The Amazon Echo is an attempt to usher in a new product category. A box that listens to you and obeys your wishes. Sort of like Siri or Google Now for your house. Kickstarter creator [Joshua Montgomery] likes the idea, but he wants to do it all Open Source with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

The Kickstarter (which reached its funding goal earlier this month) claims the device will use natural language to access media, control IoT devices, and will be open both for hardware and software hacking. The Kickstarter page says that Mycroft has partnerships with Lucid and Canonical (the people behind Ubuntu). In addition, they have added stretch goals to add computer vision and Linux desktop control to Mycroft.

With or without Mycroft, people are going to hack things like this together. If you dream of being able to start your teapot with the command “Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” then Mycroft might be a pretty good leg up on getting started. We’ve also seen Echo integration with Roku and even Nest. We imagine an open platform would spawn a lot of interesting hacks. You can find out more about Mycroft’s plans in the video below.

Building your own clock is practically a rite of passage as a Maker. 3D-print this Arduino-based desktop clock with a jumbo seven-segment LED display that glows from within.

Read more on MAKE

The post 3D Print a Supersized Seven-Segment Clock appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Today SeeedStudio launched an intriguing new Kickstarter project, the RePhone. Reminiscent of Google's Project Ara, the RePhone is a modular phone built from open source components.

Read more on MAKE

The post A First Look at the RePhone, a Modular Cellphone You Build Yourself appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Open-source platforms like Arduino have considerably lowered the barrier of entry for robotics, but it can still be daunting (and expensive) for a beginner to get started. The Makeblock Arduino Starter Robot Kit gives you the know-how to build your own electronics through hands-on instruction, with no programming experience required. Right now, Engadget readers can get one for 46 percent off -- just $79.99 plus free shipping.

Open-source platforms like Arduino have considerably lowered the barrier of entry for robotics, but it can still be daunting (and expensive) for a beginner to get started. The Makeblock Arduino Starter Robot Kit gives you the know-how to build your own electronics through hands-on instruction, with no programming experience required. Right now, Engadget readers can get one for 46 percent off -- just $79.99 plus free shipping.

Open-source platforms like Arduino have considerably lowered the barrier of entry for robotics, but it can still be daunting (and expensive) for a beginner to get started. The Makeblock Arduino Starter Robot Kit gives you the know-how to build your own electronics through hands-on instruction, with no programming experience required. Right now, Engadget readers can get one for 46 percent off -- just $79.99 plus free shipping.

“It’s only software!” A sentence that strikes terror in the heart of an embedded systems software developer. That sentence is often uttered when the software person finds a bug in the hardware and others assume it’s going to be easier for fix in software rather than spin a new hardware revision. No wonder software is always late.

[Clint Stevenson] is his own hardware and software guy, as are most of us. He wanted to use the less expensive HC-SR04 ultrasonic rangefinder in a prototype. Longer term he wanted to have the choice of either a Parallax PING or MaxBotix ultrasonic sensor for their better performance outdoors. His hardware hack of the SR04 made this a software problem which he also managed to solve!

[Clint] was working with the Arduino library, based on the Parallax PING, which uses a single pin for trigger and echo. The HC-SR04 uses separate pins. Originally he modified the Arduino library to accept the two pin approach. But with his long term goal in mind, he also modified the HC-SR04 sensor by removing the on-board pull-up resistor and adding a new one on the connector side to combine the signals. That gave him an SR04 that worked with the single-pin based library.

We’ve seen Parallax PING projects for sensing water depth and to generate music. These could be hacked to use the HC-SR04 using [Clint’s] techniques.

[Arduino and HC-SR04 photo from http://www.blaxlab.com/%5D

Industruino’s mission is to offer industrial automation components that have the simplicity of Arduino at its core. It’s created by Loic & Ainura, two product designers originally from Belgium and now based in Shenzhen, with a mission to help people make their own products, by creating an accessible platform.

Today they are officially joining the Arduino AtHeart program with Industruino Proto, a Leonardo compatible industrial controller housed in a DIN-rail enclosure, with screw connector terminals to robustly connect to sensors and actuators.

Industruino allows makers and professionals to take a breadboarded solution and make it into an enclosed finished looking product, ready for permanent installation. Watch Loics’ introduction:

With Industruino everyone can combine the strengths of Arduino with the specific requirements of industry:

We are now at the dawn of a new industrial revolution, one in which the key elements will be automation, robotics and interconnected devices. In this revolution the Arduino platform is growing to be a real contender.

We are very excited to become part of the At Heart family! It is our way to show that we are very much interlinked with the Arduino community. We are looking forward to further develop the use of Arduino in industrial applications whilst contributing back to the Arduino platform.

