Getting started using Bluetooth LE is much harder than it should be, and that a lot of great work people are doing is getting dropped on the floor, or worse yet done again. We decided to sit down and do something about that.
[Aaron] has been wanting to build his own binary desk clock for a while now. This was his first clock project, so he decided to keep it simple and have it simply display the time. No alarms, bells, or whistles.
The electronics are relatively simple. [Aaron] decided to use on of the ATMega328 chips he had lying around that already had the Arduino boot loader burned into them. He first built his own Arduino board on a breadboard and then re-built it on a piece of protoboard as a more permanent solution. The Arduino gets the time from a real-time clock (RTC) module and then displays it using an array of blue and green LED’s. The whole thing is powered using a spare 9V wall wort power supply.
[Aaron] chose to use the DS1307 RTC module to keep time. This will ensure that the time is kept accurately over along period of time. The RTC module has its own built-in battery, which means that if [Aaron's] clock should ever lose power the clock will still remember the time. The RTC battery can theoretically last for up to ten years.
[Aaron] got creative for his clock enclosure, upcycling an old hard drive. All of the hard drive guts were removed and replaced with his own electronics. The front cover had 13 holes drilled out for the LED’s. There are six green LED’s to display the hour, and seven blue LED’s for the minute. The LED’s were wired up as common cathode. Since the hard drive cover is conductive, [Aaron] covered both sides of his circuit board with electrical tape and hot glue to prevent any short circuits. The end result is an elegant binary clock that any geek would be proud of.
The very first fully operational radar Arduino shield was recently demonstrated at Bay area Maker Faire. It was built by [Daniel] and [David], both undergrads at UC Davis.
Many have talked about doing this, some have even prototyped pieces of it, but these undergrad college students pulled it off. This is the result from Prof. ‘Leo’ Liu’s full-semester senior design course based on the MIT Coffee Can radar short course, which has been going on for 2 years now. Next year this course will have 30 students, showing the world the interest and market-for project based learning. yet again showingWe the influence of hackers on higher education.
Check out the high res ranging demo, where a wider band chirp was used to amazing results. Video below.
Some people really love their smoothies. We mean really, really, love smoothies and everything about making them, especially the blenders. [Adam] is a big fan of blenders, and wanted to verify that his Vitamix blenders ran as fast as the manufacturer claimed. So he built not one, but two speed measuring setups. Scientific blender measurement method requires one to cross check their results to be sure, right?
Measuring the speed of a blender is all about the RPM. Appropriately, [Adam's] first measurement tool was an LED based stroboscope. Stroboscopes have been around for hundreds of years, and are a great way to measure how fast an object is rotating. Just adjust the speed of a flashing light until the rotating object appears frozen. The number of blinks per second is then equal to the Rotations Per Second (RPS) of the object being measured.Multiply by 60 seconds, and you’ve got RPM. [Adam] used an Arduino as the brains behind his stroboscope. He wired a dial up on his breadboard, and used it to adjust the flash rate of an LED. Since this was a quick hack, [Adam] skipped the display and just used the Arduino’s USB output to display speed measurements on his laptop.
There are possibilities for error with stroboscopes. [Adam] discovered that if the stroboscope was flashing at a multiple of the blade’s rotation speed, the blades would appear frozen, and he’d get an erroneous RPM value. Thankfully, [Adam's] Vitamix had asymmetric blades, which made the test a bit easier. He calculated his blades to be spinning at 380 RPS, or 23,000 RPM. Not satisfied with his results, [Adam] brought out Audacity, and ran a spectral analysis of the blender in operation. He found a peak at 378Hz, which was pretty darn close to his previous measurement. Since the blender has a 4 inch blade this all works out to a blade tip speed right around the claimed value of 270 MPH. We’re glad [Adam] found an answer to his blender questions, but our personal favorite blender hack still has to be the V8 blender created by the Top Gear crew. [via HackerNews]
Trent Brook is a designer based in Sydney who created an elefant-shaped night lamp for his daughter Harpa (1 and a half years old). It has evolved from a small paper origami elephant with blinking LEDs, to a large 3-d printed elephant lamp shade with Wifi controlled RGB LEDs, microphone, speaker, and a custom designed iPad application to teach her about colour:
The electronics are driven by an Arduino MEGA 2560 microcontroller with ethernet shield for network control. Connected to the board is a 50cm 5V RGB addressable LED strip with 30 LEDs, a 3.3V microphone module for sound detection, and an 8ohm speaker for playing back generated ‘white-noise’ audio. Total cost for the all the electronics was less than $100.
