Supercapacitors are intriguing power sources, and while they don’t hold as much total energy as a battery, they can store and release charges in an instant. To take advantage of this interesting properly, Mike Rigsby created the ‘Little Flash‘ rover.
This device uses a pair of continuous rotation-modded servos to move about for roughly 20 minutes. It’s controlled by an Arduino Uno, and employs over-current detection as well as a bump switch to keep it from getting stuck.
The coolest feature, however, is that it’s powered by a bank of three 350 farad supercaps in series. The capacitor setup allows it to charge in seconds, though with a current flow of nearly 50 amps, charging experimentation wisely took place with Rigsby some distance away!
A few months ago, maker Fabian Mazza created a CD ROM plotter for his daughters. While the three-year-old loves it, the eight-year-old thought it was too small. Rather than giving up—or building a CNC machine from scratch—he cleverly constructed a new plotter out of a Smith Corona electric typewriter.
Since this device is designed to control the X and Y positions of a writing implement using steppers, it gave him everything he needed for CNC use via an Arduino Uno and GRBL shield.
For better resolution, he added gear reduction to the carriage stepper salvaged from an old scanner. Z-axis movement is done using parts from a DVD-ROM to control whether the pen lowered onto the paper or retracted.
YouTuber Tom Stanton built a trebuchet about a year ago. Now, in order to figure out just how high it can toss something, he designed a custom altitude tracking device in the form of an oversize golf ball.
An Arduino Nano is squeezed inside this sphere, along with a battery, an altimeter, an accelerometer, and even a small servo. The altimeter is used for primary height measurement, while the accelerometer detects launches. A servo then deploys a parachute four seconds later to keep the electronics safe.
As it turns out, the trebuchet is able to fling the ball in the air 60 meters. While impressive, per Stanton’s discussion, it may not be as efficient as you might suspect! Be sure to check out the project in the video below!
While most cameras use an array of sensors to quickly capture an image, Niklas Roy presents a different take on things with his Flying Pixel Portrait Camera.
This installation invites participants to place their head under a shroud for nearly a minute and a half, while a computer-controlled projector scans one’s face pixel by pixel. Reflected light levels are recorded with a single light-dependent resistor (LDR) via an Arduino flashed with Firmata, allowing it to interface with the Processing sketch that runs the device without any extra software.
The results are 50×50 black and white photos. It’s also possible to produce color images, which means triple the wait time—and a bit more noise.
The Flying Pixel Portrait Camera uses a video beamer, a single photo resistor, an Arduino and a PC for taking photos of people’s faces. The beamer ‘scans’ the image by projecting a small white square onto a person’s face inside an otherwise completely dark chamber. While the projected square slowly moves over the entire face, the photo resistor captures the reflected luminosities. This generates a proportional analog electric signal which is digitized by an Arduino and transmitted to the PC. As the PC also controls the position of the projected square, it can now construct an image based on the different brightness values that it receives, one pixel at a time.
Creators keep coming up with new clock designs, and while you might think that every new possibility has been exhausted, Christine Thompson has proved this assumption wrong once again with her “VFD Trilateral Clock.“
This Arduino Uno-powered device employs a stepper motor to rotate a triangular prism shape with scales for hours and minutes on one side, temperature in Celsius and Fahrenheit on the other, and humidity and pressure on the third surface.
The geometric scale travels in 120-degree steps, causing each face to line up with a pair of IN-13 Nixie tubes on either side. These linear tubes are then used to indicate time and environmental conditions in a beautiful bell jar display, as seen at around 3:30 in the video below.
While waiting for the delivery of parts for another project I decided to push ahead with this project. At its heart is two IN-13M Nixie tubes. These tubes are designed to provide a linear scale between maximum and minimum points using an illuminated column. The project uses two of these IN-13M, three wire Nixie tubes to show, time (Hours and Minutes), temperature (Celsius and Fahrenheit), Humidity (percentage), and Pressure (millibars).