When you open the enclosure you will find a prototyping area to add your own components, and re-routable jumper connections, letting you connect any point to either the microcontroller’s pins or the external screw connectors. The onboard graphic LCD and membrane button panel facilitate quick UI development to visualise and input your application’s data.

Explore other tech info on Industruino website and make it yours on their store!

Introduction

There are many ways of remotely-controlling your Arduino or compatible hardware over the Internet. Some are more complex than others, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your level of expertise. Lately we’ve become more interested in this topic and have come across Blynk, which appeared to be a simple solution – and thus the topic of our review.

What is Blynk?

From their website: “Blynk is a Platform with iOS and Android apps to control Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the likes over the Internet. It’s a digital dashboard where you can build a graphic interface for your project by simply dragging and dropping widgets. 

It’s really simple to set everything up and you’ll start tinkering in less than 5 mins. Blynk is not tied to some specific board or shield. Instead, it’s supporting hardware of your choice. Whether your Arduino or Raspberry Pi is linked to the Internet over Wi-Fi, Ethernet or this new ESP8266 chip, Blynk will get you online and ready for the Internet Of Your Things.” Here is the original launch video:

Blynk started off as an idea, and raised initial funding through Kickstarter – which was successful and the system has now launched. Blynk comprises of an app on your smartphone (Android or iOS) inside which you can add widgets (controls) to send commands back to your development board (Arduino etc.).

For example, you can add a switch to turn a digital output on or off. Furthermore, data from sensors connected to the development board can be send back to the smartphone. The data passes through the Blynk Cloud server, or you can download and run your own server on your own hardware and infrastructure.

How much does it cost?

Right now (September 2015) the Blynk system is free. We downloaded the app and experimented without charge. We believe that over time there will be payment required for various functions, however you can try it out now to see if Blynk suits your needs then run with it later or experiment with other platforms.

Getting Started

Well enough talk, let’s try Blynk out. Our hardware is an Android smartphone (the awesome new Oppo R7+) for control, and a Freetronics EtherTen connected to our office modem/router:

You can also use other Arduino+Ethernet combinations, such as an Arduino Uno with an Ethernet shield. First you need to download the app for your phone – click here for the links. Then from the same page, download the Arduino library – and install it like you would any other Arduino library.

For our first example, we’ll use an LED connected to digital pin 7 (via a 560 ohm resistor) shown above. Now it’s time to set up the Blynk app. When you run the app for the first time, you need to sign in – so enter an email address and password:

Then click the “+” at the top-right of the display to create a new project, and you should see the following screen:

You can name your project, select the target hardware (Arduino Uno) – then click “E-mail” to send that auth token to yourself – you will need it in a moment. Then click “Create” to enter the main app design screen. Next, press “+” again to get the “Widget Box” menu as shown below, then press “Button”:

This will place a simple button on your screen:

Press the button to open its’ settings menu:

From this screen you can name your button, and also determine whether it will be “momentary” (i.e., only on when you press the button) – or operate as a switch (push on… push off…). Furthermore you need to select which physical Arduino pin the button will control – so press “PIN”, which brings up the scrolling menu as shown below:

We set ours to D7 then pressed “Continue”. Now the app is complete. Now head back to your computer, open the Arduino IDE, and load the “Arduino_Ethernet” sketch included with the library:

Then scroll down to line 30 and enter the auth key that was sent to you via email:

Save then upload the sketch to your Arduino. Now head back to your smartphone, and click the “Play” (looks like a triangle pointing right) button. After a moment the app will connect to the Blynk server… the Arduino will also be connected to the server – and you can press the button on the screen to control the LED.

And that’s it – remote control really is that easy. We’ve run through the process in the following short video:

Now what else can we control? How about some IKEA LED strips from our last article. Easy… that consisted of three digital outputs, with PWM. The app resembles the following:

… and watch the video below to see it in action:

Monitoring data from an Arduino via Blynk

Data can also travel in the other direction – from your Arduino over the Internet to your smartphone. At the time of writing this (September 2015) you can monitor the status of analogue and digital pins, and widgets can be added in the app to do just that. They can display the value returned from each ADC, which falls between zero and 1023 – and display the values in various forms – for example:

The bandwidth required for this is just under 2 K/s, as you can see from the top of the image above. You can see this in action through the video below:

Conclusion

We have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Blynk – which is an impressive, approachable and usable “Internet of Things” platform. Considering that you can get an inexpensive Android smartphone or tablet for under AU$50, the overall cost of using Blynk is excellent and well worth consideration, even just to test out the “Internet of Things” buzz yourself. So to get started head over to the Blynk site.

