The Funky Chicken was created during a series of workshops that were given as part of the larger project “Interactive Sensory Objects Designed for and by People with Learning Disabilities”:

It was designed by Rumena, a student from the Reading College LLD/D course (people with learning disabilities) who attended the workshops on a regular basis. She made the papier mache chicken, painted it and added the frills and ornaments, and wanted it to sit inside a basket but flap it’s wings and cluck. We helped her to complete this artwork by adding the necessary electronics including an Arduino Uno, Adafruit Waveshield, speaker and a servo to make the wings flap.

The whole flapping/clucking of the chicken is triggered using a sonar attached to Arduino Uno. Moving within 1m of the chicken will trigger it:

 In the image below the sonar is hooked up to the Arduino Uno, and the Arduino is connected to the servo controller (not shown). The sonar is a very inexpensive off-the-shelf HC-SR04, which has a range of about 3m.

Here’s the video with the chicken at work:

[Robi] and [Kathy] from elecfreaks have put together a how-to article about a Laser Piano they just built. Instead of keys, the user breaks beams of laser light to trigger the sounds.

Several laser pointer diodes are wired in parallel and mounted in a box, cardboard in this case. The laser diodes are aimed at photocells that reside on the other side of the box. Each photocellis connected to a digital input pin on an Arduino. When the Arduino senses a state change from one of the photocell, meaning the beam of light has been interrupted, it plays the appropriate wave file stored on an external JQ6500 sound module.

[Robi] admits that there are some improvements to be made, specifically the trigger response time and the piano sounding too monotonous. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comments section.

If you’d like to build one, the bill of materials and Arduino code are listed on the above site. We’ve features some other interesting laser-based instruments in the past, such as this guitar, this harp and this harp.

“Be excellent to each other!”

A group of skydivers and engineers, combined their passions to create the world’s first autonomous skydiving robot, equipped by a camera and controlled by Arduino Mega.

The Freefall Camera is a student project at the University of Nottingham, its team is composed by David Alatorre, Tom Dryden, Tom Shorten and Peter Storey who received the third prize at the Student Venture Challenge from the Haydn Green Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

Their robot freefall camera is already in testing phase and the team features in a number of videos created by the University’s Nottingham Science YouTube channel.

Take a look at the video below explaining how they used Arduino Mega and enjoy the whole playlist at this link.

Lasers are some of the coolest devices around. We can use them to cut things, create laser light shows, and also as a rangefinder.[Ignas] wrote in to tell us about [Berryjam's] AMAZING write-up on creating an Arduino based laser rangefinder. This post is definitely worth reading.

Inspired by a Arduino based LIDAR system, [Berryjam] decided that he wanted to successfully use an affordable Open Source Laser RangeFinder (OSLRF-01) from LightWare. The article starts off by going over the basics of how to measure distance with a laser based system. You measure the time between an outgoing laser pulse and the reflected return pulse; this time directly relates to the distance of the object. Sounds simple? In practice, it is not as simple as it may seem. [Berryjam] has done a great job doing some real world testing of this device, with nice plots to top it all off. After fiddling with the threshold and some other aspects of the code, the resulting accuracy is quite good.

Recently, we have seen more projects utilizing lasers for range-finding, including LIDAR projects. It is very exciting to see such high-end sensors making their way into the maker/hacker realm. If you have a related laser project, be sure to let us know!

Two new Arduino products are available starting today from the Arduino Store. Read below for details!

Arduino USB Host Shield

This shield allows you to connect devices to your Arduino using a USB port, for example game controllers, digital cameras, phones, keyboards, etc:

- it is based on the MAX3421E, which is a USB peripheral/host controller containing the digital logic and analog circuitry necessary to implement a full-speed USB peripheral or a full-/low-speed host compliant to USB specification rev 2.0.

- it can be used with the “USB Host Library for Arduino” hosted by Lauzus from circuits@home on GitHub (click to download zip).

If you want to see how to use it, take a look at this tutorial from Officine Arduino which used it to add wireless to an RC Car.

Buy USB Host Shield now

——————————-

ArduinoISP

It’s a tiny AVR-ISP (in-system programmer) based on David Mellis’ project FabISP and useful to anyone needing more space on the Arduino board. Uploading a sketch with an external programmer can be used for three main reasons:

- remove the bootloader and use the extra space for your sketch

- burn the bootloader on your Arduino, so you can recover it if you accidentally corrupt the bootloader.

