We are happy to announce Tsunami by Arachnid Labs has joined the Arduino At Heart Program.

Tsunami is a new powerful and flexible signal generator built on the Arduino platform and the best way to get started experimenting with analog signals.

Nick Johnson, its creator, took the versatile processor behind the Arduino Leonardo, and combined it with a Direct Digital Synthesis chip, which makes generating analog signals incredibly straightforward. He also added flexible input and output circuitry, an easy to use software library, to make working with analog signals as easy as blinking an LED.

Tsunami lowers the barriers to making music, sending and receiving data, experimenting amateur radio, and creating educational applications. It was launched successfully on KickStarter last April and you are in time to pre-order it on Crowd Supply!

Here’s a list of projects you could do:

•  Use it as a building block for a synthesizer
• Measure unknown signals
• Measure the response curve of your audio amplifier
• Implement an APRS modem
• Generate precise clocks for other devices
• Make a digital theremin
• Read and write data tapes from classic computers (Commodore, Atari, etc)
• Test filters and reactive components (capacitors, inductors, and so forth)
• Encode and decode your own data for audio transmission
• Teach yourself about Direct Digital Synthesis
• Teach yourself about AC and complex impedance
• Make your own low frequency radio transmitter

Want to know more? Meet Nick and Tsunami in this video:

A pretty color LCD screen, an Arduino, a buzzer and a joystick is all you need for a minimalist gaming console for under $20. At least, that’s all [João Vilaça] needed to get this sweet version of Tetris up and running. (He’s working on Breakout right now.)

It’s a testament to the current state of the hardware hacking scene that [João] could put this device together in an afternoon for so cheap, presumably after waiting a while for shipments from China. The 320×240 SPI color TFT LCD screen used to cost twice as much as this whole project did. And wiring it up is a simple matter of connecting this pin to that pin. Almost child’s play.

Equally impressive is the state of open source software. A TFT library from Seeed Studios makes the screen interface a piece of cake. [João] wrote his own sound and joystick code, and of course the Tetris gameplay itself, but it’d be much more than a few weeks’ work without standing on the shoulders of giants. Check out [João]’s Github for the project code and stick with us after the break for a demo video and some of our other favorite Arduino gaming hacks.

Now, we’ve seen a whole lot of Arduino-based gaming platforms around here before, and they range from the simplistic black-and-white to the bells-and-whistles of the Gameduino which tacks an FPGA onto your Arduino to enable sprites, awesome sound, and VGA output. But we’ve also got a place in our hearts for simplicity and comprehensibility, and [João]’s device and code has got those in spades.

If you’re ready to push your Arduino skills beyond blinking LEDs, [João]’s game project should be on your reading / building list. We can’t wait to see Breakout.

Cubled is an interactive installation made of 27 luminous spheres arranged in space to create a cube 5 mt (16.4ft) per side floating on a stage.

The project created by Giuseppe Acito of Opificio Sonico  has a structure made of steel wires, RGB LED Strips and Ikea paper lanterns.

The system is MIDI-controlled, the notes generated by a sequencer are converted to electric signals using an Arduino UNO and a Mosfet:

No DMX device was used for this system which is 12V DC powered, with slim electric wires in order to give the lightness needed to this installation. In this clip, the performance is splitted in 2 parts: in the first a kit of electronic percussion is “played” live by a step sequencer named Sonic Fraction Beatdown (a Max\MSP device for Ableton Live), the combinations of 12 MIDI notes generated are linked to the spheres. In the second part the combinations of sounds and lights are pre-programmed patterns clip and performed live by a Tenori-on Yamaha and Ableton Live. The installation was mounted inside the Link Club (Bologna – Italy) in December 2013, which hosted some world-famous DJ set, during a month of permanence.

One of our prime passions is to motivate the next great minds and ideas by posting informative step-by-step tutorials. To celebrate the launch of our fourth-generation muscle sensor, the MyoWare, we’ve put together a tutorial that will make you go berserk! This tutorial will teach you to build bionic claws using […]

Read more on MAKE

The post 3D Printed Bionic Claws with MyoWare Muscle Sensors appeared first on Make:.

One of our prime passions is to motivate the next great minds and ideas by posting informative step-by-step tutorials. To celebrate the launch of our fourth-generation muscle sensor, the MyoWare, we’ve put together a tutorial that will make you go berserk! This tutorial will teach you to build bionic claws using […]

Read more on MAKE

The post 3D Printed Bionic Claws with MyoWare Muscle Sensors appeared first on Make:.

