The illustrious Becky Stern has joined us for an interview about wearable electronics. As you know, Becky lives and breathes wearables so she has some incredible insight. If you’d like to find more of Becky, you should probably tune into her weakly show about wearable electronics! If you don’t want […]
PopPet is a cute robot kit with changeable face plates so you can customize her the way you want. The kit is available through Kickstarter now.
Arduino community on Gplus is pretty active and many people share their experiments, projects and prototypes to receive comments and tips. Yongho Jeong from Seul (South Korea) published a video called Uncanny, a breathing plant installation creating unusual sensations and made with Arduino Uno + air pump:
The uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, “the opposite of what is familiar”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange. //
The subject of this project is interaction between human and plant. My First thought is that Do plants breathe like we human do? I was amazed after learning that plants breathe and that their breathing is very similar to ours. So I want to show that plants breaths llike human do and reacting to touch of human.
Watch the plant in action below and explore Jeong blog for the other technical details.
Could your humble abode use a little microcontrolled LED pizzaz? Why not class up the joint with a stunning arduino-controlled chandelier made from jars using this brilliant tutorial?
Last June Thomas Amberg participated to Water Hackathon – Open Source Technologies for Rivers, Oceans and Lakes taking place in Lausanne. He came up with a DIY solution made with Arduino Uno and a flow sensor to help monitor how much water a tub consumes.
For most of us, the only way we can see the strength of a WiFi network is by the familiar signal icon on any given device. Newcastle University School of Architecture doctorate student Luis Hernan, however, has a different method: spirit photography. He's using the new age-y method of capturing someone's aura via electric coronal discharges -- a Kirlian Device -- with a few geeky augmentations (an Arduino Uno board and WiFi Shield, for example) to illustrate how strong a wireless broadcast is with colors. As Wired notes, these components take account of the nearby signal and convert it into color information that's then beamed onto an LED strip; red being the strongest and blue being weaker sections of the network. To create the pictures like what you see above and at the source, Hernan swung the home-made device around after setting up long-exposure shots with a camera. While we can't know for sure, we'd imagine that something with no signal would look a lot like this.
Filed under: Wireless, Science, Alt
Via: Wired
Source: DigitalEthereal (1), (2)
Jaap de Maat shared with us his final year project called I know what you did last summer, the finale to a two-year-long MA in Information Experience Design of the Royal College of Art. The ingredients are simple (an old electric wheel chair, an Arduino Mega, 12v motor board, Bluetooth slave, wires, blood sweat and tears) and the concept is very actual:
It is physically impossible for the human brain to remember every event from our past in full detail. The default setting is to forget and our memories are constructed based on our current values. In the digital age it has become easier to look back with great accuracy. But this development contains hidden dangers, as those stored recollections can easily be misinterpreted and manipulated. That sobering thought should rule our online behaviour, because the traces we leave behind now will follow us around for ever.
The video of the installation shows how the physical presence of an archive drawer stalking has a real impact on visitors:
Here’s the making of the prototype:
Tom Igoe some days ago wrote an interesting post about Arduino Yún on his blog. We post it here as it could be useful to the Arduino Community.
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Recently, Federico Fissore added node.js to the package repository for the Arduino Yún. Here’s how you get node to communicate with the Arduino processor on the Yún via the Bridge library.
To do this, you’ll need an Arduino Yún, a microSD card, a microUSB cable and a wifi connection. You should be familiar with the basics of the Arduino Yún and node.js in order to get the most out of this post.
All of the code for this post can be found on my GitHub repository.
First you’ll need to install node on the Yún. Make sure you’ve upgraded to the current Yún software image and have connected to the internet via wifi. Then ssh into your Yún, or connect to the command line interface using the the YunSerialTerminal sketch, and issue the following commands:
$ opkg update
$ opkg install node
That’s it. Now you have node.js onboard. You can check that it’s okay by checking the version:
$ node -v
You should get the version number in reply.
Once you’ve got that working, you’ll undoubtedly want to communicate with the Yún’s Arduino processor from node. You can do this using the Bridge library. On a microSD drive, make a directory for your node scripts. I called mine /arduino/node. Then insert it into your Yún. For reference, its path from the command line is /mnt/sda1/arduino/node.
Note: The Yún automatically treats the microSD card’s /arduino/www/ directory as a public web directory. Anything you put in there will be served out as static HTML. So you may not want to put your node scripts in this directory, so they’re not visible via the browser. That’s why I created a node directory at the same level as the www directory, but outside it.
[Dave] has some big plans to build himself a 1980′s style computer. Most of the time, large-scale projects can be made easier by breaking them down into their smaller components. [Dave] decided to start his project by designing and constructing a custom controller for his future computer. He calls it the Rabbit H1.
[Dave] was inspired by the HOTAS throttle control system, which is commonly used in aviation. The basic idea behind HOTAS is that the pilot has a bunch of controls built right into the throttle stick. This way, the pilot doesn’t ever have to remove his hand from the throttle. [Dave] took this basic concept and ran with it.
He first designed a simple controller shape in OpenSCAD and printed it out on his 3D printer. He tested it out in his hand and realized that it didn’t feel quite right. The second try was more narrow at the top, resulting in a triangular shape. [Dave] then found the most comfortable position for his fingers and marked the piece with a marker. Finally, he measured out all of the markings and transferred them into OpenSCAD to perfect his design.
[Dave] had some fun with OpenSCAD, designing various hinges and plywood inlays for all of the buttons. Lucky for [Dave], both the 3D printer software as well as the CNC router software accept STL files. This meant that he was able to design both parts together in one program and use the output for both machines.
With the physical controller out of the way, it was time to work on the electronics. [Dave] bought a couple of joysticks from Adafruit, as well as a couple of push buttons. One of the joysticks controls the mouse cursor. The other joystick controls scrolling vertically and horizontally, and includes a push button for left-click. The two buttons are used for middle and right-click. All of these inputs are read by a Teensy Arduino. The Teensy is compact and easily capable of emulating a USB mouse, which makes it perfect for this job.
[Dave] has published his designs on Thingiverse if you would like to try to build one of these yourself.
In the 30 years since Alexey Pajitnov first launched Tetris, the world's most popular game has regularly been immortalized in fashion. Luxembourgian Mark Kreger wanted to do the same, but instead of cooking up a colorful print, he's staving off boredom with something much more interactive: a playable Tetris T-shirt. Featuring 128 LEDs powered by an Arduino Uno microcontroller, Kreger's marvellous tee requires only four rechargeable AA batteries to power the game. It'll keep score and display level numbers -- the only thing it appears to be lacking is the super-funky soundtrack.
Filed under: Gaming, Wearables
Via: Time
Source: Mark Kerger (YouTube)