And finally a plug for our own store – tronixlabs.com – which along with being Australia’s #1 Adafruit distributor, also offers a growing range and Australia’s best value for supported hobbyist electronics from DFRobot, Freetronics, Seeedstudio and much much more.

As always, have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, Google+, subscribe  for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column, or join our forum – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website.

The post Control your Arduino over the Internet using Blynk appeared first on tronixstuff.

Introduction

There are many ways of remotely-controlling your Arduino or compatible hardware over the Internet. Some are more complex than others, which can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your level of expertise. Lately we’ve become more interested in this topic and have come across Blynk, which appeared to be a simple solution – and thus the topic of our review.

What is Blynk?

From their website: “Blynk is a Platform with iOS and Android apps to control Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the likes over the Internet. It’s a digital dashboard where you can build a graphic interface for your project by simply dragging and dropping widgets. 

It’s really simple to set everything up and you’ll start tinkering in less than 5 mins. Blynk is not tied to some specific board or shield. Instead, it’s supporting hardware of your choice. Whether your Arduino or Raspberry Pi is linked to the Internet over Wi-Fi, Ethernet or this new ESP8266 chip, Blynk will get you online and ready for the Internet Of Your Things.” Here is the original launch video:

Blynk started off as an idea, and raised initial funding through Kickstarter – which was successful and the system has now launched. Blynk comprises of an app on your smartphone (Android or iOS) inside which you can add widgets (controls) to send commands back to your development board (Arduino etc.).

For example, you can add a switch to turn a digital output on or off. Furthermore, data from sensors connected to the development board can be send back to the smartphone. The data passes through the Blynk Cloud server, or you can download and run your own server on your own hardware and infrastructure.

How much does it cost?

Right now (September 2015) the Blynk system is free. We downloaded the app and experimented without charge. We believe that over time there will be payment required for various functions, however you can try it out now to see if Blynk suits your needs then run with it later or experiment with other platforms.

Getting Started

Well enough talk, let’s try Blynk out. Our hardware is an Android smartphone (the awesome new Oppo R7+) for control, and a Freetronics EtherTen connected to our office modem/router:

You can also use other Arduino+Ethernet combinations, such as an Arduino Uno with an Ethernet shield. First you need to download the app for your phone – click here for the links. Then from the same page, download the Arduino library – and install it like you would any other Arduino library.

For our first example, we’ll use an LED connected to digital pin 7 (via a 560 ohm resistor) shown above. Now it’s time to set up the Blynk app. When you run the app for the first time, you need to sign in – so enter an email address and password:

Then click the “+” at the top-right of the display to create a new project, and you should see the following screen:

You can name your project, select the target hardware (Arduino Uno) – then click “E-mail” to send that auth token to yourself – you will need it in a moment. Then click “Create” to enter the main app design screen. Next, press “+” again to get the “Widget Box” menu as shown below, then press “Button”:

This will place a simple button on your screen:

Press the button to open its’ settings menu:

From this screen you can name your button, and also determine whether it will be “momentary” (i.e., only on when you press the button) – or operate as a switch (push on… push off…). Furthermore you need to select which physical Arduino pin the button will control – so press “PIN”, which brings up the scrolling menu as shown below:

We set ours to D7 then pressed “Continue”. Now the app is complete. Now head back to your computer, open the Arduino IDE, and load the “Arduino_Ethernet” sketch included with the library:

Then scroll down to line 30 and enter the auth key that was sent to you via email:

Save then upload the sketch to your Arduino. Now head back to your smartphone, and click the “Play” (looks like a triangle pointing right) button. After a moment the app will connect to the Blynk server… the Arduino will also be connected to the server – and you can press the button on the screen to control the LED.

And that’s it – remote control really is that easy. We’ve run through the process in the following short video:

Now what else can we control? How about some IKEA LED strips from our last article. Easy… that consisted of three digital outputs, with PWM. The app resembles the following:

… and watch the video below to see it in action:

Monitoring data from an Arduino via Blynk

Data can also travel in the other direction – from your Arduino over the Internet to your smartphone. At the time of writing this (September 2015) you can monitor the status of analogue and digital pins, and widgets can be added in the app to do just that. They can display the value returned from each ADC, which falls between zero and 1023 – and display the values in various forms – for example:

The bandwidth required for this is just under 2 K/s, as you can see from the top of the image above. You can see this in action through the video below:

Conclusion

We have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Blynk – which is an impressive, approachable and usable “Internet of Things” platform. Considering that you can get an inexpensive Android smartphone or tablet for under AU$50, the overall cost of using Blynk is excellent and well worth consideration, even just to test out the “Internet of Things” buzz yourself. So to get started head over to the Blynk site.