ArduSat, which stands for “Arduino satellite”, is a recently kickstarted project that aims at developing an open platform usable to emulate space scientists:

Once launched, the ArduSat will be the first open platform allowing the general public to design and run their own space-based applications, games and experiments, steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on-demand, and even broadcast personalized messages back to Earth.

ArduSat will be equipped with several sensors (such as cameras, gyros, accelerometers, GPS and more) packed inside a small cube (the side will be approximately 10 cm long) that can be accessed through a set of Arduinos.

Once in orbit, the ArduSat will be accessible from the ground to flash the required firmware for the experiments and for getting back all the collected information. People interested in performing space experiments will have access to a ground replica of ArduSat explotable to test and debug their code before the actual deployment.

The project is very ambitious, and it is expected that such an open accessible space platform will have a considerable impact on how simple space experiments will be carried out in the forthcoming years, in the case of fundraising success.

You may find the Kickstarter page of the project here.

[Via: Hack A Day and Kickstarter]

Dr. Scott Ananian, from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, conceived an Arduino Leonardo-compatible board especially designed for the OLPC XO laptop, with the goal to cut down its price as much as possible, to foster its adoption even in developing countries. From Scott’s blog:

The board uses mostly through-hole parts, with one exception, and there are only 20 required components for the basic Arduino functionality, costing about $5 (from digikey, quantity 100). It is reasonable for local labor or even older kids to assemble by hand.

The board, named XOrduino, is open hardware (schematics and pcb files can be found on github), and can be directly plugged into the XO’s USB ports, which allowed Scott to save the money required for the USB connector. Moreover, its design has been inspired by other open hardware projects, such as SparkFun’s ATmega32U4 breakout board and SparkFun’s Scratch Sensor Board-compatible PicoBoard.

Scott designed also a second board, which is even cheaper than the first one, called XO Stick:

It’s based on the AVR Stick using the ATtiny85 processor and costs only $1/student. It’s not quite as user-friendly as the Arduino-compatible board, but it can also be used to teach simple lessons in embedded electronics.

A longer description can be found here, while detailed release notes can be found on github.

It’s very exciting to see how open technologies, such as open hardware and open source software, contribute to the way education and creativity can take place around the world, especially regarding their promotion in developing countries.

[Via: Ossblog, OLPC blog, Scott Ananian's blog]

Arduteka en colaboración con Cooking Hacks y Milla Digital del ayuntamiento de Zaragoza han preparado un evento con capacidad para más de 400 personas en uno de los edificios más emblemáticos de la ciudad, el Antiguo Seminario Metropolitano de Zaragoza transformando en una moderna Ciudad Administrativa Municipal y que amablemente han cedido para organizar el evento.

Desde charlas sobre arte interactivo con Arduino como interface, pasando por talleres sobre impresión 3D hasta demostración de integración de Arduino con Asterisk será solo una parte de lo que vamos a poder disfrutar, ya que estarán habilitados diferentes Stands como el de Parrot, en que podremos probar el nuevo Ar-Drone 2.0, el de Cooking Hacks que nos amenizarán con micro talleres Arduino e incluso el de nuestros amigos de Ultra-Lab que seguro hará las delicias de los asistentes.

Por si esto fuera poco.. Contaremos con la presencia y colaboración de David Cuartielles, el cual nos ofrecerá una charla sobre los últimos productos Arduino que se está aconteciendo…

Accede ahora a toda la información en la nueva web de Arduteka AQUÍ e inscríbete!!

Te lo vas a perder??

Via | Arduteka

Researchers from Centro de Automática y Robótica (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) and from Brown University carried out a very deep research about the specific behavior of bat flight, whose ultimate goal is to replicate the capabilities of bat’s wings by means of an ad-hoc designed micro aerial vehicle (MAV).

From the home page of the project:

[...] this research is oriented towards the development of a biological inspired bat robot platform, that allows to reproduce the amazing maneuverability of these flying mammals. The highly maneuverability is achieved by reproducing the flapping and morphing capabilities of their wing-skeleton structure. This structure is composed by several joints and a membrane that generates the required lift forces to fly.

To mimmic the muscular system that moves the joints of the wing-bones, Shape Memory Alloys (SMA) NiTi wires are used as artificial-muscles. Several challenges in controlling this SMA-based actuation system are regarded in this research.

A lot of research work has already been carried out (see here for a list of publications) and a bat-like MAV prototype has been designed and implemented to both evaluate and validate the research outcomes. Among the other stuff, the core onboard electronic is made up of an arduino-based board, an IMU, a radio transceiver and a rechargeable LiPo battery.

More details on this project can be found here.

