William Gerrey and Dr. Joshua Miele made the Blind Arduino Project to help those in the blind community expand their STEM and Maker education.
The post Blind Arduino Project Proves You Don’t Need to See to Build Electronics appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
Congratulations to Geoff Seawright for the following photo showing a cute dog getting angry with four-legged Arduino spider. He’s the last winner of our MKR1000 giveaway, which kicked off back on Arduino Day! Thanks to all the participants sharing their pics and mentioning our new official Arduino Instagram account!
Dog getting angry with 4-legged arduino spider…possibly it will replace him #arduinoD16 @Arduino.cc
A photo posted by Geoff Seawright (@geoffseawright) on
“The Cloud” is an interactive lamp and speaker designed to mimic a thunderstorm in terms of appearance and entertainment. Created by Richard Clarkson, it not only provides users with an Arduino-powered, motion-triggered lightning and thunder performance, but serves as a music-activated visualizing speaker as well.
The Cloud employs embedded motion sensors to create unique lightning and thunder shows while providing entertainment value and inspiring awe. This is a kind of magic, not based on illusions and trickery, but on sensors and code. Featuring a powerful speaker system, The Cloud allows its beholder to stream music via any Bluetooth-compatible device and can adapt to any desired lighting, color and brightness.
The hybrid installation is suspended from the ceiling, and consists of hypoallergenic polyester fiberfill with a sponge casing that holds the Arduino, lights, sensors, speakers and other components. Users can control the Cloud through a small, wireless remote.
Clarkson tells The Creators Project:
“Acting as both an immersive lighting experience and a speaker with visual feedback, this hybrid lamp/speaker introduces a new discourse for what a light fixture could be. Advances in physical computing and interaction design hardware over recent years have created a new breed of smart-objects, which are gaining more and more traction in the design world. These smart-objects have the potential to be far more interactive and immersive than ever before.”
Seem awfully familiar? If it does, that’s because development of the project dates back 2012. Whereas the original model had subtle reactive light and sound elements, the latest iteration boasts a more robust design with a larger speaker system. And what’s even cooler is that multiple units are able to communicate with each other, creating a connected network of clouds right in your living room, office or wherever else it’s hanging.
You can check out Clarkson’s page to learn more about the Cloud, or even purchase your own for a few thousand dollars. You’ll also find cheaper versions with less functionality on the site, too.
(Photos: Richard Clarkson)
You can still use punch cards to operate knitting machines, but a few groups are now bringing the technology full circle by hacking knitting machines so that they may be operated digitally via an Arduino.
The post How Punch Cards and Arduino Close the Gap on Hacked Knitting appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.
I just launched a contest to give away 2 prototypes of the new Jetduino robotics interface board for the Jetson TK1. The Jetduino mounts on top of the TK1 and level shifts all of its GPIO, I2C, serial and SPI lines to 3.3V or 5v. It has Grove and 3-pin 2.54mm headers to make it very easy to connect commercial off-the-shelf sensors to the Jetson and communicate with them via Python or C++. It also has a built-in shield for any Mega or Uno form factor Arduino.
Everyone loves learning a new programming language, right? Well, even if you don’t like it, you should do it anyway, because thinking about problems from different perspectives is great for the imagination.
Juniper is a functional reactive programming language for the Arduino platform. What that means is that you’ll be writing your code using anonymous functions, map/fold operations, recursion, and signals. It’s like taking the event-driven style that you should be programming in one step further; you write a=b+3 and when b changes, the compiler takes care of changing a automatically for you. (That’s the “reactive” part.)
If you’re used to the first-do-this-then-do-that style of Arduino (and most C/C++) programming, this is going to be mind expanding. But we do notice that a lot of microcontroller code looks for changes in the environment, and then acts (more or less asynchronously) on that data. At that level of abstraction, something like Juniper looks like a good fit.
Changing up the programming paradigm for Arduino is an ambitious project, especially considering that it was started by two undergraduates [Caleb Helbling] and [Louis Ades] as a senior design project. It’s also brand new, so there’s not much of a codebase out there yet. Time, and your participation, will tell if it’s useful. But one thing’s for sure, once you’ve programmed in a reactive language, you’re not going to be able to look at a delay loop the same again.
What’s the wierdest language you’ve ever programmed a microcontroller in?
(The XKCD comic’s alt-text reads “Functional programming combines the flexibility and power of abstract mathematics with the intuitive clarity of abstract mathematics”.)
As fun as petting your dog can be, sometimes you’re just too busy to give it the attention it deserves — especially if he or she is needy. Luckily, there is now an automated mechanism that’ll give Fido a nice pat and reward him with a treat at the press of an arcade button. But that’s not all. Engineer James Cochrane’s “IOT Robot People/Pet Affectionator” allows your pup to reciprocate their appreciation, too.
The robot itself consists of an Arduino Nano, two H-Bridge motor drivers, two geared Pittman motors, and two geared hobby motors. The Kibbles ‘n Bits are delivered using a wooden spoon, while a button on the pup’s side enables them give their owner a nice rub of the head and a snack with a fork as well.
Connor Nishijima has come with a unique way to detect motion using an Arduino Uno. The active media developer is polling an ADC pin with a pair of wires twisted tightly together — one plugged into A3, another plugged into ground — and generating readings whenever a large living object (like his two cats) is nearby.
“The closest I have ever come to explaining this is capacitive coupling. So what it is is the antenna is leaching a little bit of electricity off you, and you are leaching a little bit of electricity from the antenna. The differential that happens when you move around is what the Arduino is picking up.”
He’s calling this effect “Capacitive Turbulence,” and so far he’s only got it work on the Arduino, no luck using other boards with ADCs. You can watch him explain this magical phenomenon in more detail below!
The subreddit for Shower Thoughts offers wisdom ranging from the profound to the mundane. For example: “Every time you cut a corner you make two more.” Apparently, [Harin] has a bit of an addiction to the subreddit. He’s been sniffing the CAN bus on his 2012 Hyundai Genesis and decided to display the top Shower Thought on his radio screen.
To manage the feat he used both a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. Both devices had a MCP2515 to interface with two different CAN busses (one for the LCD display and the other for control messages which carries a lot of traffic.
The code is available on GitHub. There’s still work to do to make the message scroll, for example. [Harin] has other posts about sniffing the bus, like this one.
We’ve covered CAN bus quite a bit, including some non-automotive uses. We’ve even seen the CAN bus for model railroading.
Hacking has always brought more good to the world than not hacking. The successful efforts of the Allies during World War II in deciphering the Enigma machine output still reminds us of that. Today, the machine is a classic example of cryptography and bare-metal computing.
We have covered quite a few DIY Enigma machines in the past, yet 14 years old [Andy] really impressed us with his high school science fair project, a scratch built, retro-modern Enigma machine.
With its wooden enclosure, keyboard, interchangeable rotors, and plugboard, his build resembles an original Worldwar II enigma machine down to the letter. However, when looking closer, you’ll find that the rotors are implemented as electronic modules that plug into D-Sub sockets on the machine. Also, there is a 16 segment display that displays the rotor position as well as an LCD screen that lets you comfortably read the plain- and ciphertext. On the inside, you’ll find an Arduino Mega along with 1,800 other parts and 500 wires, and of course, this modern version has a backspace key.
It took [Andy] over 9 months to put all this together, and he now finds himself among the winners of the State Science & Engineering Fair (SSEF), who will be sent to Intel as representatives of their states. Given his experience in field-capable computing, we’re sure [Andy] can help Intel reconquering mobile. Enjoy the video!
Thanks to [Arduino Enigma] for the tip!
