Contaminated water is a huge problem in many third-world countries. Impure water leads to many serious health problems, especially in children. Installing a water purification system seems like a simple solution to this problem, but choosing the right purification system depends on the level of contaminants in the water.

Water turbidity testers are often used to measure the severity of water contamination. Unfortunately most commercial water turbidity testers are very expensive, so [Wijnen, Anzalone, and Pearce] set out to develop a much more affordable open-source tester. Their tester performs just as well as commercial units, but costs 7-15 times less.

The open-source water tester was designed in OpenSCAD and 3d printed. It houses an Arduino with a custom shield that measures the frequency from several TSL235R light-to-frequency converters. An LED illuminates the water and the sensors measure how much light is diffused and reflected off of particles in the water. Another sensor measures the brightness of the LED as a baseline reference. The turbidity of the water is calculated from the brightness values, and is displayed on a character LCD. More details about the tester are included in a fairly extensive paper.

[Thanks Andrew]

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When people restore old typewriters, they mostly just make them (1) look new and (2) usable again. Joe Hounsham from Plymouth University in the UK, however, had other ideas in mind: he took one and added the appropriate upgrades to turn it a high-tech typewriter that connects to the internet. To be precise, Hounsham's device called Dico connects you to a random person from a chat room -- in fact, it starts looking for a stranger to talk to as soon as its ultrasonic sensor feels you approaching. The other person's messages are then processed by an Arduino microcontroller, which controls the solenoids the pulls down the keys on the typewriter. Yes, a paper serves as the device's "screen," and to reply, you need to type on it, as well.

Filed under: Misc

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Via: Physorg

Source: Plymouth University, Joe Hounsham, IBM Business Mobile Insights

[grassjelly] has been hard at work building a wearable device that uses gestures to control quadcopter motion. The goal of the project is to design a controller that allows the user to intuitively control the motion of a quadcopter. Based on the demonstration video below, we’d say they hit the nail on the head. The controller runs off an Arduino Pro Mini-5v powered by two small coin cell batteries. It contains an accelerometer and an ultrasonic distance sensor.

The controller allows the quadcopter to mimic the orientation of the user’s hand. The user holds their hand out in front of them, parallel to the floor. When the hand is tilted in any direction, the quadcopter copies the motion and will tilt the same way. The amount of pitch and roll is limited by software, likely preventing the user from over-correcting and crashing the machine. The user can also raise or lower their hand to control the altitude of the copter.

[grassjelly] has made all of the code and schematics available via github.

Keeping up with a kickstarter campaign can be quite a task, especially if your project is real (looking at you, Scribble Pen!) and you’re trying to keep up with product fabrication and all the other logistics involved in bringing a product to market. [macetech] are currently in the middle of a campaign themselves and built a loud, bright alert system to notify them of any new kickstarter backers.

The project uses a LED marquee to display the current number of backers, but every time a new backer contributes to the project, a blindingly bright green arrow traffic signal is illuminated and a piezo speaker plays a celebration tune. All of these devices are controlled by an Arduino Yun which, with its built-in Atheros chipset, easily connects to the network and monitors the kickstarter page for changes.

[macetech] used some interesting hardware to get everything to work together. They used a USB-to-RS232 cable with and FTDI chip to drive the LED marquee and a PowerSwitchTail 2 from Adafruit to drive the power-hungry traffic signal. Everything was put together in a presentable way for their workshop and works great! All of the source code is available on their project page, and you can check out their RGB LED Shades kickstarter campaign too.

During Maker Faire Rome we announced and gave a preview of our new project called Arduino Materia 101, the 3d printer developed in collaboration with Sharebot.

