Virtually everyone has played Simon, that electronic memory game from the 70s, but who among us has actually beaten it? That was the goal of [Ben] and his 7-year-old daughter, and after a year of work, an Arduino, some servos, and a few Lego bricks, they’ve finally done it.

Instead of the large original Simon, [Ben] is using a key chain version of the game: much smaller, and much easier to build a device to sense the lights and push the buttons. The arms are made from Lego bricks, held up with rubber bands and actuated with two servos mounted on a polycarbonate cutting board.

To detect Simon’s lights, [Ben] connected four phototransistors to an Arduino. The Arduino records the pattern of lights on the Simon, and activates the Lego arms in response to that pattern. [Ben]‘s version of Simon has only a maximum of 32 steps in the final sequence, but that still means each game takes 528 button presses – and a lot of annoying beeps – to complete.

Videos below.

You don't have to be a forward-thinking fashion designer or scientist to produce tech-savvy clothing. Need evidence? Just look at the smart hoodie developed by New York University grad students Alina Balean and Rucha Patwardhan. They've integrated a cellular-equipped Arduino board and switches into the wearable, letting you send messages through discreet movements; you can cover your head to text your mom, or roll up your sleeve to post on Facebook.

Filed under: Wearables

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Via: The Verge

Source: Alina Balean

Have you ever wondered how far your dog actually runs when you take it to the park? You could be a standard consumer and purchase a GPS tracking collar for $100 or more, or you could follow [Becky Stern's] lead and build your own simple but effective GPS tracking harness.

[Becky] used two FLORA modules for this project; The FLORA main board, and the FLORA GPS module. The FLORA main board is essentially a small, sewable Arduino board. The GPS module obviously provides the tracking capabilities, but also has built-in data logging functionality. This means that [Becky] didn’t need to add complexity with any special logging circuit. The GPS coordinates are logged in a raw format, but they can easily be pasted into Google Maps for viewing as demonstrated by [Becky] in the video after the break. The system uses the built-in LED on the FLORA main board to notify the user when the GPS has received a lock and that the program is running.

The whole system runs off of three AAA batteries which, according to [Becky], can provide several hours of tracking. She also installed a small coin cell battery for the GPS module. This provides reserve power for the GPS module so it can remember its previous location. This is not necessary, but it provides a benefit in that the GPS module can remember it’s most recent location and therefore discover its location much faster.

How can you not be interested in a project that uses load cells, Bluetooth, a Raspberry Pi, and Twitter. Even for those of our readers without a cat, [Scott's] tweeting litter box is worth the read.

Each aspect of this project can be re-purposed for almost any application. The inexpensive load cells, which available from eBay and other retailers, is used to sense when a cat is inside the litter box. Typically sensors like the load cell (that contain a strain gauge) this use a Wheatstone bridge, which is very important for maximizing the sensitivity of resistive sensor. The output then goes to a HX711, which is an ADC specifically built for load cells. A simple alternative would be using an instrumentation amplifier and the built-in ADC of the Arduino. Now, the magic happens. The weight reading is transmitted via an HC-06 Bluetooth module to a Raspberry Pi. Using a simple Perl script, the excreted weight, duration, and the cat’s resulting body weight is then tweeted!

Very nice work! This is a well thought out project that we could see being expanded to recognize the difference between multiple cats (or any other animal that goes inside).

“Turbo-gusli” or “Gusli-samogudy” is a russian folk bot made by Moscow media-artist, musician and engineer of strange-sounding mechanisms – Dmitry Morozov. It’s basically a portable electro-acoustic orchestra inspired by ”Gusli-samogudy”, a self-playing gusli, the oldest Russian multi-string plucked instrument, and very common in old russian fairy tales.

The system works in 3 different modes: when it plays algorithmically from Pure Data patch, when it’s controlled by Emotiv EPOC EEG interface and in MIDI mode (all of them using Pduino library and custom patch in Pure Data).