- when you use a new ATmega microcontroller in your Arduino, and you need the bootloader in order to upload a sketch in the usual way.

For more details about using the Arduino ISP please visit the Getting Started page

Learn how to program an ATtiny and to read your Arduino built-in EEPROM using ArduinoISP in the tutorials on Scuola.

Buy Arduino ISP now

Explore this tutorial  demonstrating how the Arduino Yún can be controlled from anywhere with any internet connected web browser. The solution is provided by Bo Peterson using the Yaler service which means that the Yún can be reached from any network without knowing the IP-address, and without any port forwarding on the router where the Yún is connected.

A common problem in home automation and internet of things applications is that it is difficult to reach devices connected behind wifi routers from the outside. There are different approaches to overcome this problem:

• Port forwarding and static ip addresses. This solution requires the user of the connected device to know how to configure a router and have access to router administration which is not always possible. A Yun tutorial with port forwarding is found here.
• Polling is a technique where the connected device at regular intervals checks with an external server if the device should take action. This solution requires no configuration of the router but it creates extra network traffic and response delays.
• A third way is to use WebSockets which is a way of providing real time full-duplex communication over TCP. Spacebrew is a good open source toolkit for connected devices using WebSockets. Autobahn is another infrastructure that can be used.
• Reverse HTTP is the solution that will be used in this tutorial. We will use Yaler which is an open source relay infrastructure that gives access to connected devices with very little configuration.

Follow the tutorial and get the code at this link.

We’ve all been there. You are having fun walking around the carnival when you suddenly find yourself walking past the carnival games. The people working the booths are taunting you, trying to get you to play their games. You know the truth, though. Those games are rigged. You don’t know how they do it. You just know that they do… somehow.

Now you can put your worries to rest and build your own carnival game! [John] built his own “Bass Master 3000” style carnival game and posted an Instructable so you can make one too.

The game is pretty straightforward. You have a giant fish-shaped target with a wide open mouth. You take hold of a small fishing reel with a rubber ball on the end. Your goal is to cast the ball out and hit the fish in its big mouth. If you hit the mouth, you get to hear a loud buzzer and see some flashing lights. The system also uses a webcam to take a candid photo of the winner. A computer screen shows all of the winners of the day.

The brain of the system is an Arduino Yún. The Yún is similar to an Uno but it also has some extra features. Some good examples are an Ethernet port, a wireless adapter, and an SD card slot. The mouth sensors are just two piezo elements. Each sensor is hooked up to the Arduino through a small trim pot. This allows you to dial in the sensitivity of each sensor. The lights and the buzzer are controlled via a relay, triggered by a 5V digital pin on the Arduino.

The Yún actually has a small on-board Linux computer that you can communicate with from inside the Arduino environment. This allows [John] to use the Yún to actually take photos directly from a web cam, store them on the local SD card, and display them on a local web server. The web server runs a simple script that displays a slide show of all of the photos stored on the card.

The final piece of the game is the physical target itself. The target is painted using acrylic paint onto a small tarp. The tarp is then attached to a square frame made from PVC pipe. The mouth of the fish is cut out of the tarp. A large piece of felt is then placed behind the hole with the piezo sensors attached. A short length of copper pipe helps to weigh down the bottom of the felt and keep it in place. The important thing is to make sure the felt isn’t touching the tarp. If it touches, it might be overly sensitive and trigger even when a player misses.

Now you know how to build your own Bass Master 3000 carnival game. Whether you rig the game or not is up to you. Also, be sure to check out a video of the system working below.

If you’re dealing with RF, you’ll probably have the need to generate a variety of clock signals. Fortunately, [Jason] has applied his knowledge to build a SI5351 library for the Arduino and a breakout board for the chip.

The SI5351 is a programmable clock generator. It can output up to eight unique frequencies at 8 kHz to 133 MHz. This makes it a handy tool for building up RF projects. [Jason]‘s breakout board provides 3 isolated clock outputs on SMA connectors. A header connects to an Arduino, which provides power and control over I2C.

If you’re looking for an application, [Jason]‘s prototype single-sideband radio shows the chip in action. This radio uses two of the SI5351 clocks: one for the VFO and one for the BFO. This reduces the part count, and could make this design quite cheap.

The Arduino library is available on Github, and you can order a SI5351 breakout board from OSHPark.

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