While building a robot (nearly) from scratch isn’t easy, it needn’t be a lengthy process.  Is it possible to build a bot in a single day? With some musical motivation (a 10 hour loop of the A-Team theme song), [Tyler Bletsch] answers with a resounding ‘yes’ in the shape of his little yellow robot that he built for a local robotics competition.

Designing and fabricating on the fly, [Bletsch] used Sketchup to design the chassis, and OpenSCAD to model the wheels while the former was being 3D printed. Anticipating some structural weakness, he designed another version that could bolt to wood if the original failed, but the addition of some metal support rods provided enough stability. Mouse pad material gave the wheels ample traction. An Arduino with the L298 control module receives input via an HC-06 Bluetooth board. Eight AA batteries provide 12V of power to two Nextrox mini 12V motors with an integrated voltmeter to measure battery life.

Lacking a proper drive belt provided a bit of a challenge, so [Bletsch] — in an ingenious expression of resourcefulness — cobbled together an effective solution with some superglue and 3D printing filament packaging; the heat pressed parts proved to be strong and flexible. Waste not maker skills in action!

Arduino code was borrowed from a TerrorBytes student — the organization hosting the competition — and adapted by [Bletsch]. A python script combined with a joystick emulator he made in Google App inventor and some control equations from WPILiB allowed him to control his new robot from his phone.

Whether they are expressing your maker skills, assisting with your luggage or with your board meetings, robots can be a valuable inclusion in everyday life — or just a fun way to spend one day of it.

Good news everyone. Due to many requests from our community we agreed to extend the contest to January 31st 2016.

You have some more days to submit your ideas to the World’s Largest Arduino Maker Challenge,  win one of the one thousand Arduino and Genuino MKR1000 and a fully-funded (up to $1,500) trip to Maker Faire Shenzhen, New York, Bay Area or Rome; a chance to present your creation at the Microsoft and the Arduino & Genuino booths; a professional video production of you and your creation; and a whopping $500 gift certificate to Adafruit.

Watch Massimo Banzi’s video presenting the contest.

Keep dreaming new ideas and have fun!

We are excited to announce Arduino Wifi Shield 101 developed with Atmel is now available for purchase on the Arduino Store US (49.90$).

Arduino WiFi Shield 101 is a powerful IoT shield with crypto-authentication that connects your Arduino or Genuino board to the internet wirelessly. Connecting it to a WiFi network is simple, no further configuration in addition to the SSID and the password are required. The WiFI library allows you to write sketches which connect to the internet using the shield.

The shield is based on the Atmel SmartConnect-WINC1500 module, compliant with the IEEE 802.11 b/g/n standard. The WINC1500 module provided is a network controller capable of both TCP and UDP protocols.  The main feature is an hardware encryption/decryption security protocol provided by the ATECC508A CryptoAuthentication chip that is an ultra secure method to provide key agreement for encryption/decryption, specifically designed for the IoT market.

Last year, Massimo Banzi introduced the shield:

“In this increasingly connected world, the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 will help drive more inventions in the IoT market. Expanding our portfolio of Arduino extensions, this new shield can flawlessly connect to any modern Arduino board giving our community more options for connectivity, along with added security elements to their creative projects.”

The WiFi Shield 101 is the first Arduino product fully supporting SSL and all the communication between your board and our secured server. With the power of the Arduino Zero and the WiFi Shield 101 it is possible to make secure IoT applications simply and just using the Arduino Language.

A working example and instructions on how to get started are available on Arduino Cloud, a work-in-progress project that gives you access to a pre-configured MQTT server for your IoT sketches using only your Arduino account. More examples and features will be available in the next months.

Feel like knowing more about the shield? Explore the  Getting Started guide.

Creative Mornings is a series of talks given by creative types all over the world and recorded for everyone to see online.

Last May, 22-year-old Nerea de la Riva Iriepa, one of the worlds most promising young talents in Robotics gave an inspiring talk about her journey in the world of robotics, her discovery of Arduino, how to work in team and also how to deal with a male-dominated robot world.

She is currently student of Electronic Communications at the University of Alcalá in Madrid and also an intern at Arduino in Malmö where she is creating educational content for beginners and finding ways to make coding easier for young users.

