Fifteen students from Master degree of ECV Aquitaine  under the direction of Tazas Project - an artistic group run by Guillaume Beinat and Alexandre Suné –  created and shared with us a smart board game called “Web World War”.

The goal is simple: survive a computer virus that has infected your machine and, throughout the game, the player should build a strategy  to win this virtual war.

The game runs on Arduino and is composed by a screenprinted board connected to any mobile device plugged on a local WiFi connection. Take a look at the video:

Last March, during Arduino Day in Zaragoza, four guys met for the first time and  then decided to participate to the Nasa Challenge collaborating to the project made by Carlos Sicilia Til in the previews months:

OpenCuriosity is an open source, exomars rover (1:5 scale) with Arduino as main controller, based on the NASA Curiosity Rover. It contains a set of Arduino boards and sensors. The general public will be allowed to use these Arduinos and sensors for their own creative purposes while they are in space. All the people will be allowed to integrate their project in the robot, and the data gathered will be available on the internet in order to share this information with the general public for educational, science or other purposes. We want to provide affordable space exploration for everyone!

The robot designed by the Aragonese team is now among the finalists of the NASA contest!

Read the details of the story on El Pais.

If you are anything like [Antoine], you would love to be able to control your PC with a simple hand-held remote control from anywhere in your house. [Antoine] wrote in to tell us about his wireless computer remote that emulates a USB keyboard, making it suitable for any device that uses a USB keyboard.

His blog post is very well written and contains a ton of design information and background on the project. He initially wanting to easily control his PC’s music from anywhere in his house without needing to be within line of site of his computer. The end result is a very handy remote that can be used to change music, video, and even launch applications on his computer. The system consists of a base station for his remote that connects to the computer and acts as a USB keyboard, and the remote itself. The base station uses V-USB on an Arduino to interface with the computer, and VirtualWire to handle the wireless protocol for the remote. For those of you who don’t know about VirtualWire (now superseded by RadioHead), it is a very cool Arduino library that lets you easily use raw wireless interfaces (also called vanilla wireless interfaces).

Without going into too much detail here (be sure to see the actual post for more information), the remote itself was redesigned after the initial proof of concept to maximize battery life. The final power consumption is very impressive, resulting in a battery life of more than two years! This remote system is very well put together and contains many aspects that can easily be reused for other projects.

Do it yourself garage door openers must be all the rage nowadays. We just got word of another take on this popular idea. [Giles] was commissioned by his friend to find a way to control the friend’s garage door using a smart phone. The request was understandable, considering the costly garage door remote and the fact that the buttons on the expensive remote tended to fail after a while. The inspiration for this project came from some YouTube videos of other similar projects. Those projects all paired an Arduino with a Bluetooth headset in order to control the door from a mobile phone. [Giles] understood that while this would get the job done, it wouldn’t be very secure. Bluetooth headsets typically connect to mobile phones using a four digit PIN. Many of them have known default PINs and even if the default is changed, it wouldn’t take very long to guess a four digit PIN. [Giles] knew he had to find a more secure way.

While WiFi was an option, [Giles] decided that having the garage door hooked up to the internet would likely be a security risk, even if it did offer some potential interesting use cases.  He therefore opted to stick with Bluetooth, but decided to use the Seedstudio Bluetooth shield instead of a basic headset. The electronics are relatively simple. [Giles] simply plugged the Bluetooth shield into an Arduino Uno. [Giles] did have one problem with the Bluetooth shield though. The Bluetooth module did not accept many standard AT commands. He needed a way to force a disconnect of a mobile device if it failed authentication. After digging around, he discovered that the module had some extra exposed pads that he could likely use to accomplish that goal. The only problem was that they were expecting a 3.3V signal, and the Arduino works at 5V. The solution was simple. He setup a basic voltage divider using two resistors. This lowered the 5V signal from the Arduino to the required 3.3V. This provides the communication functionality to the mobile phone. He then realized that he could use a simple 12V automotive relay to control the garage door. To control the relay, he used the Freetronics relay control shield. The end result is a relatively simple stack of shields hooked up to a relay.

For the smart phone interface, [Giles] started out by trying to write a native Android application. Having little experience in Android development, he soon realized that it was going to take him longer than anticipated to get anything usable this way. He then decided to use SL4A. SL4A provides a scripting environment for Android and supports several different scripting languages. [Giles] was then able to write a Python script that can be executed on the smart phone. Many people would be tempted to write a really simple script that would just open the door and connect without any real thought about security. After all, this is a one-off obscure garage door opener. Security through obscurity! [Giles] is smarter than that.