[Via: BaTboT project homepage]

SparkFun struck a chord with many when it released the ProtoSnap series last year. The perforated perfboard housed not only a tiny Arduino compatible chip, but a small host of sensors and components that made assembling simple projects a snap (pun not only intended, but relished). Tomorrow, the company will begin selling the next member of its ProtSnap family -- the MiniBot. Just like its predecessors, the ProtoSnap MiniBot is based around an Arduino compatible microcontroller (specifically ATmega328) and features a number of components that can easily be detached when you're ready to move from prototype to a more permanent arrangement. The onboard selection components is fairly limited. The base is a relatively bare perfboard with a 9v battery holder on one side and two wheels connected to a motor on the other. Up front is two IR sensors that can be used for basic controls.

Of course, it's simple enough to expand on the basic platform with any host of sensors and components, like servos or RF receivers. Ultimately it's up to your imagination and skill level, which is why SparkFun is primarily targeting the kits at the educational market. The company's new educational outreach program is making a big push to put the ProtoSnap MiniBot in classrooms across the country, starting with high schools and trade schools, as a bridge from more simplistic robotics kits to the more advanced projects tackled at the university level. The completely open source robotics platform will be available tomorrow for $74.95. As soon as we can get our mitts on one our own we'll return with a thorough hands on... one that reveals just how much smarter the average high school kid is than us.

SparkFun launches ProtoSnap MiniBot for the budding roboticist originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 31 May 2012 16:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Eric Schmidt has said that Google will make cash available through its investment into Teach First to buy Raspberry Pi and Arduino units for British schoolchildren. He was at the UK's Science Museum to talk about Mountain View's partnership with the charity, which puts top university graduates into schools to teach disadvantaged kids. The Android-maker wrote a cheque to fund over 100 places on the scheme, aiming to get bright computer scientists to reintroduce engineering principles to pupils. Mr. Schmidt hoped that with the right support, kits like the Raspberry Pi would do for this generation what the BBC Micro did three decades ago.

Google pumps cash into UK classrooms, will buy Arduino, Raspberry Pi sets for kids originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 May 2012 05:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Next July a workshop on wearable computing will be held at Supsi Summer School (Ticino).

Goal of the workshop is the design and prototyping, through the Arduino platform, of objects that sense, interpret and react to the real world and that can be wearable and digitally fabricated.

More info here.

Via [openwear.org]

It seems that there is a shortage of programmers who can do embedded systems (which is what computer engineering is mostly about these days).

Critics lay much of the blame for the embedded programming gap at the doorstep of university computer science departments that have tended to migrate curricula toward trendy programming languages like Java at the expense of unglamorous tasks such as how to design and analyze algorithms and data structures.
Struggle continues to plug embedded programming gap | EE Times (by George Leopold)

I’m not so sure that Java is at fault here. It seems to me to be perfectly fine second programming language (after a simpler one like Python that does not require all data structures to be declared before any code is written).  The problem is more that the instruction focuses entirely on designing huge complex data structures and using large libraries of complex software components, rather than on fundamentals:

The problems start early in the curriculum. Too often an introductory Computer Science course will fall into one of two extremes: either focusing on the syntactic details of the programming language that is being used—“where the semicolons go”—or else treating programming as a matter of choosing components and plugging them into a GUI.

The basics—how to design and analyze algorithms and data structures—are covered summarily if at all. Software methodologies such as Object Orientation that are best approached in the context of the development life cycle for large applications, are introduced through trivial examples before their benefits can be appreciated: the proverbial cannon that is used to shoot a fly.

The education of embedded systems software engineers: failures and fixes | EE Times (by Robert Dewar)

I’m not so sure that I believe in Robert Dewar’s proposed solution, though, as he suggests having students do more high-level design (software architecture, rather than nuts-and-bolts programming), which is in direct opposition to his claim that students should be getting more training in low-level languages like C.

Robert Dewar also makes an argument for group work at the university level—something that is common in computer engineering programs, but apparently rare in computer science programs.  At UCSC, I know that all computer engineers, electrical engineers, and game design majors are expected to do group senior projects, and some of their other classes (such as mechatronics) are also group projects.

I think that the lack of group projects in many CS courses is not so much tied to Dewar’s idea “a perhaps regrettable staple of the educational process is the need to assess a student’s progress through a grade, and a team project makes this difficult” as it is to the problem of scale—a group project is only reasonable when the project is too big to be done more efficiently by a single person.  Creating and managing such big projects in lower-level classes would be a major undertaking, particularly in the short time frame of a quarter or semester, when a lot of things other than group dynamics need to be learned. Pasting a group structure onto tiny project would make things worse, not better, in terms of training students to be effective in groups (see Group work).

Some entrepreneurs have addressed the problem by starting up “initiatives like Barr’s week-long, hands-on Embedded Software Boot Camp.”  The idea is to take programmers who already have degrees and supposedly know C and train them specifically in the skills needed to do real-time programming. The cost is not small ($3000 for 4.5 days, if you register early).