In September we published a review of the new Freetronics OLED Display module for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, and inside that review was the details for a simple competition – send in a postcard to go in the draw for a free OLED display. Today marks the end of the competition, so we’ve put all the cards in a box, shuffled them around a bit and selected one winner:

Congratulations to Jorge from Portugal. Thanks to all those who entered, and for the curious here are the submitted cards:

Personally I’d like to thank all those who enjoyed the spirit of the competition and sent in a card, and of course Freetronics for the OLED Display:

We hope to run more competitions in the future and also offer product discounts for our readers – so be sure to read all of a post when they appear. And if you made it this far – check out my new book “Arduino Workshop” from No Starch Press.

In the meanwhile have fun and keep checking into tronixstuff.com. Why not follow things on twitter, Google+, subscribe  for email updates or RSS using the links on the right-hand column? And join our friendly Google Group – dedicated to the projects and related items on this website. Sign up – it’s free, helpful to each other –  and we can all learn something.

The post Freetronics OLED Display Competition Winner appeared first on tronixstuff.

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Baobot is my team's entry into the AFRON Design Competition. It is a 2-wheeled design intended for classroom use as a way to teach middle and high school students about electronics, programming, and robotics.

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This is the LMR robot for the today's Campus-Party Berlin. Its purpose in life is to help children if they are afraid of monsters in the night. The Monster Catcher stays under the bed and makes noises to catch the monsters...

The Monster Catcher is a collective work of Drakuni, Antonio, Isotope, TinHead, Frits, RobotFreak, Lumi and Francisco.

The Making

Here some impressions from the making.

Frits, Nils and Antonio elaborate on the ideas. It is important that it is a very easy-to-make robot that does not need rocket science software and hardware.

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Samuel Cox, a maker who defined himself as a mix of “design, ideas and technology“, has invented a brand-new competition for digital citizens: Digilympics.

From his website:

2012 is not only the year of the Olympics, but also the launch of the first ever ‘Digilympics’, a twitter-powered race for sporting success where you determine the outcome. Four Lego athletes move down a physical racetrack as fans Tweet their team to move them further towards the finish line.

Starting today (07/18/2012), the Digilympics will be a two-week event as the four teams – UK, US, Canada and Japan – compete for the prestigious Digilympics Gold Medal.

The competition is open to anyone on the web, allowing them to Tweet their team to success using one of four unique Twitter accounts (UK_Digi, US_Digi, CA_Digi &JP_Digi). Tweets in support of a particular account will move that country’s contestant physically along a running track.

After each race, the team victories are recorded and contestants go back to the starting line. At the end of the week the team who has won the most races will be given the Gold Medal online at digilympics.com

Under the hood, this funny race is enabled by a Processing sketch that seeks for Twitter replies on each account: a new reply triggers a motor-shield equipped Arduino board, which provides the movement to each athlet.

More information can be found here. And… let’s start twitting for your favourite team! ^^

[Via: Samuel Cox's Digilympics]

A stick has been the traditional constant companion for the old people. Hence, it makes sense to hack some intelligence into it to make their life better. How about a stick that tells you when you have reached the destination? Or which tells you when to avoid an obstacle? Or better, about the various new attractions that are near the place that they are taking a walk through?

A team from Syracuse University senior, lead by Hingham resident Laura Hogan, won first place in the Senior Design Project in Electrical & Computer Engineering for designing a computerized walking stick.

Hogan and her teams’ computerized walking stick was designed to use Radio Frequency Identification tags to alert users when they have reached their destination, and also to inform them of what attractions are nearby. With the use of sensors, GU|tra will also be able to inform the user when there is an obstacle near them. The turn by turn directions along with the alerts for impending collisions will be delivered to the user using a headphone set, which will be connected to a mobile phone. The mobile phone will receive information from the sensors and RFID’s, with the help of an Arduino Microcontroller, and then announce the appropriate commands based on the information it receives. This will be done using a signal transmitted through the USB connection on the Android phone.

Via:[Hingham]

Arduino users are getting younger! Davis Fortenberry, Age 10 designed his own robot and won The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, South eastern competition, in Orlando. He competed with a lot of college level teams and had a robot that was equally competent.

Davis, who has tinkered with robots since he was 5, built his “davibot” in a week, starting with an m3pi (“a robot in itself, really”) as the base.

He added an Arduino (Italian microcomputer that tells the base unit whether to go left, right, straight ahead), then designed components for measuring contest specifics: voltage, capacitance, temperature and waveform.

He attends the Tennessee Virtual Academy an online approved school.

[Via: Commercial appeal]