At this point I would like to thank Dr. Scott M. Baker for his great web site, which provided me with all the information I needed to get these Nixie tubes to work. In particular the Current Regulator as displayed and detailed on his web site.
The project uses a BME280 sensor to determine the temperature, pressure and humidity and RTC clock to monitor time. As the system needs to display six different values it was necessary to construct a rotating central display which showed these values against six scales. In order to achieve this an equilateral triangle of wood was fashioned, each side showing two sets of values. A stepper motor was mounted under the top platform and this motor rotates through 120 degrees in time for the next set of values to be displayed on the two Nixie tubes.
Consider all the tools that modify how light is transmitted and received: lasers direct light in a tightly focused beam and telescopes let us focus on an area far away. While there are certainly ways to modify sound, these techniques are not nearly as developed as their light counterparts.
With hopes of changing that, researchers from the University of Sussex and the University of Bristol have been working with metamaterials—normal materials like plastic, paper, wood or rubber with an internal structure designed to manipulate sound waves—to build acoustic lenses.
The team demonstrated the first dynamic metamaterial device with the zoom objective of a varifocal for sound, as well as create a collimator capable of transmitting sound as a directional beam from a standard speaker.
The lenses are attached to the collimator, and can be used to direct sound from a speaker or two can be employed together to construct an adjustable focus system. Focal length is regulated by the distance between the two lenses, which is controlled by an Arduino Nano and a single stepper motor mounted to an adjustable rail.
That’s a lot to unpack, but suffice it to say, all this stems from [Tom]’s obvious appreciation for physics. Where most of us would be satisfied with tossing a ball into the air and estimating the height to solve the classic kinematic equations from Physics 101, [Tom] decided that more extreme means were needed.
Having a compound trebuchet close at hand, a few simple mods were all it took to launch projectiles more or less straight up. The first payload was to be rocket-shaped, but that proved difficult to launch. So [Tom] 3D-printed an upsized golf ball and packed it with electronics to record the details of its brief ballistic flight. Aside from an altimeter, there’s a small servo controlled by an Arduino and an accelerometer. The servo retracts a pin holding the two halves of the ball together, allowing a parachute to deploy and return the package safely to Earth. The video below shows some pretty exciting launches, the best of which reached over 60 meters high.
Arduino's Nano line will soon welcome four new products. They're all small boards like the classic one, making Nano a family of small boards meant for compact projects. All the new boards boast low energy consumption and processors more powerful than what the classic has. Even better, they're all pretty affordable: the most basic entry called Nano Every, which you can use for "everyday" projects and can replace the classic Nano, will even set you back as little as $9.90.
Arduino's Nano line will soon welcome four new products. They're all small boards like the classic one, making Nano a family of small boards meant for compact projects. All the new boards boast low energy consumption and processors more powerful than what the classic has. Even better, they're all pretty affordable: the most basic entry called Nano Every, which you can use for "everyday" projects and can replace the classic Nano, will even set you back as little as $9.90.
Constrained builds are often the most fun. Throw an artificial limit into the mix, like time limiting your effort or restricting yourself to what’s on hand, and there’s no telling what will happen.
[bitluni] actually chose both of those constraints for this ping pong ball LED video display, and the results are pretty cool, even if the journey was a little rough. It seems like using sheet steel for the support of his 15 x 20 Neopixel display was a mistake, at least in hindsight. A CNC router would probably have made the job of drilling 300 holes quite a bit easier, but when all you have is a hand drill and a time limit, you soldier on. Six strings of Neopixels fill the holes, a largish power supply provides the 18 or so amps needed, and an Arduino knock-off controls the display. The ping pong ball diffusers are a nice touch, even if punching holes in them cost [bitluni] a soldering iron tip or two. The display is shown in action in the video below, mostly with scrolling text. If we may make a modest suggestion, a game of Pong on a ping pong ball display might be fun.
