is transferred to the Android tablet via Bluetooth. There is a little app which is responsible, for example, reducing volume whenever the wheel volume button is clicked. And a menu activity to open other apps.

You can watch the elaborate project below, and read more about it on Celik’s blog. The Maker has also made the software and other information available on GitHub.

[Bokononestly] found a lil’ music box that plays Stairway to Heaven and decided those were just the kinds of dulcet tones he’d like to wake up to every morning. To each his own; I once woke up to Blind Melon’s “No Rain” every day for about six months. [Bokononestly] is still in the middle of this alarm clock project right now. One day soon, it will use a *duino to keep track of the music box’s revolutions and limit the alarm sound to one cycle of the melody.

[Bokononestly] decided to drive the crank of the music box with a geared DC motor from an electric screwdriver. After making some nice engineering drawings of the dimensions of both and mocking them up in CAD, he designed and printed a base plate to mount them on. A pair of custom pulleys mounted to the motor shaft and the crank arm transfer motion using the exact right rubber band for the job. You can’t discount the need for a hig bag ‘o rubber bands.
In order to count the revolutions, he put a wire in the path of the metal music box crank and used the body of the box as a switch. Check out the build video after the break and watch him prove it with the continuity function of a multimeter. A clever function that should at some point be substituted out for a leaf switch.

We’ve covered a lot of cool clock builds over the years, including one or two that run Linux. And say what you will about Stairway; it’s better than waking up to repeated slaps in the face.

[via r/engineering]

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

Via: Gizmodo, Popular Mechanics

Source: Daniel Perdomo (YouTube)

If you miss the days of playing Pong with old-school dial controllers but would rather not track down a vintage console or arcade cabinet, today's your lucky day. Daniel Perdomo and crew have built a real-world Pong machine that replicates the pioneering game with physical parts. Despite what it looks like, it's not just an Atari-themed air hockey table. Instead of letting physics take over, the machine maps virtual ball and paddle movements to objects. All the eccentricities of Pong gameplay are intact, just in a more tangible (and arguably, far more immersive) form. LEDs track the score, while the controllers are rejiggered hard drives.

Via: Gizmodo, Popular Mechanics

Source: Daniel Perdomo (YouTube)

[gutbag] is a guitarist. And guitarists are notorious knob-twiddlers: they love their effects pedals. But when your music involves changing settings more than a few times in the middle of a song, it can get distracting. If only there were little robot hands that could turn the knobs (metaphorically, sorry) during the performance…

Tearing into his EHX Pitch Fork pedal, [gutbag] discovered that all of the external knob controls were being read by ADCs on the chip that did all of the processing. He replaced all of the controls with a DAC and some analog switches, coded up some MIDI logic in an ATmega328, and built himself a custom MIDI-controlled guitar pedal. Pretty slick, and he can now control it live with his iPad, or sequence the knobs with the rest of their MIDI system.

This wasn’t [gutbag]’s first foray into pedal automation, however. He’d previously automated a slew of his pedals that were already built to take control-voltage signals. What we like about this hack is the direct substitution of DAC for potentiometers. It’s just hackier. (Oh, and we’re envious of [gutbag]’s lab setup.)

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered [gutbag]’s band, Zaardvark, either. Way back in 2013, we featured an organ-pedal-to-MIDI hack of theirs. Keep on rockin’.

[Daniel Perdomo] and two of his friends have been working on a mechanical version of Pong for the past two years. We can safely say that the final result is beautiful. It’s quite ethereal to watch the pixe–cube move back and forth on the surface.

[Daniel] has worked in computer graphics for advertising for more than 20 years. However, he notes that neither he nor his friends had any experience in mechanics or electronics when they began. Thankfully, the internet (and, presumably, sites like Hackaday) provided them with the information needed.

The pong paddles and and pixel (ball?) sit onto of a glass surface. The moving parts are constrained to the mechanics with magnets. Underneath is a construction not unlike an Etch A Sketch for moving the ball while the paddles are just on a rail with a belt. The whole assembly is made from V-groove extrusion.