We are happy to announce that starting today the 3d printer is available for pre-order (30 days delivery time) from Arduino Store :

• Arduino Materia 101  Kit Version  €570/USD727
• Arduino Materia 101 Assembled Version € 696/USD887

We can also share with you a list of documentation to learn all the details about it:

• Product page with downloadable PDFs of
  • Use Manual in English and Italian
  • Assembly Manual (soon online in Italian and  in English)

• Github repository with all the source files

In the next weeks we are going to post on the blog some cool hacks and user profiles to make it even easier to enjoy with the 3d printer.

Robin Andersson shared with us the link to his Instructable to create a robot controlled by (gloved) hand gestures and running on a couple of Arduino Unos and Xbee.

You can make it yourself following the 8 steps of the tutorial and then customize the gestures as you like.

Enjoy the video below:

An Interaction and Industrial Designer studying at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh tried to re-imagine the way we interact with radios to create a more meaningful relationship between the user and the artefact.

Radios have been around since the 1920s but the devices we have at home haven’t changed much even if they were designed nearly 100 years ago and share similar elements like switches, knobs, sliders.

Yaakov Lyubetsky worked on a prototype of The Experimental Form Radio using Arduino Uno:

When The Experimental Form Radio is laying on a tabletop, it is off. To turn the radio on, you pick it up and slot it onto a wall mount. The radio leverages the elastic qualities of fabric to control stations and volume. To change stations you press lightly and slide your finger along the fabric surface. To change the volume you press firmly into the fabric, and then slide your finger along the deeper cavity in the radio. The video below showcases the interaction.

Requiring the user to pick up and wall mount the radio to turn on creates a ritualistic experience with a very simple feedback mechanism. If the radio is hanging on the wall it’s on, if the radio is laying on a flat surface then it’s off. The visual and auditory feedback allows the user to have a clear understanding of the system state.

Even cooler than the video above is the next one, showing all the “Making of” process to build the wooden piece and the soft interface:

The project uses an Arduino Uno board with a custom circuit made with three independent layers of conductive fabric and conductive thread. Touching together two layers of conductive fabric completes one of twelve circuits that then either change the radio station or the volume.

Take a look at the additional documentation on his website.

When the washing machine at [hydronucleus]‘s place went on the fritz, he went straight to the toolbox to try to repair it. The problem was with the old mechanical control unit, so [hydronucleus] got an Arduino out of the parts bin to create a brand new electronic controller for his washing machine. (Imgur Link)

The old mechanical controller functioned like a player piano. A rotating drum with ridges actuate different cycles in the washing machine. Some of the cycles weren’t working properly so [hydronucleus] ripped them out. With the help of a schematic posted on the washing machine itself, the cycles were able to be programmed into the Arduino.

The other obstacle in this repair was getting enough relays together to switch everything in the washing machine. This was solved with a Sainsmart 16 relay block, which has more than enough relays for the job. [hydronucleus] wired up an LCD and a pushbutton to control it and his washing machine is as good as new! The cost of the repair certainly beats a new machine, too. Although if it finally gives up the ghost completely, he could always turn it into a windmill.

Want to read more about [hydronucleus]‘s washing machine hack? Check out his Reddit thread!

In the following 10-minute video, the Currah team is showing us all the details of Wood Lizzie, a project experimenting with Arduino Mega and Wi-Fi Shield, a very flexible steering system and the virtually unlimited control range afforded by WiFi and Internet Protocol:

The original plan was to construct one of the two-wheeled robots very popular with hobbyists but it was eventually decided that the resulting vehicle would be of very limited application and capable only of traversing smooth surfaces. However, note that the current design can be viewed as the drive of a two-wheeled robot coupled with a trailer by means of a 360 degree pivot. A slip ring capsule within the pivot enables the heavy battery and bulky control system to be separated from the drive and located on the trailer thereby distributing weight evenly between the four wheels.

DIY soap-carts were pretty common among kids in the first part of the 20th century and built from old pram wheels, scrap wood and, typically, soap boxes. They could provide a lot of fun for the family at very low cost and in recent years there’s a new interest in them especially to those appreciating their vintage look!