This page is next level of Virtual Touch Screen project. 

Do you have this impression, like video I posted earlier was outdated? Software to draw a handwriting, mouse interface, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice to use a new era  technology? And here it is.

Technically, there are two hardware parts were added, to fully demonstrate extra ordinary sensitivity of the VTS project. First one is the BlueTooth module. And second is a tablet, running android. Device that I have, doesn’t support USB host mode (OTG), otherwise I may be fine w/o BT, just transfer a data over USB cable, as it was done in two previous demo video clips.  Have to say, it was not easy to represent 3D perspective on a flat screen, and picture below shows what I designed to complete a task:

Don’t think it requires a comments, the tricky part was to create an elliptical grid to show a distance. The number of circles is not limited to 2, I’d think about how to film next demo video, that ‘d show a “volume”.

Enjoy the movie:

This page is next level of Virtual Touch Screen project. 

First things is a distance, for virtual touch screen its less than 3 m, because the reflective area is too small. For radar (or sonar) its different, and the bigger size of object the stronger echo. Approximated range of detection the object as big as a wall, 30 meters.

Technically, there are two hardware parts were added, to fully demonstrate extra ordinary sensitivity of the VTS project. First one is the BlueTooth module. And second is a tablet, running android. Device that I have, doesn’t support USB host mode (OTG), otherwise I may be fine w/o BT, just transfer a data over USB cable, as it was done in two previous demo video clips.  Have to say, it was not easy to represent 3D perspective on a flat screen, and picture below shows what I designed to complete a task:

Don’t think it requires a comments, the tricky part was to create an elliptical grid to show a distance. The number of circles is not limited to 2, I’d think about how to film next demo video, that ‘d show a “volume”.

Enjoy the movie:

There are two apples, and arduino measure position in 3D space both of them. X, Y, and Z coordinates plus P – power of reflected ultrasonic wave used to draw circles, with different colors. You can see movement of the red circle on screen when first apples moves.

edited on 21-08-2014

After thinking awhile how to show a “volume” on a flat tablet screen, I decide to remove filtering stage in a software, when a bunch of consecutive “layers” were shown as one single ring (object) on a screen. Now each packet of data received from single “spherical” layer creates a circle. As always packet includes X, Y, Z, and P. To make an image “clear” there are two others filters left over in the processing algorithm. One is rejecting data below ( selectable in a menu ) power threshold, and another rejects anything thats located farther specific (again, selectable) distance. This is why in a video you can see only a ball, but not me – operator making a movie.

Here is how the ball looks like on radar screen:

And video:

That;s it for now.

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Agy Lee is an active member of the Singapore maker community and shared with us on the Arduino G+ Plus Community the interactive pad she prototyped using Lilypad Arduino:

She was inspired by the Sensor Demo Mat made by Kenneth Larsen some months before and that you can make yourself following this Instructables!

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“Less pants, more science” is the tagline for this company called Orgasmatronics that put up a tutorial showing how to hack a vibrator. No engineering experience required for this. All that’s needed is a sex toy, an Arduino Uno, a battery pack, and some handheld cutters to sleekly strip down the wires. A little tweaking and screwdriving later and just about any vibrator can be hacked and programmed. This gives the option to surprise a lover with some custom code as alternating and gyrating vibrations can be sent through the motor terminals switching up the standard LED flasher script into something more sexy. Sounds very kinky, while at the same time, very geeky to us. Experimenting between the sheets is guaranteed.

Check out the video after the break for a full tutorial. In it, a porn star transitions into a programmer in a quick few minutes. The video is hackerspace safe, but definitely not work safe. So you might want to wait until you get home, depending on where you are:

[Paul Stoffregen], known as father of the Teensy, has leveraged the Teensy 3.1’s hardware to obtain some serious speed gains with SPI driven TFT LCDs. Low cost serial TFT LCDs have become commonplace these days. Many of us have used Adafruit’s TFT LCD library  to drive these displays on an Arduino. The Adafruit library gives us a simple API to work with these LCDs, and saves us from having to learn the intricacies of various driver chips.

[Paul] has turbocharged the library by using hardware available on Teensy 3.1’s 32 Freescale Kinetis K20 microcontroller. The first bump is raw speed. The Arduino’s ATmega328 can drive the SPI bus at 8MHz, while the Teensy’s Kinetis can ramp things up to 24MHz.

Speed isn’t everything though. [Paul] also used the Freescale’s 4 level FIFO to buffer transfers. By using a “Write first, then block until the FIFO isn’t full” algorithm, [Paul] ensured that new data always gets to the LCD as fast as possible.

Another huge bump was SPI chip select. The Kinetis can drive up to 5 SPI chip select pins from hardware. The ATmega328 doesn’t support chip selects. so they must be implemented with GPIO pins, which takes even more time.

The final result is rather impressive. Click past the break to see the ATmega based Arduno race against the Kinetis K20 powered Teensy 3.1.

Paul’s library is open source and available on Github.

After spending some time on Arduino Forum and finding the right solutions for his project’s sketch, Connor Hubeny shared with us the infraHarp: an Arduino-powered eight-tone arpeggiator made with infrared emitters and detectors, Sparkfun’s Musical Instrument Shield, and an Arduino Mega 2560:

The InfraHarp was my first Arduino project. At first the project seemed daunting since I had no previous experience in programming and electrical engineering. Yet after spending some time with the Arduino I realized that electronics work very much the same, and by learning a few core components you are really right on the doorstep of exploring any technology you have the faintest interest in.

The InfraHarp can play in the keys of A, B, C, D, E, F, G in major, minor melodic and harmonic scales, with two octave choices. Listen to it in the video below:

The project requires basic soldering skills and Connor shared all the info and the sketch on this page.

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Hackaday – and the projects featured on Hackaday – get a lot of flak in the comments section simply for mentioning an Arduino. The Arduino complainers are, of course, completely wrong; everyone here is trying to make something, not make something in the most obscure possible way.

The Arduino is a legitimate tool, but still there are those among us who despise anything ending in ~duino. This browser plugin is for them. It’s a Chrome extension that selectively replaces or removes Arduino content from Hackaday depending on the user’s preference.

There are three settings to the plugin: See No Evil replaces images of Arduinos with serious business. Hear No Evil removes all occurrences of the word ‘Arduino’ and replaces them with something of your choosing. Speak No Evil removes all posts in the Arduino Hacks category.The last option also removes the ability to comment on any post in the Arduino Hacks category, so obviously the quality of the comments here will drastically increase by tomorrow.

You can grab the plugin on the gits. It’s Chrome only, but if someone wants to port it to Firefox, we’ll gladly put up another post.

There you go, Internet. You’re free now, and the biggest problem in your life has now been solved. Go give [SickSad] a virtual pat on the back, or tell him he could have done the same thing with a 555. Either of those are pretty much the same thing at this point.