Casa Jasmina and FabLab Torino in partnership with Officine Arduino e Toolbox Coworking are hosting the IX° edition of the Share Prize, an international competition that promotes and supports contemporary art in the digital age .

The prize theme is ”House Guests” and focuses on the use of electronic art inside the private domestic space.

Share prize’s artistic director is Bruce Sterling, writer, journalist and critic of the new media. He invited two special guests to join the international jury: Cap. Samantha Cristoforetti and Paola Antonelli.

Captain Samantha Cristoforetti is the European Space Agency astronaut protagonist of Futura mission, the second long-duration mission ASI,  engineer and design enthusiast. Paola Antonelli, is the Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design as well as the Director of R&D at MoMA New York. Paola Antonelli was responsible for adding video games, the Arduino control board and innovative 3DPrinted objects to the NY MoMA’s permanent design collection.

The jury is then completed by Chiara Garibaldi, the SHARE Festival director, Jasmina Tesanovic, widely known as “the Jasmina of Casa Jasmina”.

On March 4th the Share jury will meet to select the entries for Share Festival and Samantha Cristoforetti and Paola Antonelli are going to give a public talk at Toolbox Coworking  from h.17:30 to h.19:30 (CET).  Stay tuned  on our social channels for the live streaming link. 

This project by Greg is about building a smart litter box for his cats:

We have three cats and the litter is difficult to control. So I had been thinking through a project to build an enclosure. Once I stumbled on Arduino the doors of opportunity were opened. I ordered the electronics and got started on my project right away. So far the Arduino is activating exhaust fans, lightng, and a Lysol spray dispenser. It tracks the number of times the fans are activated and uses a piezo buzzer to alert a filter cleaning. I plan to use it to trigger cleaning based on usage and track each cats potties so we can control their stink before its too late.

A nice video about this project can be found on YouTube.

On his blog, Miguel presents one of his latest projects:

This project shows the operation of an RGB lamp using a digital LED strip. After activating the bluetooth connection, the user can open the GUI on the PC to control the lamp. The program shows a hue palette divided into 30 rods, one for each LED of the strip.
By clicking & dragging the mouse cursor it is possible to make your own patterns,. To remove a color, the user can simply click on a rod while pressing the spacebar, which switches off the selected LED.

Part list: wooden support, RGB digitally-addressable LED strip, microcontroller (Arduino Pro Mini, for example), Bluetooth or USB wire.

More information on this project can be found on Miguel’s blog, while a brief video about its operation can be found here; the code of the project can be found on Github. The project’s page on Thingiverse can be found here.

[Via: Miguel's blog]

Have you ever wanted a smart home that can automatically adjusts the blinds for you? If so, this project is for you.

In this instructable, the author describes his approach to “smart blinds”, by using an Arduino board, an ethernet shield, a motor shield and a couple of sensors.

By means of a simple web-based GUI, the user can manually open and close the blinds, or he/she can setup both temperature and brightness thresholds in order to automate the whole process. Finally, opening and closing events can also be scheduled at pre-defined times of the day, if necessary.

The complete tutorial, together with the source code of the project, can be found here.

[Via: Instructables and Lifehacker]