If you want video support on your project, you might start from a device like a Raspberry Pi that comes with it built in. [Kevinhub88] doesn’t accept such compromises, so he and his Black Mesa Labs have come up with a whole new way to add video support to devices like the Arduino and other cheap controllers. This project is called Mesa-Video, and it can add digital video at a resolution of up to 800 by 600 pixels to any device that has a single serial output.
The video is created by an FT813, a low cost GPU from FTDI that offers a surprising amount of video oomph from a cheap, low power chip (he has demoed it running from a lemon battery), meaning that he is hoping to be able to sell the Mesa-Video for under $50.
However, Mesa-Video is just the beginning. [Kevinhub88] wanted to get around the problem of stacking shields on Arduinos: add more than one and you get problems. He wanted to create an interface that would be simpler, faster and more open, so he created the Mesa-Bus. This effectively wraps SPI and I2C traffic together over a simple, fast serial connection that doesn’t require much decoding. This means that you can send power and bi-directional data over a handful of wires, and still connect multiple devices at once, swapping them out as required. You could, for instance, do your development work on a PC talking to the prototype devices over Mesa-Bus, them swap the PC out for an Arduino when you have got the first version working in your dev environment. Is the Arduino not cutting it? Because Mesa-Bus is cross-platform and open source, it is easy to swap the Arduino for a Raspberry Pi without having to change your other devices. And, because all the data is going over a simple serial connection in plain text, it is easy to debug.
It’s an ambitious project, and [Kevinhub88] has a way to go: he is currently working on getting his first prototype Mesa-Bus devices up and running, and finalizing the design of the Mesa-Video. But it is an impressive start and we’ll be keeping a close eye on this work. Hopefully he can avoid that head crab problem as well because those things are as itchy as hell.
Mate Marschalko, who gave us the recent RC car over wireless and a racing wheel project now has a cool Ikea hack to share. He took an Ikea lamp and used a WiFi-enabled Arduino compatible microcontroller to create an alert notification light for his desk. He writes: This IKEA lamp […]
Microcontrollers existed before the Arduino, and a device that anyone could program and blink an LED existed before the first Maker Faire. This might come as a surprise to some, but for others PICs and 68HC11s will remain as the first popular microcontrollers, found in everything from toys to microwave ovens.
Arduino can’t even claim its prominence as the first user-friendly microcontroller development board. This title goes to the humble Basic Stamp, a four-component board that was introduced in the early 1990s. I recently managed to get my hands on an original Basic Stamp kit. This is the teardown and introduction to the first user friendly microcontroller development boards. Consider it a walk down memory lane, showing us how far the hobbyist electronics market has come in the past twenty year, and also an insight in how far we have left to go.
The Basic Stamp 1. A Simple circuit with just a microcontroller, an EEPROM, crystal, and brownout circuit.
Teardown
The Basic Stamp kit on my workbench was made in 1993, and sold for a suggested retail price of $139 USD. Adjusted for inflation, this is nearly $230 in 2015 dollars. What do you get in the Basic Stamp starter kit? A single stamp, a programmer cable, and a surprising amount of documentation.
The Basic Stamp is an extremely minimalist board that does just enough to blink an LED, read a button, or drive an LCD. In the official documentation, there are only a handful of parts: a microcontroller, an EEPROM with a few bytes of memory, a crystal, and a voltage regulator.
The PIC16C56XL is the brains of the outfit, featuring 1.5kilobits of Flash memory and 25 bytes of RAM. By modern standards, it’s tiny; the closest modern analog would be the ATtiny10, itself not a very recent chip. Microchip’s smallest and newest chip is the PIC12LF1522, featuring twice as much Flash and ten times the amount of RAM. We’re dealing with an old microcontroller when using the Basic Stamp
Like the Arduino, it was encouraged to use the Basic Stamp in product design.
Other components include a 93LC56 serial EEPROM. beside that is a 4MHz regulator, a 5V linear regulator, and a transistor and a few resistors for the ‘brown out’ circuit. Power is provided by a 9V battery connector soldered onto the board.
The electronic design of the Basic Stamp is simple, yes, but there’s a method to the madness. The code you write for the Basic Stamp is stored in 256 bytes of the EEPROM. This code is read by a PBASIC interpreter on the PIC, dutifully following commands to blink a LED or display a character on an LCD. No user code is actually stored on the microcontroller.
Programming
How about the programming environment? That’s a single executable running in a DOS shell. The system requirements are only, an IBM PC or compatible, DOS 2.0+, 128k of RAM, and a disk drive. Meager requirements, but this is not something that will run on your modern Windows workstation; it requires a proper parallel port.
For an IDE, the Basic Stamp editor is comparable to earlier Arduino IDEs; Alt+R runs the program on the Stamp connected to the computer, Alt+L loads a program, Alt+S saves a program, and Alt+Q quits the editor.
The BASIC language implemented on the PIC is minimal, but it does everything you would expect; individual pins can be set as input and output, buttons are debounced, and PWM functions are baked into the language.
An ad for the Basic Stamp. From High Tech Entrepreneur, October/November 1993. Ads had text in the past.
Context
The Basic Stamp is now regarded as a slow, inconvenient artifact from the past. No one uses it, and the only place you’ll find one is in the back cabinet in a physics or EE classroom. This is an incredible disservice to a still-impressive piece of technology, and looking back at the Basic Stamp with our modern expectations is an incredible bias.
There were microcontroller development platforms before the Basic Stamp, but these were engineering tools, and expensive compared to the Stamp. Development platforms for the electrical hobbyist were around after the stamp, too: the Micromint Domino packed an entire development platform into a rectangular brick of plastic. None of these designs could match the popularity of the Basic Stamp despite the platform’s shortcomings.