It runs on 2 Arduino Uno – mainly for interacting with the computer using standard FIRMATA and secondly only to control the stepper motor  which is playing random bass notes when it’s triggered by the first Arduino.

Marco Schwarz is an electrical engineer and passionate about home automation. He wrote us some weeks ago to present his work on the Arduino Yún:

I was recently playing with the Arduino Yún for a whole set of new projects, and I discovered a sketch that implements a REST API for the Arduino Yún. We’ll see in more details what a REST API is, but for now let’s say it allows to standardise the communication between your Arduino and the external world via WiFi or Ethernet, and develop complex applications without having to modify your Arduino sketch every time.

So I told myself: why not create one REST API for the CC3000 WiFi chip ? That’s exactly what I did as a weekend project, and I wanted to share it with you. If you want to directly jump to the project files, go over to the GitHub repository of the project.

Keep reading on his blog or watch the video below:

Orbis is a kinetic & lighting  lasercut sculpture controlled by Arduino Mega and created by an engineering design service located in Long Island NY which submitted it to our blog:

Orbis has several unique features and modes of operation not usually seen in Kinetic Art work. There are six specialized lighting modes and two motion modes which are all controlled via two independent Arduino Atmega 2560 control boards.
Orbis was created for a client’s new home who wanted something truly unique. The client specifically requested something which blends the classic look of wood with electronics and mechanics in a simple artistic manner.

It also had to be large enough to highlight a central wall in the home while combining elements of old and new technologies. The client also wanted a separate control box which would allow guests to his home the ability to interact with the Kinetic Sculpture.
In order to create such a unique Kinetic Sculpture and control box, custom 3D models were developed. Once the client approved, these same files were sent out to a laser wood cutting service. Each piece was then hand stained and carefully assembled.

In the picture below you can see the inside of the control box:

More pictures and videos on the project’s website.

Arduino user Cinezaster sent us a project using Node js server on the Arduino Yún to control the lights, heating and some other sensors in the office of Appsaloon, the company where he’s doing an internship.

They already use Node.js for a lot of things and some of them are pretty cool with it.
That’s how they did it:

First of all you need to expand your flash, because there is not enough flash (16 MB) on the Arduino Yún. Sounds reasonable right? Not when you got the Yún for the first time in your hands. Luckily someone wrote this tutorial.

To start with you need to be on the same network to reach the Arduino .
Open your terminal

ssh root@arduino.local

It will ask for a password, which will by default be: ‘arduino’:

Now you can install Node.js on the Yún type :

opkg update
opkg install node

When the install is finished verify it by :

 node -v

It should give you something like this v0.10.28 (it may vary in the future)

Next you have to install the node-serialport package. This is necessary because the Atheros AR9331 needs to communicate with the ATmega32u4.

opkg update
opkg install node-serialport

After this you will need firmata for Node.js. This will control the inputs and outputs of the ATmega32u4.

Normally you would install firmata like this:

npm install firmata

But because the Arduino Yún does not have enough RAM this is ‘not possible’.

Keep reading it on their blog and fork it on Github!

When it comes to home automation, there are a lot of different products out there that all do different things. Many of them are made by different companies, and they don’t often play very well together. This frustration ultimately led [Daniel] to develop his own Python based middleware solution to get these various components to work as a single cohesive system. What exactly did [Daniel] want to control?

First up was the door lock. [Daniel] lives in an apartment building, so there are actually two locks. First, a visitor must be allowed into the building by pressing a button on the intercom system in the apartment. Second, the apartment door has its own dead bolt lock that needs to be opened and closed. [Daniel] was able to control the building’s front door using just a transistor hooked up to an Arduino to simulate the press of the physical button. The original button remains in tact so [Daniel] can still easily “buzz” in a visitor.

