I designed a DIY motion-sensing alarm that is controlled by a resistor. When an intruder is detected, a siren sounds that can be deactivated by touch.
The post Build a Motion Sensing Alarm You Can Disable with a Resistor appeared first on Make:.
In the future, we'll all live in "Live Cubes," tiny homes that restrict your energy and water use
The post A Peek at Hacking in an Energy Starved Future appeared first on Make:.
In the future, we'll all live in "Live Cubes," tiny homes that restrict your energy and water use
The post A Peek at Hacking in an Energy Starved Future appeared first on Make:.
If you are from the 1960’s or 1970’s we know you would have enjoyed furiously punching the buttons of a pin ball machine back in the day. Installation artist [Niklas Roy] recently revisited this old classic game and built Galactic Dimension – a supersized pinball machine for Phæno – an amazing science center in the German city of Wolfsburg. The science centre was planning a big exhibition featuring thirty beautiful, classic pinball machines loaned from the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, California.
The game machine was built on a steep ramp and has a gigantic play field measuring 3m x 6m (10’x20′). It features Sci-Fi game elements in the play field which blend perfectly with the futuristic building where it is housed. The game elements are built from repurposed everyday items like hair dryers and fans, giving visitors the motivation to build some of their own such contraptions.
The players operate the machine via a control desk, and a giant calculator is used to display the game score. The steep ramp had an incline of almost 30° which meant that he had to use a light ball to be able to propel it around the play field. The main user controls are the two flippers, and building giant ones was a big challenge. Solenoids or coils would not cut the ice, and he settled for pneumatic cylinders – easy to control, powerful, not too loud, and the museum already had a compressed air supply readily available. But it still took him three iterations before he could get it right. The plunger, which initially propels the ball, was built from PVC pipes and a hair dryer. Each play field element was built as a separate module to make assembly and maintenance easier. All featured a 220V AC supply, a sensor (either an IR distance sensor or a light barrier) to detect the ball, and an Arduino. Actuators were built from hair dryers and portable fans. Each of them have their own sound effects too – either a hacked toy or a speaker controlled by the Arduino. After everything was built, taken apart, transported, and reassembled at the site, the Galactic Dimension worked without a glitch, and without releasing any magic smoke. To top it off, Andreas Harre, who’s been the German pinball champion for several years in a row, also played the machine when he visited Phæno – and was totally excited about it!
So if you are in that part of Germany anytime until September, do drop in and try to ring up a big score. For photos of his build log, check out the photo album. There’s also a fairly big block diagram (German) and the Arduino sketches (.zip file), if you’d like to take a stab at building an even bigger pinball machine. Check the video to see the machine in action. And if the name [Niklas] sounds familiar, it is because he loves building installations such as the Forbidden Fruit Machine, the Ball Sucking Machine, and another Ball Sucking Machine.
Creative Mornings is a series of talks given by creative types all over the world and recorded for everyone to see online.
Last May, 22-year-old Nerea de la Riva Iriepa, one of the worlds most promising young talents in Robotics gave an inspiring talk about her journey in the world of robotics, her discovery of Arduino, how to work in team and also how to deal with a male-dominated robot world.
She is currently student of Electronic Communications at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and also an intern at Arduino in Malmö where she is creating educational content for beginners and finding ways to make coding easier for young users.
If you’re looking to build the next creepy Halloween decoration or simply thinking about trying out OpenCV for the first time, this next project will have you covered. [Glen] made a pair of giant googly eyes that follow you around the room using some servos and some very powerful software.
The project was documented in three parts. In Part 1, [Glen] models and builds the eyes themselves, including installing the servo motors that will eventually move them around. The second part involves an Arduino and power supply that will control the servos, and the third part goes over using OpenCV to track faces.
This part of the project is arguably the most interesting if you’re new to OpenCV; [Glen] uses this software package to recognize different faces. From there, the computer picks out the most prominent face and sends commands to the Arduino to move the eyes to the appropriate position. The project goes into great detail, from Arduino code to installing Ubuntu to running OpenCV for the first time!
We’ve featured some of [Glen]’s projects before, like his FPGA-driven LED wall, and it’s good to see he’s still making great things!
If you’ve ever watched MotoGP (motorcycle) racing, you might have wondered how the camera appears to stay level even while the bike turns left and right, nearly becoming horizontal. Saftari was curious about this himself and, rather than simply answering the question, he built a gyroscopic camera rig that allows the camera […]
The post Motorcycle Gyromount Always Delivers Perfect Video appeared first on Make:.
If you’ve ever watched MotoGP (motorcycle) racing, you might have wondered how the camera appears to stay level even while the bike turns left and right, nearly becoming horizontal. Saftari was curious about this himself and, rather than simply answering the question, he built a gyroscopic camera rig that allows the camera […]
The post Motorcycle Gyromount Always Delivers Perfect Video appeared first on Make:.
Are incorrect passwords driving you insane? Do you tire of constantly having to type in your 20 character password? In this project we use an Adafruit NFC shield to detect an NFC tag and an Arduino Leonardo to unencrypt the NFC tag and type in your password. This project requires […]
The post Make a Custom NFC Unlocker for Your Computer appeared first on Make:.
Are incorrect passwords driving you insane? Do you tire of constantly having to type in your 20 character password? In this project we use an Adafruit NFC shield to detect an NFC tag and an Arduino Leonardo to unencrypt the NFC tag and type in your password. This project requires […]
The post Make a Custom NFC Unlocker for Your Computer appeared first on Make:.
