Day one of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is in the books, but that doesn't mean the news has stopped. The Windows 10 IoT Core Insider developer preview (phew!) has launched for small devices including the Raspberry Pi 2. Redmond admits that it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hoping that the maker community can provide feedback for how the platform's turning out along the road to a full release. What's more, the software giant is partnering with Arduino for a series of "Arduino Certified" products to bring the ubiquitous DIY boards into the Windows family and take advantage of all that the software has to offer. For example, cloud computing, a familiar user interface, image processing and a ton more. It follows the theme of bringing everything under one roof that Nadella and Co. have been so vocal about lately, and should hopefully help tinkerers develop some pretty powerful stuff in their garage.

Source: Windows Blog, Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2)

Day one of Microsoft's Build 2015 conference is in the books, but that doesn't mean the news has stopped. The Windows 10 IoT Core Insider developer preview (phew!) has launched for small devices including the Raspberry Pi 2. Redmond admits that it's still pretty rough around the edges, but it's hoping that the maker community can provide feedback for how the platform's turning out along the road to a full release. What's more, the software giant is partnering with Arduino for a series of "Arduino Certified" products to bring the ubiquitous DIY boards into the Windows family and take advantage of all that the software has to offer. For example, cloud computing, a familiar user interface, image processing and a ton more. It follows the theme of bringing everything under one roof that Nadella and Co. have been so vocal about lately, and should hopefully help tinkerers develop some pretty powerful stuff in their garage.

Filed under: Desktops, Microsoft

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Source: Windows Blog, Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter) (1), (2)

It’s a special day for the Makers’ community. Massimo Banzi is in San Francisco attending Build Conference, the biggest developer event of the calendar year for Microsoft and today Microsoft is  announcing a strong partnership with Arduino: Windows 10 is in fact the world’s first Arduino certified operating system!

‘Arduino Certified’  Windows 10 enables makers to easily create smart objects combining hardware-driving capability of Arduino with the software capabilities of Windows.

For example, a security camera can be built by using Arduino to power the motors controls to tilt/turn the camera and using Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to create great UI, to connect the camera to the cloud, to process the image for motion detection and for adding facial/voice recognition.

The makers’ community can now also enjoy Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino technologies – both released as open source libraries.

With Windows Remote Arduino developers can (wirelessly) access the capabilities of  Windows 10 devices as if they were physically attached to an Arduino Shield and leveraging Arduino functions directly from Universal Windows Application.

In this way Microsoft is enabling developers to extend their Universal Windows Platform Application with Arduino commands (that execute on a wirelessly connected Arduino device). Combining the power of Windows 10 devices including features such as Image processing, Speech recognition, Website parsing, Cameras and Advanced Audio pipelines with the power of physical world interactivity through Arduino enables incredible new scenarios to be created. Take a look at this Basic Windows Remote Arduino project to learn how to leverage this technology in any interactive project.

With Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino, users can tap into the incredible power of their Windows 10 devices through wireless protocols. For example Lumia 530 contains a lot of Arduino Shield capabilities and allows designers/makers to connect all those components seamlessly. Imagine being able to create an Arduino project that includes GPS, Web connectivity/parsing, touch display, speech technologies and more! Take a look at this Picture the Weather project created to bring children’s drawings to life!

Arduino is really happy that Microsoft got inspired by the enthusiasm and passion for technology represented by the Maker community and we look forward to see the amazing projects opening up from this unique offering.

There are plenty of GPS navigation units on the market today, but it’s always fun to build something yourself. That’s what [middelbeek] did with his $25 GPS device. He managed to find a few good deals on electronics components online, including and Arduino Uno, a GPS module, and a TFT display.

In order to get the map images on the device, [middelbeek] has to go through a manual process. First he has to download a GEOTIFF of the area he wants mapped. A GEOTIFF is a metadata standard that allows georeferencing information to be embedded into a TIFF image file.  [middelbeek] then has to convert the GEOTIFF into an 8-bit BMP image file. The BMP images get stored on an SD card along with a .dat file that describes the boundaries of each BMP. The .dat file was also manually created.

The Arduino loads this data and displays the correct map onto the 320×240 TFT display. [middelbeek] explains on his github page that he is currently unable to display data from two map files at once, which can lead to problems when the position moves to the edge of the map. We suspect that with some more work and tuning this system could be improved and made easier to use, of course for under $25 you can’t expect too much.

With the release of Arduino 1.6.2 we turned a page in the history of Arduino:  The “old” IDE 1.0.x is replaced by a more modern and more modular development environment which introduced a lot of usability improvements for Makers.

The community responded energetically to these new features by packaging up cores for other processors and boards that are not officially supported by Arduino. There is so much cool stuff being done out there that we figured out we wanted to make them available to the whole Arduino community.

We want a more open Arduino development environment where the community contribution can be made available more easily to all the users alongside the officially supported code.

To do this we are adding new features in the next release of the Arduino IDE that will allow adding community contributed cores just by adding a line to the IDE configuration. This will allow these community contributions to be made available simply and quickly. In the future we’ll also make it possible for those contributions to be hosted on our servers for quicker deployment.