The apartment’s dead bolt was a bit trickier. There are off-the-shelf solutions to control a dead bolt, but they are often expensive. [Daniel] built his own solution using a simple servo motor bolted to the door. The servo is controlled by the Arduino which is in turn controlled via two broken intercom buttons that already existed within the apartment. The buttons were originally used to either speak to or listen to a visitor before buzzing them into the building. They had never worked for [Daniel] so he re-purposed them for his own project. The whole DIY door locker is enclosed in a custom-made laser cut wooden box.

Click past the break for the rest of [Daniel's] story.

When it comes to lighting, [Daniel] has a couple of different brands of automated light bulbs in his apartment. One brand has bulbs that are controlled by a radio frequency signal. That brand comes with a converter box that can accept lighting commands via WiFi. It also uses a simple API that allowed [Daniel] to easily control all of the bulbs from his Python code. The second brand of light bulb did not have a simple API. After some searching around, [Daniel] found an open source project called ouimeaux. Ouimeaux is a Python library that allows you to control this particular brand of automated light bulbs. This was perfect for [Daniel] since he was already using Python in his project. With this library it was trivial for him to control the lights from his web interface.

As a proof of concept, [Daniel] also built a custom WiFi enabled power outlet using a SparkCore module. He has an entire separate post dedicated to that project.

For the brain of the system, [Daniel] chose to use a Raspberry Pi. The Pi runs a web server with a Flask based back-end system. Flask allows him to code the website in Python, which meant he could easily write a website that can interact with the various automation components. The Pi can directly communicate with all of the off-the-shelf components using the various Python libraries. For the door lock, the Pi communicates with the Arduino via pySerial. [Daniel] also used Flask OAuth to limit access to the system to only authorized users. Now whenever [Daniel] wants to turn the lights on or unlock the door for a visitor, all he has to do is press a button on a web page.

[via Reddit]

When [Robert] is presented with a challenge, he doesn’t back down. His friend dreamed of reusing some old LED panels by mounting them to the ceiling of the friend’s night club. Each panel consists of a grid of five by five red, green, and blue LEDs for a total of 75 LEDs per panel. It sounded like a relatively simple task but there were a few caveats. First, the controller box that came with the panels could only handle 16 panels and the friend wanted to control 24 of them. Second, the only input device for the controller was an infrared remote. The friend wanted an easy way for DJ’s to control the color of the panels and the infrared remote was not going to cut it. Oh yea, he also gave [Robert] just three weeks to make this happen.

[Robert] started out by building a circuit that could be duplicated to control each panel. The brain of this circuit is an ATtiny2313. For communication between panels, [Robert] chose to go with the DMX protocol. This was a good choice considering DMX is commonly used to control stage lighting effects. The SN75176 IC was chosen to handle this communication. In his haste to get this PCB manufactured [Robert] failed to realize that the LED panels were designed common cathode, as opposed to his 25 shiny new PCB’s which were designed to work with a common anode design. To remedy this, he switched out all of the n-channel MOSFET with p-channel MOSFET. He also spent a couple of hours manually cutting through traces and rewiring the board. After all of this, he discovered yet another problem. The LED’s were being powered from the same 5V source as the microcontroller. This lead to power supply issues resulting in the ATtiny constantly resetting. The solution was to add some capacitors.

Click past the break for more on [Robert's] LED panels.

As for software, [Robert] completely filled the ATtiny’s memory. He used three channels to control red, green, and blue. He added a fourth channel to control pre-designed animation effects such as fading, strobe, and random color. The DIP switches are normally used to set the address of the panel, but there is a second option to put the panel into standalone mode. In this mode, the switches are used to program the panel to perform specific effects with no DMX controller required.

Now that the panels were all designed and functioning, [Robert] still needed a way to control them. He used the laser cutter at Shackspace hackerspace to design the actual panel face and then mounted a bunch of buttons, switches, and potentiometers to it. All of those things were connected to a Teensy3 using perfboard and a hand wired circuit. Another SN75176 IC was used for the DMX communication from the control panel. The control panel allows the DJ to change between different pre-built animation effects, color effects, and also change the speed of the animations to match the speed of the music.