office door hack from Valentin Heun on Vimeo.

MIT Researcher Valentin Heun created the RFID door opener as he was annoyed that he needed both his MIT ID card and a key to gain access to the MIT Media Lab. With this system his RFID-embedded ID card is read by an RFID evaluation shield connected to an Arduino Uno board. His RFID code is approved and a servo opens the door. A laser cut mounting board allows the servo and RFID evaluation shield to be attached to the door’s handle and deadbolt.

The code can be taken from here.

[Via: Lifehacker and colorsaregood.com]

It is a noisy, yet a novel idea. Extremely useful to talk to your near and dear ones while moving around the house doing chores. The arduino controlled two 5V relays with 12 V 40A car relays prove as the base hardware. The control system however, consists of a simple html page with ajax calls to php scripts that sends serial commands to Arduino using this.

The complete know-how along with code can be found here.

[Via: Hackaday]

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Hello everybody,

I am back one year later, with my latest construction Red Dragon biped robot http://letsmakerobots.com/node/27414.

After my second construction, named Red-dragon V2 (humanoid) was too heavy and tall, wasn’t successful, I moved on constructing a new one Humanoid Robot, which I called it Talos.

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G'day everyone. I am not a professional programmer, I have not had any training in C language. Previously I had a lot of support from LMR and learned to write an Arduino Library. Now I am trying to compile a bootloader and need help again. I've installed WinAVR and AVR studio and have been trying to find out how to use them. It seems I need to learn to use a "make" file but I cannot find any good information on how to do this. Most information on the net assumes I am a programmer.

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Tired of dealing with keys to get into his office, Valentin Heun hacked together this door unlocker with a laser-cutter, Arduino, and some bits n’ bobs from SparkFun.  Full design files and parts list can be found on the linked page.

Waterbear is a tool for creating drag-and-drop programming editors for programming languages (like Javascript) that weren’t designed for it.  It has implementations for Javascript and a small subset of C++ customized for Arduino programming.

I looked a little at the Arduino environment, and it looked like it might be an ok transition from Scratch programming (which Waterbear’s interface is modeled on) and programming the Arduino with a text-based editor, particularly for people who can’t type well.  Unfortunately, Waterbear is just a text editor—it does not appear to include the compilation, linking, download, and serial communication of the Arduino environment.  In this it does not include some of the best features of Scratch as a programming environment, where any block of code can be executed directly from the edit window.

I’m not knocking having an editor separate from the Arduino environment, mind you.  My son and I have both found the provided editor in the Arduino environment a bit uncomfortable, and usually use other text editors when we have more to change than one or two typos.  (I use emacs, he has used TextEdit, XCode, and TextWrangler.)

I don’t think that Waterbear will sweep the Arduino community, though.  The number of blocks needed to include substantial parts of the library is huge (at least with the current design), and Waterbear is not well set up for typed variables.  I believe (without strong evidence) that learning the syntax and using a text editor is not a major burden for Arduino programmers, once they have sufficient programming skills to be able to use the Arduino effectively.

The Scratch-like interface is great for a first introduction to programming, but programming the Arduino is not a good choice for that first introduction.  Waterbear might help, slightly, with making the transition from a Scratch-like editing interface to a test-based editing interface, but I don’t think it is worth the trouble.

First off I know very little about programing! But it seems to me that since there are tones of old CPUs around, many simply for the taking.

Why not use these on the larger complex Robots instead using two or three or more MCUs. 

But honestly I use one or two PIC chips on my small tinkerings. But I have larger project that I "think" I can see the CPU as being a much better fit. 

Am I missing something so fundamental that it boarders on the absurd?

Please, any I deas and feedbacks are welcome!

rccubed

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Don’t want to pay for shipping? Check your local RadioShack for availability!

I started designing this controller in December 2011. After 4 months and 2 previous revisions it will finally be shipping out April 2012. I think this is DAGU's best Arduino compatible robot controller yet!

Designed for small robots using small batteries, the Micro Magician is a 3.3V controller running at 8MHz.
Working from 3.6V to 9V means this constroller can run from a single LiPo cell or 3x NiMh batteries.
Reverse polarity protection means no blue smoke if you get your power wires crossed (reverse polarity diode rated at 3A).

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Emily Gertz and Patrick Di Justo, authors of Environmental Monitoring With Arduino (available from Maker Shed and O’Reilly), wrote it to let me know that the book got used as a textbook in the recent NYC Water Hackathon. They’ve got the pictures to prove it, too!

Brooklyn, NY, March 25 — Patrick and I went to the Gowanus Canal to observe the testing of prototype water monitoring devices created at the weekend Water Hackathon. The Gowanus is one of Brooklyn’s more notorious Superfund sites.

We were excited to see that the device being developed by Leif Percifield and the citizen sensor group Don’t Flush Me is based on the water conductivity gadget we devised for Environmental Monitoring With Arduino.

We designed our gadget to test water samples in a controlled setting, such as sitting at your desk with the samples in flasks. They’ve adapted our water probe with little spade terminals, to be more durable in the field. Brilliant!

Slideshow: “Environmental Monitoring With Arduino” goes to the Gowanus Canal!