Check the details of this cute project on his page on Behance.
I recently put an old laptop in my room as an XBMC computer. However, whenever I wanted to switch the content that was playing, I would have to drag myself out of my warm bed to change the content on the computer. I searched far and wide for a glitch […]
To celebrate the new littleBits ArduinoAtHeart Module, littleBits has partnered with Arduino for a huge give away!
Entering is easy, just sign up on this page for your chance to win an incredible littleBits + Arduino collection. One lucky winner will receive a littleBits Deluxe Kit, littleBits Arduino Starter Bundle, and Arduino Starter Kit. All together a $400 value!
The contest started Monday, June the 9th and runs through June 22nd, so enter soon!
The winner will be announced on or before June 27th.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of examples around the Intertubes of an Arduino generating a VGA video output. The Arduino isn’t the fastest chip by far, and so far, all of these VGA generation techniques have peaked out at lower resolutions if you want to control individual pixels.[PK] has an interesting technique to generate 640×480 VGA at 60 frames per second without overclocking. It’s hacky, it’s ugly, but surprisingly, it actually works.
The VGA standard of 640×480 @ 60 fps requires pixels to be clocked out at 25.175 MHz, and the ATMega chips found in Arduinos top out at 20 MHz. [PK] wanted to generate VGA signals without overclocking, He did this by doubling the clock frequency with digital logic. The ATMega generates a clock, an inverter delays that clock so it is 90 degrees out of phase, and the two clocks are XORed, doubling clock output of the micro. It produces a very ugly square wave at 32 MHz – an error of 27% compared to the VGA spec. Somehow it still works.
With a hilariously out of spec clock, the rest of the project was pulled together from [Nick Gammon]‘s VGA library, a 16×16 font set, and a project from [lft]. Video below.
Last March RS Components, in collaboration with RobotChallenge, launched the Hack the Arduino Robot competition.
Jacob Glueck submitted a great hack for the Arduino Robot:
“A couple of years ago, I built an Arduino-powered shirt-folding machine which folds clothes. Using the Arduino robot from the RobotChallenge, I will build a device to remove folded clothes from the machine and to stack them. My idea is special because it will involve two Arduinos (the Arduino Uno in the shirt folder, and the Arduino Robot) which will have to communicate, and because it will be very useful. The robot will solve the real life problem of laundry folding by making the task easier and faster and by doing so nicely; the robot will use a custom-designed gripper to transport garments while keeping them perfectly folded.”
On his blog you can look at the pictures of the construction phase , and below watch the video of the final project:
Instructables user Beaconsfield posted a great project of a suit controlled by Arduino Micro, lighting up EL wires when the wearer starts to walk and lights them up completely when the wearer runs or dances:
Most of the time EL wire is used as is, with manual on/off control. However, I wanted to control it with an Arduino, so it would react to results from a sensor. This motion-activated suit flashes when the wearer starts to walk and lights up completely when the wearer runs. Perfect for those late-night runs! (or dance parties – it lights up when the wearer moves, and this includes dancing)
The suit itself is a set of zip-up coveralls decorated with EL wire and controlled via an Arduino Micro. An accelerometer monitors the wearer’s motion and sends that data to the Arduino.
In 19 steps you can make yours: follow the instructions.