He instead implemented a challenge handshake authentication mechanism between the Python script and the Arduino. This would ensure that users are authenticated before permitting commands to be executed, and also help prevent replay attacks. The process works like this. First the smart phone connects to the Arduino. The Arduino then generates a pseudo-random string and calculates the expected response, based on a pre-shared key. The phone then receives the string and sends back the appropriate response. If it doesn’t match, the Arduino disconnects the phone. If it does match, the phone then sends back a request for a different pseudo-random command challenge string. Once the phone receives this new string, it is able to use that string in conjunction with a second pre-shared key to generate a one-time use command. Assuming it was calculated correctly, the Arduino will then run the command to open or close the door. If it doesn’t match the phone gets disconnected. All of this is to help prevent replay attacks. Any attacker watching the airwaves would not be able to simply record the signals or commands and play them back. This is because every time the authentication and commands are transmitted, they must be different based on the pseudo-random seed.

While everything seems to work mostly fine, the Arduino tends to crash after about six door cycles. [Giles] believes this may be caused by the MD5 library he is using but has so far been unsuccessful in trying to fix this bug. He also thinks his Python script is messy and somewhat unstable. He’s decided to publish his programs to the internet in hopes that someone else may have the time and drive to figure out what’s going on.

Read more on MAKE

Imagine this. A phone on a nearby desk starts ringing. No one is around to pick it up, so you decide that you will be a good Samaritan and answer the phone. You are greeted by a slightly creepy robotic female voice asking you to complete a simple survey. Having nothing else to do, you go ahead and run through the telephone survey. As you start answering the questions, things start to get a bit… weird. The robot voice doesn’t like your answers. She actually disagrees with you, and she does NOT like being interrupted. Now she’s getting sassy with you! What is going on here?

Most likely you are the latest victim of Insert Customer Feedback Here, [Charles'] art installation. You see, that is no ordinary telephone. [Charles] actually removed the guts of an old telephone and replaced them with an Arduino. The Arduino periodically rings the phone, waiting for someone to answer. Once the phone is off the hook, the Arduino uses a Wave shield to start playing back the scripted audio files. All of the text-to-speech files and the various hold music files are played back with the wave shield. The Arduino is also hooked up to the 1, 2, 3, and # keys of the telephone keypad in order to read back the user’s responses.

From here on out the program acts as a sort of “choose your own adventure” game. The program takes different paths and responds in different ways depending on how the user answers the questions. Generally speaking, it will get more “irritated” towards the user if it doesn’t “like” your answers, otherwise it will get less irritated. The hold music will even change to become more or less aggressive.

It’s easy to draw comparisons to Portal’s GLaDOS due to the robotic female voice and to the narrator from The Stanley Parable for the “choose your own adventure” feeling. In fact, if GLaDOS and The Stanley Parable had offspring, this would surely be it. This project brings that same type of silly sarcastic humor to a different medium and it does it well. Be sure to watch the video of the system in action below. It really starts to get interesting around the 1:15 mark.

Tangible Orchestra is a project by Picarøøn, a collaboration of artists Rebecca Gischel and Sebastian Walter, combining electronic and classical music perceived very individually in a three-dimensional space.

Single units are triggered by people in close proximity and play a unique instrument, with the collection of individual instruments gathering as people congregate in the project space, eventually creating a complete musical work. As electronic music is usually composed and arranged at the mixing desk, the installation creates the illusion of an orchestra playing a musical piece that relies heavily on digitally created sounds and therefore could normally not be perceived this way.

Tangible Orchestra consists of seven individual cylinders that play their unique instrument if people in close proximity are identified by a complex system of sensors. Each column is an independent, interactive sound and computer unit that has the ability to play a separate instrumental track and a sensory system which reacts dynamically to the proximity of its participants.

Essentially, this enables each member of the audience to become a musician and together they constitute a musical ensemble or orchestra. This is achieved because depending on the proximity of each participant to any particular cylinder and the number of participants involved, the range, contribution and volume of the music contained within each cylinder varies proportionately. Therefore, the experience is guaranteed to be different every time; orchestrated by the participants both individually and as part of an ensemble.

The installation uses 112 ultrasonic sensors controlled by Arduino Mega and only if  enough people gather and scatter evenly across the project space, the installation evolves to its greatest potential and the complete work of art can be perceived:

Human interaction within Tangible Orchestra is made possible by 16 ultrasonic sensors on the inside of each cylinder, granting a 360 degree field of view. The sensors are run by one integrated microprocessor per cylinder, evaluating and comparing the readings of all sensors making very accurate assessments.
To avoid interference between ultra sonic waves of different cylinders, the microprocessors run consecutively rather than simultaneously. All microprocessors are controlled, assessed and coordinated by one Arduino Mega.
The programming language Processing is used to communicate with Arduino and consequently with the microprocessors in each cylinder. It is programmed to coordinate the microprocessors, so that their sensors cast their rays consecutively as with 112 ultrasonic sensors operating at the same time, there would be a substantial risk of interference and acoustic shadow misreading. It also assesses the data coming from Arduino and, after verification, generates the output. Is a person detected within the bubble of a cylinder, Processing receives the digital information as an input from Arduino and stops muting the respective instrument which then joins into the melody. Processing also reads the values of each instrumental track to calculate the digital signals for the LEDs and controls the LED stripes inside of the cylinder.
Each instrument is played by a separate speaker which is located in the base of each cylinder. Multiple sound outputs were realised by using several external sound cards together with the minim library by Damien Di Fede. When an instrument plays, the beats of the audible track are analysed and consequently values are calculated to create an equalizer-like light beam. The outcome is transferred via Arduino to a transformer, which converts the 5V Arduino signal into an 230V output operating 192 LEDs per cylinder. Another transformer converts 5V Arduino signals into 12V output powering LED stripes inside of each cylinder as soon as they are activated.

The first exhibition of the Tangible Orchestra was at Royal Mile, Edinburgh  this May 2014. Check their website for next events.

We are delighted to share a video about the light installation performed by Arduino Verkstad in Jakarta in 2013. 15200 LEDs in 3800 groups adding up to 1900 Chinese lanterns controlled by 40 Arduino Mega boards with a specially design shield to handle communications and a lot of manual work.

Take a look at the shorter version of video below focusing more on the results of the installation, or the full length directly on youtube.

Enjoy!

Today we want to introduce you to a new Arduino at Heart Partner launching on Kickstarter this week: Hummingbird Duo is an electronics kit designed to be fun and educational for a fourth grader, a high school student, a college engineering student, or an adult maker.

Hummingbird Duo  creates a bridge between making and classroom education combining craft materials, electronic components and drag &drop programming. Part of Hummingbird’s mission is, in fact, to explode common conceptions of how robotics can be used in K-12 education:

 We have designed several levels of learning into the Hummingbird experience. Instead of a steep learning curve, learners go up a staircase where each step increases skills and where mastering each step allows one to use the Hummingbird in a new and more interesting way.

The kit was developed by BirdBrain Technologies, a Pittsburgh, PA firm founded by Tom Lauwers in 2010 to commercialize educational technology developed by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute’s CREATE lab and since 2012, they have pledged 1% of their net profits to the Computer Science Teacher’s Association.

Support them on Kickstarter!

Gleb Kanunnikau is  a designer and trainer based in Minsk. He is part of a group of volunteers running a meetup group and an open laboratory bringing together people from the tech and education/media and experimental, hackerspace scene trying to solve a few very local and very practical problems that don’t seem to be getting a lot of attention from the tech community.  Their initiative is focused on providing educational tools for children and adults with vision disabilities and is organized as an open laboratory with contribution from Minsk hackerspace (the first in Belarus), Belarusian meetup.by community, and monogroup.by - community of architects and visual artists.

Gleb wrote me a long email and explained the aims and the context of their amazing work:

The problem is that schools for the visually impaired aren’t getting new books with Braille type and the education system for these kids is stuck in the 1970s, only now it is much worse (at least in the USSR there were factories and employment options for these people, as well as city districts with disabilities-friendly housing). They are the forgotten, invisible people – no textbooks means there are few people able to read Braille books – and they just can’t leave their apartments nor get education or a job.

Luckily, Ludmila Skradal, who works with these children on a regular basis as a tour guide and a teacher, had met a few architects, as well as people from the first Belrusian hackerspace and we’ve organized a hackathon a year ago.

We are building the first tactile museum exhibition for these children (but also for adults) on history/ethnography/architecture.

This is a sound/tactile installation that uses technology but isn’t tech-centric and solves a practical problem. We are combining hand-built architectural plastic models of buildings and elements printed with a 3d printer (open source mendel prusa, with Arduino inside) for small-scale columns and ornaments etc.

The models serve as instructional materials and partly substitute for the missing handbooks on history and culture that the children in schools for the visually impaired are not receiving currently.
The kids say that these architecture lessons were the first time they’ve been able to even imagine what buildings in cities “look like” above ground level. Things that were outside of their reach, like the clock tower on the city hall building, rooftops, column capitals were suddenly accessible – they were invited to touch the real city hall walls during the field trip to feel their texture and then they explored the model, and hearing the sound of the real city hall clock they examined it in the model.

The current goal is to build a museum exhibition unified by narrative and allowing self-exploration within the space, using Arduino for controlling the exhibits.

We hope that 3d printed objects could work as handbooks on history, culture, art. Maybe we’ll even print DNA segments that can be combined as like lego puzzles – so that kids can try to put together a DNA chain out of aminoacid plastic blocks to understand how the spiral of amino-acids looks like. There are many possibilities.

If you want to get in touch and know more about their project, visit the website.