Electric Daisy Carnival Las Vegas is just days away, and YouTuber “Korberos” is ready. The Maker has created an LED Pac-Man totem using 967 lines of code, 256 NeoPixels wired in succession and laid out in a game-inspired map, and an Arduino Pro Mini.

The controller and game lights are powered by a 5V power bank with 10,000mAh of storage, while blue EL wire lights (for the “walls”) are powered by a 12V supply coming from eight AA batteries wired in serial. A MAC7219 7-segment display shows the current level and score.

According to Korberos, two libraries were used in the project: FastLED to control the LED strips and LedControl2 to handle the scoreboard.

If you’ve always wanted a bot for a friend, personal assistant or butler, you’re in luck. John Choi, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science and arts student, has managed to build his own life-size robotics platform for about $2,000. Sure, a price tag like that may not seem “cheap” but in comparison to other research-grade platforms out there, it’s a bargain.

Ideal for Makers, students, educators, artists and researchers alike, the Multipurpose Mobile Manipulator Mk 1 is capable of playing the piano, drawing pictures, preparing meals, watering plants, and engaging in toy sword duels, among many other things.

The Multipurpose Mobile Manipulator is divided into three major parts: the base, the arms, and the chest. The base contains motors for mobility and batteries to power the robot, enabling it to navigate around. The arms contain adaptable grippers, shoulder and elbow joints, and an extensible limb for grabbing and moving things with its environment. Meanwhile, the chest connects all of these together with control electronics and serves as a platform for an intelligent laptop-for-a-face. An Arduino Mega at its heart makes interfacing with sensors and actuators super easy, while the robot’s functionality can also be expanded by simply attaching new electronics and sensors to its mounting areas.

The open-source platform is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux, and supports Python 2.7 and Arduino libraries. According to Choi, libraries for Unity, Processing, ROS, MATLAB, C++, and Scratch are also in the works.

Those interested in building their own should check out Choi’s incredibly-detailed 80-step tutorial, and watch the robot take on some tasks below. Prepare to be amazed!

Lights synchronized to music, what’s not to love? YouTuber “Robert Robert” has done just that using 24 acrylic blocks, an Arduino Uno, four 12-pixel WS2812B addressable LED strips, an Adafruit electret microphone amplifier, a 12000mAh external battery pack, and some code.

The blocks are divided into two sets of 12, held together by threaded rods and nuts, with LED strips hot glued to the back. A 60cm x 40cm stainless steel shelf rests underneath to reflect the light back.

In terms of code, the project uses Adafruit’s NeoPixel library:

The first part of the code is Adafruit’s own mic code which calibrates the sound level so that whether you’re using a big speaker or, as in the video, a tiny iPad speaker, the mic remains sensitive. The second part of the code maps the sound level onto 12 if statements so that when quiet it idles with the NeoPixel library rainbow but then as the sound level gets higher more effects are triggered. Within each if statement I have then included a random() function so that the display stays interesting. You can edit each individual strip pixel to create patterns in an infinite variety of ways and using the random () function you can keep on building so you never get bored. The code works best with music with a wide dynamic range (soft and loud parts).

Last year, Moscow-based artist Dmitry Morozov — known by many as ::vtol:: — came up with a far less modern way of taking selfies. The Maker modified an old Brother SX-4000 typewriter to create portraits in the form of ASCII art.

The machine, called “i/o,” is controlled by an Arduino Mega and works by capturing an image using an iSight camera (with the help of a lamp for proper lighting), converting it into ASCII art using Pure Data and MAX/MSP, and then gradually printing it onto a piece of paper — one alphanumeric character at a time.

Gyroscopes and accelerometers are the primary sensors at the heart of an IMU, also known as an internal measurement unit — an electronic sensor device that measures the orientation, gravitational forces and velocity of a multicopter, and help you keep it in the air using Arduino.

Two videos made by Joop Brokking, a Maker with passion for RC model ‘copters, clearly explain how to program your own IMU so that it can be used for self-balancing your drone without Kalman filters,  libraries, or complex calculations.

Auto leveling a multicopter is pretty challenging. It means that when you release the pitch and roll controls on your transmitter the multicopter levels itself. To get this to work the flight controller of the multicopter needs to know exactly which way is down. Like a spirit level that is on top of the multicopter for the pitch and roll axis.

Very often people ask me how to make an auto level feature for their multicopter. The answer to a question like this is pretty involved and cannot be explained in one email. And that is why I made this video series.

You can find the bill of materials and code here.

Why head to the store when you could simply create your outfits right at home with the touch of a button? That’s the idea behind London-based startup Kniterate, who has developed what they’re calling “the 3D printer for knitwear.”

The system features Photoshop-like software that enables Makers to easily design patterns using various templates, which are then imported over to the Arduino Mega-driven machine to knit socks, scarves, sweaters, ties, beanies, and other garments. According to the team, they are in the process of developing an online platform that’ll allow you to sketch and share your wardrobe with an entire community.

Kniterate, which was recently introduced at HAX’s demo day, is an evolution of founder Gerard Rubio’s Arduino-controlled OpenKnit project. His vision is to one day democratize textile manufacturing, and will take the next step in that journey when he launches the new age machine on Kickstarter in September. Until then, head over to its website here or watch Tested’s Maker Faire video below!

With hopes of reinventing the way food is grown, Rory Aronson has developed humanity’s first open-source CNC farming machine. The FarmBot Genesis — which will begin taking pre-orders in July — is capable of planting seeds and then watering them precisely.

