Coffee, good food, bar? Sometimes it’s hard to explore a new city and choose among hundreds options without spoiling it! A team of students at CIID (Grishma Rao, Justine Syen, Adriana Chiaia, Jivitesh Ranglani) created Pilgrim, a MKR1000-based device providing a tangible interface for discovery without a digital screen. Acting like a smart compass, Pilgrim points people in the direction of a desired location, sourcing data directly from the Yelp API and leading to an eventual unexpected discovery:

The experience begins with the selection of a category using a dial below the compass, that clicks to send out data. The proximity to the destination is then indicated by lights along the rim of the compass, that light up one by one as the person gets closer to the location.

Once a category selection is received via clicking the dial, the code queries the Yelp API to return the coordinates of the best matched result to Pilgrim. The magnetic needle would then turn an angle relative to the user’s current position, replacing magnetic north with coordinates of the destination.

Pilgrim is programmed with a Genuino MKR 1000 which enables the compass to be connected to internet and also has a higher amount of memory. Moreover, Pilgrim uses a magnetometer + accelerometer for the directions, a stepper motor with an H-bridge, and a rotary encoder for the dial.

Hello,

Has anyone worked with qp / qm state machine programing?

http://www.state-machine.com/

I am looking into this for controlling robots.  Has anyone here used it or has any opinion about it for programming Arduino ?

Thanks

After Germany, Spain, Canada and Portugal,  now it’s time to introduce a new Genuino Reseller from Italy: Melopero.

- Tell us a bit more about Melopero

We founded Melopero in 2015. Since then, we constantly added new products to our portfolio, the objective was to create a company of makers for makers. We have been waiting so intensely for Genuino to become available and finally we have it. Welcome Genuino!

- What’s your company’s super power

We love to support our customers giving them advice on the best hardware solution they can use to build their amazing projects.

What’s your favourite Arduino or Genuino project?

The Inebriator – Arduino Cocktail Machine by Ian Cooper and Jake Osborne

Why: Making a good cocktail is an art, and it’s not easy to mix the right quantities in the right sequence. This machine solves the equation! See video on Youtube.

***

Secret Knock Detecting Lock by Steve Hoefer

Why: We like this project because it’s an effective way to show the ability of Arduino in sensing the real word. See video on Youtube and explore how to make it on Instructables.

Contacts

Melopero Store Website  – Facebook – Twitter – Youtube  – Google+

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For some people, the RunKeeper coach's voice is enough to keep them motivated during a jog. Others need something physical to keep pace with. That's where Puma's BeatBot comes in. Developed by a NASA robotics engineer, a trio of MIT students and Puma's ad agency, the robot follows lines around a track at any pace you'd want, according to Fast Company. It can even match Usain Bolt's 2009 foot-speed world record of 44.6 KPH (27.7 MPH) in case you need something a little more aspirational than an eight-minute mile.

For some people, the RunKeeper coach's voice is enough to keep them motivated during a jog. Others need something physical to keep pace with. That's where Puma's BeatBot comes in. Developed by a NASA robotics engineer, a trio of MIT students and Puma's ad agency, the robot follows lines around a track at any pace you'd want, according to Fast Company. It can even match Usain Bolt's 2009 foot-speed world record of 44.6 KPH (27.7 MPH) in case you need something a little more aspirational than an eight-minute mile.

Via: Tech Crunch

Source: Fast Co Create

For some people, the RunKeeper coach's voice is enough to keep them motivated during a jog. Others need something physical to keep pace with. That's where Puma's BeatBot comes in. Developed by a NASA robotics engineer, a trio of MIT students and Puma's ad agency, the robot follows lines around a track at any pace you'd want, according to Fast Company. It can even match Usain Bolt's 2009 foot-speed world record of 44.6 KPH (27.7 MPH) in case you need something a little more aspirational than an eight-minute mile.

Via: Tech Crunch

Source: Fast Co Create

[Paul] participated in a hackathon at work and created a hack to help solve what was ultimately a people problem. A soda fridge at work wasn’t getting refilled when empty. Instead of trying to make people less lazy, [Paul] went with making the fridge more needy.

The first thing [Paul] did was make a soda fridge refill sensor from a scale. As the fridge got emptier, it got lighter. The scale senses that and can decide it’s time for a refill. The only part missing was how to read the output from the scale. To do that, he took an unusual approach.

The soda fridge sits on an analog scale with a dial. [Paul] saw there was no need to measure the exact weight of the fridge, only to detect a refill threshold. He came up with a simple hack: colored paper attached to the scale’s dial and an Arduino with an OSEPP COLOR‑01 color sensor pointed at the paper. The dial moves in response to the fridge’s changing weight, and the color sensor reads the color of the paper as it moves under the sensor. With a little bit of trial-and-error calibration and some barely modified sample code for the sensor, it was possible to reliably detect when the fridge required refilling. With the sensor done, it was time to use it to solve the lazy people problem.

In a way, the root problem wasn’t that people couldn’t be bothered to check if the fridge needed a refill – it was that the right people weren’t finding out at the right times. This resulted in spotty refilling as well as soda not being ordered when needed. This hack means that the fridge can now actively announce its state, which now allows things like notifying people via email that it is their turn to refill and re-order. It turns out that a fridge that can tell people what it needs has a much better chance of being serviced, compared to a one that has to wait for people to check up on it.

We’ve seen people interface directly to the load sensors in weight scales before, but this hack took a completely different approach.

Thanks to [Paul] for sharing.

If you are a regular Hackaday reader, you’ve probably seen plenty of ESP8266 projects. After all, the inexpensive device is a workhorse for putting a project on WiFi, and it works well. There is a processor onboard, but, most often, the onboard CPU runs a stock firmware that exposes an AT command set or Lua or even BASIC. That means most projects have a separate CPU and that CPU is often–surprise–an Arduino.

It isn’t a big leap of logic to imagine an Arduino with an integrated WiFi subsystem. That’s the idea behind the MKR1000. But the real question you have to ask is: is it better to use an integrated component or just put an Arduino and ESP8266 together?

[Andreas Spiess] not only asked the question, but he answered it in a YouTube video (see below). He examines several factors on the MKR1000, the Arduino Due and Uno, and several other common boards. The examination covers performance, features, and power consumption.

We’ve covered a slew of ESP8266 projects. We’ve also seen at least two MKR1000 projects, one for an automotive project and the other controls a shower.