Thursday May 28th at noon The Computer History Museum is hosting an open lecture by Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project. He will cover the historical origins of Arduino, including discussion of the process of designing tools which make digital technology accessible to people who are not experts, and the essential role of the larger Arduino ecosystem that supports this remarkable computer platform.

The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View (California), is a nonprofit organization  exploring the history of computing and its ongoing impact on society in the last 40 years. The Museum is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computer history, it hosts the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world and many virtual exhibition you can explore directly online.

If you like vintage images and history of computing, check the “visible storage” collection below.

The main image of this post is a picture by Massimo Banzi showing the first useable Arduino prototype. Still called “Wiring Lite”, used as a low cost module for wiring users. David Cuartielles joined at this point (the flying resistor is his first contribution to the design) from this point on the project becomes Arduino. 

Over the Memorial Day weekend the first Arduinos were to be made in the USA were hand built by Limor in the Adafruit offices in New York.

Read more on MAKE

The post Here Is the First Arduino Made on American Soil appeared first on Make:.

Over the Memorial Day weekend the first Arduinos were to be made in the USA were hand built by Limor in the Adafruit offices in New York.

Read more on MAKE

The post Here Is the First Arduino Made on American Soil appeared first on Make:.

Candy Locker is a mouth-watering tutorial based on  Intel® Edison and image recognition of objects.
You can keep your candies safe from greedy hands with this color recognition lock and a dispenser using a set of 5 distinct color images and setting up a pattern that will activate and dispense candies.

Follow the link and open the magic door of the video and picture recognition,  invent cool systems learning how to manage object recognition and OpenCv foundations.

Introduction

Using a large TFT LCD with various development boards can often be a trial – from dedicating eight or more GPIO pins to working with a flaky software library or memory limitations. Personally I have thought “there must be a better way”, and thus usually results in shifting the concept over to a single-board computer such as a Raspberry Pi to get the job done.

However this is no longer necessary – thanks to the team at Itead Studio and now available from Tronixlabs. They have developed a series of TFT LCDs which include enough onboard hardware, a graphic processor unit and memory to be a self-contained display solution whose output can be created with a WYSIWYG editor and be controlled using simple serial text commands.

For a quick demonstration, check out the following video:

As you can see the display can be quite complex, and with some imagination you can create a neat interface for your project. And once the interface has been uploaded to the display, all your development board needs to do is communicate with the Nextion displays via a TTL-level USART  (serial port).

Hardware

Nextion displays are available in a wide range from 2.4″ through to 7″ at varying resolutions – with all having a resistive touch screen:

On the rear of an example 4.3″ unit we can see the brains behind the Nextion – an STM32F microcontroller, 16MB of flash memory and a meaty Altera MAXII FPGA. :

… and the 2.4″ version which has 4MB of flash memory:

And as shown above you can see from the images there is a microSD card socket on each display, and the only external connections are 5V and GND plus TX/RX for serial data to your system. For testing purposes with a Windows-based PC you can use a simple USB-TTL serial cable. This could also be used for a more permanent solution between a Raspberry Pi, or any USB-enabled PC.

Software

The display interface is created used an IDE (integrated development environment) which is currently available for Windows. Using the IDE, you can import images for use in the interface, determine touch areas, add  buttons, progress bars, gauges and much more.

Furthermore there is a simulator and debugger tool which allows you to test your interface on the PC or directly to the Nextion unit. The simulator also allows for sending and receiving commands with the display so you can quickly test your code.

The simulator is also a demonstration of how the Nextion can be controlled via USB-TTL serial cable from a PC, thus great for secondary displays via processing, python etc – or from any software that can communicate via the PC’s serial port. And much cheaper than a secondary display if you only want to display certain types of data.

To create an interface is easy, you first start with a background image or a solid colour. Then you can add objects such as buttons for user-input, or define an area of the screen to a “touch-zone” – which, when pressed, will send a value out to the connected device. You can also add text zones, which will display incoming text from the connected device – along with progress bars and gauges.

For an ideal example of all this together, watch the following video:

Conclusion

Although the units I had for test were prototype review units supplied by Itead, they worked as expected and really do solve the problem of creating a contemporary user-interface without typing up microcontroller resources. Nextion displays are now available from our Tronixlabs store.

And finally a plug for my own store – tronixlabs.com – offering a growing range and Australia’s best value for supported hobbyist electronics from adafruit, DFRobot, Freetronics, Seeed Studio 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 Review – Nextion TFT Human Machine Interface appeared first on tronixstuff.