Our favorite part of the build is the scroll wheel for moving the paddle back and forth. For a nice smooth movement with some mass behind it, what’s better than a hard-drive platter? They printed out an encoder wheel pattern and glued it to the surface. The electronics are all hand-made. The brains appear to be some of the larger Arduinos. The 8-bit segments, rainbow LEDs, etc were build using strips glued in place with what looks like copper foil tape connecting buses. This is definitely a labor of love.

It really must be seen to be understood. The movement is smooth, and our brains almost want to remove a dimension when watching it. As for the next steps? They are hoping to spin it up into an arcade machine business, and are looking for people with money and experience to help them take it from a one-off prototype to a product. Video after the break.

Handheld measuring devices make great DIY projects. One can learn a lot about a sensor or sensor technology by just strapping it onto a spare development board together with an LCD for displaying the sensor output. [Richard’s] DIY air quality meter and emissions tester is such a project, except with the custom laser-cut enclosure and the large graphic LCD, his meter appears already quite professional.

For his build, [Richard] used a Sharp GP2Y1010AU0F dust sensor. This $11 device has a little hole, through which airborne dust particles can pass. On the inside, an infrared LED and a photodiode are arranged in a way that allows no direct light, but only light reflected by the passing by dust particles, to reach the photodiode. An accurately trimmed amplifier within the sensor package translates the diode’s photocurrent into an analog output voltage proportional to the dust density. With a bit of software wizardry, it’s even possible to differentiate between house dust and smoke by analyzing the pulse pattern of the output voltage.

The development board used in this project, a PDI-1 (which stands for Programmable Device Interface) is [Richard’s] own design. Manufactured in the UK, it isn’t the cheapest, but it’s the part that makes this build a breeze. It’s basically an Arduino Nano with a lot of onboard peripherals, including a large graphic LCD, some buttons, a speaker, plenty of H-bridges, and a few more.

After bodge-wiring the dust sensor to the board and taking the enclosure out of the laser cutter, the hardware side of this project was almost done. A little fan was added to ensure airflow through the sensor. Eventually [Richard] wrote a basic firmware to display a graph of sensor readings on the LCD. A first test in the exhaust stream of his car, cycling through idling and revving as shown in the title image, suggests that the meter works as intended. Of course, air quality and emission testing depend on more parameters than just dust density, but if you want to replicate and extend this build, [Richard] provides you with all the Arduino compatible source files.

Released in 1972, Pong was one of the earliest arcade video games to hit the scene and has since claimed its place in pop culture history. Whereas the Atari classic took the sport of tennis and brought it into the virtual world, a team of Makers led by Daniel Perdomo are taking it back to into the real world with an air hockey-like tabletop version.

As you can see in the video below, the “Pong Project” uses knobs similar to familiar arcade controls to move the paddles, which just like in the original, change the ball’s trajectory as it makes its way over to the opponent. The only difference is that it’s happening on a table instead of a screen. From the looks of it, there may even be a single-player mode with the other paddle seemingly moving all by itself.

To pay homage to the game, its creators gave the Pong Project some ‘70s flair with the iconic logo and play area, as well as neon lights along the sides that illuminate whenever the ball bounces off. Score is kept on seven-segment displays, while it would appear that at least a pair of Arduino boards are helping to drive the system. The team is currently seeking a hardware incubator and other Makers who may be interested in turning this into a final product. You can follow along with the project’s progress on Facebook.

Walking the streets of a highly-populated city, or even a crowded event for that matter, comes with certain risks like pickpocketing. Mindful of this, Maker TVMiller has come up with a clever system to prevent bag thieves from unknowingly creeping up behind you. Called the “Arduino MetroPhones,” the device consists of a Nano, an ultrasonic sensor, a digital potentiometer, a coin-cell battery, and a few other components, all housed inside a 3D-printed case.

The metropolitan in its natural habitat; unaware, oblivious, purposefully deafened and subsequent prey. To increase perception thus safety, we wed an Arduino Nano and ultrasonic sensor to regulate volume to proximity to someone behind you; easily deactivated per environment and rechargeable. Beyond this proof of concept, intention for apparel or accessory (purse, back pack) embedding is ideal.

This prototype of a prototype is a mono-version. A stereo version would merely require dual channels. Thus, imagine, you plug your head phones in to your purse strap which is embedded with a MetroPhone with Bluetooth that streams to your smartphone..