Some computer scientists have been pointing out problems in the standard CS curriculum for a while:

I started saying this over a decade ago. I even did embedded stuff in my 3rd year data architecture course—my department was uninterested, and the students had a real hard time wrapping their heads around the thought that there are places where resources are limited.

The department fought me when I said that students needed to learn more than one language (Java). The department disagreed when I said that students should learn how to program for environments where bloated OO methods might not work (… But, the ARE no places where efficiency matters!!! It’s all about “Software Engineering”!).

The students had NO idea what it meant to program for a machine that had no disk, only memory.

Part of the reason CS departments are seen as being so out of touch is BECAUSE THEY ARE!!!

University should not be about job training, BUT it is also NOT about teaching only those things the faculty find interesting.

Struggle continues to plug embedded programming gap | The Becker Blog.

I know that there have been struggles between the computer science and computer engineering departments at UCSC about what programming language to teach first, with the computer scientists arguing for Java and the computer engineers arguing for C and assembly language.  Eventually they reached a compromise (which has been stable for about a decade), with the computer science students taught Java first and the computer engineering students taught C first, then both making transitions to the other language.

I think that both approaches work, but the strengths of the resulting programmers are somewhat different.  For device drivers and small embedded systems, I’d bet on the computer engineers, who have a better grasp of low-level details, interrupts, and hardware/software interactions.  For more complicated projects, I’d want one of the computer scientists doing the high-level programming, teamed with computer engineers to do the detail work.

I actually don’t like either C or Java as a first programming language.  I think that students would be better off starting with Scratch, which gets them quickly into multi-threaded code, real time operation, and race conditions, without burdening them with a lot of syntax.  Then they can switch to Python to learn about code syntax, types, and objects, without the burden (or support) of compile-time type checking.  After that they can switch to Java to learn about declaring all their data structures and having very rigid type rules (useful for bigger projects to make interfaces between different design groups more explicit).  In parallel with learning Python and Java, they should learn C and C++ in the context of the Arduino microprocessor (or similar small microprocessor) to control real-time physical systems.

The computer engineers could even skip Java, and learn their rigid type systems strictly in C++ (which they are more likely to use later), though Java is cleaner and makes the learning somewhat easier.

Computer scientists should not stop with this handful of languages, though, as they are essentially all Algol derivatives.  The CS students should also learn a couple of languages that come from different lineages (LISP or Haskell, for example).

Arduteka lanza su último tutorial!

En él nos descubre el nuevo módulo 3G para Arduino de Cooking Hacks con el que podremos construir una divertida alarma que nos enviará la foto de nuestro intruso directamente a nuestro correo, además de avisarnos por un mensaje sms a nuestro teléfono móvil sin necesidad de tener conectado nuestro Arduino a internet constantemente, pues lo hace todo a través de la red móvil.

Vamos a construirnos una alarma totalmente casera, a través del sensor de ultrasonidos, escanearemos continuamente el espacio situado enfrente suyo con un radio aproximado de 30º, cuando algún objeto o persona se sitúe en su campo de actuación a una distancia inferior a la que establezcamos, haremos sonar una alarma, tomaremos una fotografía, el Led RGB que antes estaba verde, pasará a color azul y daremos 10 segundos para poder desactivar la alarma a través de nuestro teclado matricial, si la desactivamos, volverá de nuevo a escanear el campo, pero si no!! Reproducirá un sonido contundente y se dispondrá a mandarnos un sms a nuestro teléfono móvil y la fotografía a nuestro correo electrónico.

Via:[Arduteka]

Makers need to familiarize themselves with the core concepts and the theory involved in creating applications such as Motion Sensing and Face Tracking. As the technology is churning out new hardware day and night, DIYers need to work hard to keep up and always be in touch with the latest technology around them.

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For example, anyone working with Accelerometers/ Gyroscopes or Inertial Measurement Units needs to understand the theory of Vectors, Force, Gravity and be able to work out complex mathematical problems. They may easily get an Arduino Board and an Accelerometer Breakout or an IMU Board and use a library instead of writing their own code but to truly understand the theory behind it; how the device actually works, is not for the faint of heart.

One such problem is the Face Tracking Application. Unless you know the real theory behind how the Algorithm actually works, you can only wonder about that robot which follows its master. Greg Borenstein had an idea of creating a website dedicated to this issue. Makematics – Math for Makers.

In an introductory post, Greg writes:

” I hope to show that a normal programmer with no special academic training can grapple with these areas of research and find a way in to understanding them. And as I go I aim to create material that will help others do the same. If I can do it, there’s no reason you can’t.”

More and more people should step forward and create or compile a good amount of research data to help fellow makers and DIYers in solving complex mathematical problems.