We also decided to get rid of the popup notifying users they were using a non-certified board. Our issues with a specific manufacturer are now well known in the community that the popup just got in the way our desire to be more open and making life simpler for people. This change is already active in the current Arduino IDE.

A lot of people use boards that do not contribute back to Arduino and, honestly, we rather work with whoever wants to positively collaborate with us rather than annoy people.
We have added a “donation” option for the people who would like to contribute to the development and support of the whole Arduino ecosystem. When you download the IDE you’ll be asked if you want to donate, you can skip it or chose an amount.

In roughly 6 weeks we had more than 1 million downloads of the Arduino IDE: it’s an amazing number that we want to see grow constantly so if you appreciate what we do you can support our work directly even if your board manufacturers don’t.

This is just the beginning of a new phase where we want to make the Arduino IDE truly everybody’s development environment.

In the meantime if you have suggestions on how to further open up Arduino please post a comment!

Massimo Banzi

An Arduino Uno appeared at The Tonight Show thanks to a project called Wildfire Warning System created by a 14 years old girl from California. Take a look at the video to discover how  you can detect fires  using a gas sensor and a temperature sensor.

And guess what? Jimmy Fallon knows what an Arduino is! Watch the video:

We featured Nikodem’s bike tachometer last September on this blog. He’s now sharing with us another DIY project called DIY Arduino controlled Egg-Bot. It’s a DIY version of the original Egg-bot created by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

You can follow the step-by-step tutorial on Instructables and here’s a preview of the bill of materials you’ll need to make the project at home:

– Stepper motor with 200 steps per revolution (x2)  / I use 12V and 0,33A but you can use other.
– Stepper motor driver A4988 (x2)
– Arduino Uno
– Power supply for stepper
– Micro servo
– Plastic plate, wood
– 40cm screws x3 and 12 nuts for it’s
– Two Lego wheels
– Markers in different colors
– Drill, knife, saw, screwdriver, double sided tape, wood glue, wire, soldering iron, rubber bands
– Everything you need to make PCB

At this point, the banana piano is a pretty classic hack. The banana becomes a cheap, colorful touch sensor, which looks sort of like a piano key. The Arduino sets the pin as a low-level output, then sets the pin as an input with a pull up resistor. The time it takes for the pin to flip from a 0 to a 1 determines if the sensor is touched.

[Stian] took a new approach to the banana piano by hooking it up to Clojure and Overtone. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp which runs in the Java Virtual Machine. Overtone is a Clojure library that provides tons of utilities for music making.

Overtone acts as a client to the Supercollider synthesis server. Supercollider has been around since 1996, and provides a wide array of sound synthesis functions. Overtone simply tells Supercollider what to do, letting you easily program sounds in Clojure.

The banana piano acts as an input to a Clojure program. This program maps the banana to a musical note, then triggers a note on Overtone’s built-in piano sampler. The result is a nice piano sound played with fruit. Of course, since Overtone and Supercollider are very flexible, this could be used for something much more complex.

After the break, a video of the banana piano playing some “Swedish Jazz.”

He started off making an AVR synthesized guitar, but [Erix] ended up with much more: a complete six-voice AVR wavetable synthesis song machine that’ll run on an ATMega328 — for instance, on an Arduino Uno.

If you’re an AVR coder, or interested in direct-digital synthesis or PWM audio output, you should have a look at his code (zip file). If you’d just like to use the chip to make some tunes, have a gander at the video below the break.

It’s pretty sweet to get six channels of 31.25 kHz sampled 8-bit audio running on a 16MHz chip. The code underlying it works through some tricky optimization in the sample update routine (UpdateVoiceSample() in play.c if you’re reading along) and by carefully prioritizing the time critical elements.

For instance, the pitch is updated once every two PWM samples, I/O and other auxiliary player tasks every eights samples, and the sound’s dynamic volume envelope is only recalculated every 48 samples. Doing the slow math as infrequently as possible lets [Erix] make his timing.

And to round out the tools, [Erix] also provides wavetable editors and song generators in Lua to compile the tables of music data that the AVR routines need to run.

If you’re not impressed by this bit of AVR C coding, then you’ve not tried to implement something similar yourself.

The most fascinating project you can build is something with a bunch of blinky hypnotic LEDs, and the easiest way to build this is with a bunch of individually addressable RGB LEDs. [Ole] has a great introduction to driving RGB LED matrices using only five data pins on a microcontroller.

The one thing that is most often forgotten in a project involving gigantic matrices of RGB LEDs is how to mount them. The enclosure for these LEDs should probably be light and non-conductive. If you’re really clever, each individual LED should be in a light-proof box with a translucent cover on it. [Ole] isn’t doing that here; this matrix is just a bit of wood with some WS2812s glued down to it.

To drive the LEDs, [Ole] is using an Arduino. Even though the WS2812s are individually addressable and only one data pin is needed, [Ole] is using five individual data lines for this matrix. It works okay, and the entire setup can be changed at some point in the future. It’s still a great introduction to individually addressable LED matrices.

If you’d like to see what can be done with a whole bunch of individually addressable LEDs, here’s the FLED that will probably be at our LA meetup in two weeks. There are some crazy engineering challenges and several pounds of solder in the FLED. For the writeup on that, here you go.