Designed with the Maker community in mind, FarmBot is driven by an Arduino Mega 2560, a RAMPS 1.4 shield, NEMA 17 stepper motors, and a Raspberry Pi 3. What’s more, all of its plastic components can easily be 3D printed, while its flat connecting plates can be made with either a waterjet, plasma or laser cutter, a CNC mill, or even a hacksaw and drill press.

The three-axis machine employs linear guides in the X, Y, and Z directions, which allows for tooling such as seed injectors, watering nozzles, sensors, and weed removal equipment to be accurately positioned. Impressively, FarmBot can cultivate a variety of crops in the same area simulatenously. 

FarmBot is controlled via mobile device or laptop, while its web-based interface makes customizing your garden as simple as playing FarmVille. You can also build and schedule sequences by dragging and dropping basic operations, adjust the parameters to your liking, and save. Meanwhile, a decision support system adjusts water, fertilizer and pesticide regimens, seed spacing, timing, and other factors based on soil and weather conditions, sensor readings, location, and time of year. And of course, FarmBot can be manually operated in real-time as well.

Aronson’s vision is to make precision agriculture open and accessible to everyone. Each FarmBot Genesis can be modified and augmented to suit anyone’s unique growing style and needs. For instance, you can power your machine with renewable energy from a small off-the-grid solar panel, or install a barrel to store and use rainwater.

During a recent workshop, Swedish innovation studio Topp set out to create a platform for rapid prototyping with design and data. The team decided to take an existing product and retrofit it with IoT capabilities. For this, they selected an IKEA Spöka night light and hacked it with an Arduino MKR1000. The connected lamp is capable of reacting to its surrounding environment through sound, motion, and light, while an accompanying app is used to monitor and control intensity.

Traditionally data and physical interactions have been difficult to work with, often requiring the availability of early hardware or by constructing mockup data. However, to achieve quick iterations and a higher fidelity experiences for projects involving data, sensors, cloud, and other things typically unavailable to designers early on in projects, we’ve developed a tool called Noodl to help support a better way of working. We’re using Noodl as a foundational tool when we hack our night light.

A key function for this hack is to have the lamp and the phone connected to an IoT cloud broker. Bluetooth or other non-routable communications would not work with remote presence, so by using Wi-Fi and a public broker we could build a prototype that also works with multiple clients in a true IoT fashion.

The end result was a platform that makes use of cloud and data, which could be employed for a wide range of intelligent home devices ranging from a baby monitor to a morning alarm to a smart dimmer. You can read all about the project — along with instructions, code and components — on Topp’s page here.

Enigma machines are fascinating devices, especially for young Makers looking to explore the world of electronics. Awhile back we featured a similar project from Italy, and we’re once again amazed by the work of 14-year-old Andy Eggebraaten, who built a retro-modern gadget of his own. The project, which was for his high school’s science fair, took nine months to complete.

These electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines were developed  in the early 20th century to protect commercial, diplomatic and military communication, used especially by German military intelligence during World War II.

In the video below, Andy opens the machine to show its inner workings: the unit runs on Arduino Mega along with 1,800 other parts and 500 color-coded wires. We can see that he evolved the rotors into electronic modules that plug into D-Sub sockets, and the interface is made using a 16-segment display showing the rotor position as well as an LCD screen to read the plain- and the encoded text.

Even three decades after the Chernobyl disaster and five years after the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, each of the surrounding communities are still impacted by dangerous radiation levels. However, since the source of the problem is invisible, the relative risks remain difficult to communicate. As a result, the motivation and urgency to help those affected continue to diminish.

In order to visualize the threat, photographer Greg McNevin has mapped real-time measurements using long-exposure photographs of areas in Fukushima and Russia’s Bryansk region. To do this, McNevin and his team combined a custom Geiger counter with an LED stick and an Arduino-based controller. The detection device picks up radiation levels as it is moved around and outputs this data as an analog signal, which is then converted into white, orange or red lights — based on the severity of the reading.

Walking through a photo with shutter open anywhere from 20 seconds to five minutes allows us to create dynamic walls of undulating light, highlighting contamination in the environments it exists.

White shows levels under 0.23uSv per hour (1mSv per year), which is the Japanese government’s guideline for decontamination (which assumes people spend 8 hours a day outside and 16 hours inside). Russia’s official “norm” level is roughly the same, 0.20uSv/h.

Orange shows contamination levels elevated above this, up to 1.0uSv per hour (roughly 5mSv per year) – a range where protective measures to minimise radiation exposure should be considered. Protective measures can include resettlement, decontamination, special health services, food controls, etc. Russian communities are obligated to be resettled above this level.

Red shows radioactivity greater than 1.0uSv per hour (upwards of 5mSv per year) – a level where protective measures to minimise radiation exposure are necessary.

Using this tool in areas affected by Chernobyl and Fukushima, we found that places decontaminated by the authorities consistently exhibit radiation levels elevated above official guidelines. We also found that using the same scale, places in Russia’s Bryansk region demonstrated comparable levels of contamination now, 30 years later, as places in Fukushima do today.

As the photographer explains, this project is not a critique of the government’s decontamination efforts, but rather a demonstration of the long-term effects radioactivity has on the environments and those living within them. Be sure to check out all of McNevin’s photos, as well as learn more about the project here.

(Photos: Greg McNevin/Greenpeace)