The Arduino receives a lot of hate. Detractors say it’s too high-level for proper embedded programming, not high-level enough for a modern workflow, is based on old, obsolete chips, doesn’t have the features of modern ARM microcontrollers, and the IDE is a mess. Despite an even less capable IDE, meager memory, and a slow processor, the Basic Stamp proved incredibly popular. The fact that you could pick up a Basic Stamp development kit at any Radio Shack probably didn’t hurt it’s popularity, either.
Now, with our fancy IDEs, mbed microcontrollers, powerful ARMs, and huge libraries, the ease of use of the Basic Stamp has still not been equaled. It may be slow, outdated, but all of us owe a great debt to the Basic Stamp for introducing an entire generation to the world of embedded programming, microcontrollers, and electronics tinkering.
It was a typical day for the 27 million residents of Nepal – a small south Asian country nestled between China and India. Men and women went about their usual routine as they would any other day. Children ran about happily on school playgrounds while their parents earned a living in one of the country’s many industries. None of them could foresee the incredible destruction that would soon strike with no warning. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook the country at its core. 9,000 people died that day. How many didn’t have to?
History is riddled with earthquakes and their staggering death tolls. Because many are killed by collapsing infrastructure, even a 60 second warning could save many thousands of lives. Why can’t we do this? Or a better question – why aren’t we doing this? Meet [Micheal Doody], a Reproductive Endocrinologist with a doctorate in physical biochemistry. While he doesn’t exactly have the background needed to pioneer a novel approach to predict earthquakes, he’s off to a good start.
He uses piezoelectric pressure sensors at the heart of the device, but they’re far from the most interesting parts. Three steel balls, each weighing four pounds, are suspended from a central vertical post. Magnets are used to balance the balls 120 degrees apart from each other. They exert a lateral force on the piezo sensors, allowing for any movement of the vertical post to be detected. An Arduino and some amplifiers are used to look at the piezo sensors.
The system is not meant to measure actual vibration data. Instead it looks at the noise floor and uses statistical analysis to see any changes in the background noise. Network several of these sensors along a fault line, and you have yourself a low cost system that could see an earthquake coming, potentially saving thousands of lives.
[Michael] has a TON of data on his project page. Though he’s obviously very skilled, he is not an EE or software guy. He could use some help with the signal analysis and other parts. If you would like to lend a hand and help make this world a better place, please get in touch with him.
He makes a great point during his narration in this video: earthquakes disproportionately affect the poor because they live and work in lower-cost structures unlikely to be outfitted to withstand earthquakes. Shoring up infrastructure is a huge and costly undertaking. Discovering early warning systems like the one [Michael] is testing here will have an immediate and wide-ranging impact at a minimum cost.
Toronto-based collaborative duo Hopkins Duffield created a gaming environment running on Arduino Mega in which the player battles a laser wielding A.I. security system gone awry. It’s like being in an action movie, walking in a pitch black room filled with the hollow sound of a machine breathing and a series of red laser fences slicing through the fog-filled air!
explores the personality of a snarky and mysterious game sentience who has infected a room with technological systems that challenge players and collect data. With a limited amount of time, the player must pass through a complicated series of changing and alternating laser patterns without tripping any of the lasers in order to deactivate the system and win the game. If the player trips a laser or if the timer runs out, it’s game over.
The gaming installation uses Max 6, Max For Live, an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 and custom electronic circuits. They also used a special modification of Lasse Vestergaard’s and Rasmus Lunding’s ArduinoInOutForDummies designed to allow communication between Arduino 2560 and Max 7. In Max, laser patterns are written using MIDI.
Take a look at the video to discover how they made it:
[Yveaux] had a problem. The transmitter on his outdoor weather station had broken, rendering the inside display useless. He didn’t want to buy a new one, so, like the freelance embedded software designer that he is, he decided to reverse engineer the protocol that the transmitter uses and build his own. He didn’t just replace the transmitter module, though, he decided to create an entire system that integrated the weather system into a sensor network controlled by a Raspberry Pi. That’s a far more substantial project, but it gave him the ability to customize the display and add more features, such as synching the timer in the display with a network clock and storing the data in an online database.
Fortunately for [Yveaux], the transmitter itself was fairly easy to replace. The weather station he had, like most, transmitted on the 868MHz frequency, which is a license-free ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Monitoring) spot on the spectrum. After some poking around, he was able to figure out the protocol and teach the Pi to speak it. He then added a Moteino and an nRF2401+ transmitter to the weather station, so it can send data to the Pi, which then sends it to the display. It is a more complicated setup, but it is also much more flexible. He’s had it running for a couple of years now and has collected more than a million sensor readings.
Originally from Guatemala, Balam Soto is an artist and maker of software and hardware creating interactive art installations and public artworks that fuse low tech with high tech. He recently shared with us a project called Exp.Inst.Rain and running on Arduino Uno:
” Exp.Inst.Rain” is an interactive installation and experimental instrument that incorporates projection and sound generated by a wireless box made of wood, plexiglas, Arduino, electronic components and custom touch sensors. By touching the box at various points, participants create different sounds; these sounds then generate changes in the projection.
It is an analysis of the social and cultural adoption of tangible user interface. Globally, touch devices are increasingly common; people understand how to use them. “Exp.Inst.Rain” analyses this new technology and makes use of this new common understanding to fuse sound and visuals into realtime interactivity.
This artworks it’s power by Arduino and wireless vibes , using Capacitive Touch Sensor and home made aluminum electrode to pick up touch. Custom software acts as a Bridge between the Exp.inst.X and Midi software.
physical biochemistry. While he doesn’t exactly have the background needed to pioneer a novel approach to predict earthquakes, he’s 
