Maker Bitluni wanted an electric scooter, but he lives in Germany, where electric vehicles of that type are illegal. Motor-assisted bicycles, however, are not. So he set to work making a sort of hybrid that is controlled not by a throttle directly, but provides assistance when the rider kicks the scooter forward.

The scooter uses an accelerometer to sense forward pushes, along with an Arduino Micro that regulates speed via PWM output. A brake assembly is also implemented as a secondary input, starting up the device and powering it down as needed. 

Bitluni’s build and testing process can be seen in the videos below, and Arduino code is available on GitHub.

While the environment is important for any musical performance, generally it’s not an active part of the show. Adrien Kaeser, though, has come up with a device called the “Weather Thingy“ that integrates weather directly into electronic music performances. It’s able to sense wind direction and speed, light intensity, and rain, translating this data into MIDI inputs.

The system, which was created at ECAL, consists of two parts: a compact weather station on top of a portable stand, as well as a small console with buttons and knobs to select and modify environmental effects on the music. 

Hardware for the project includes an Arduino Mega and Leonardo, a small TFT screen to display the element under control and its characteristics, an ESP32 module, a SparkFun ESP32 Thing Environment Sensor Shield, a SparkFun MIDI Shield, high speed optocouplers, rotary encoder knobs, and some buttons.

Be sure to see the demo in the video below, preferably with the sound on!

While not known for its musical prowess, John Sutley decided to turn an Atari 2600 into a simple four-note drum machine dubbed “SYNDRUM.”

While an interesting exercise in creating a custom cartridge out of repurposed components, pushing buttons to activate four tones and an onscreen VU meter can only keep one’s attention for so long.

To turn this project’s musical entertainment level up to 11, he programmed an Arduino Nano to take MIDI signals and translate them into the equivalent electrical signals that would normally come from a controller. 

The results, as seen in the video below, are spectacular. If you’d like to try something similar yourself, code for the SYNDRUM can be found here.

When conversing face-to-face, there are a wide range of other emotions and inflections conveyed by our facial and body expressions. But what if you can’t express emotion this way, whether due to a physical impairment, or simply because of a covering—like a dust mask—temporarily hides your beautiful smile, and perhaps your hands are otherwise occupied?

As a solution to this dilemma, a team of researchers has been working on Orecchio, a robotic device that attaches to the ear and bends it to convey emotion. Three motors allow the ear to be bent in 22 distinct poses and movements, indicating 16 emotional states. Control is accomplished via an Arduino Due, linked up with a windows computer running a C# program. 

The prototype was implemented using off-the-shelf electronic components, miniature motors, and custom-made robotic arms. The device has a micro gear motor mounted on the bottom of a 3D-printed ear hook loop clip. The motor drives a plastic arm against the side of the helix, able to bend it towards the center of the ear. Rotating the plastic arm back to its rest position allows the helix to restore to its original form. Near the top of the earpiece is another motor that drives a one-joint robotic arm that is attached to the top of the helix, using a round ear clip. Rotating the motor extends the robotic arm from its resting position, to bend the top helix downwards the center of the ear. The motor together with the one-joint robotic arm is mounted on a linear track that can be moved vertically through a rack-and-pinion mechanism, driven by a third motor. Moving the rack upwards stretches the helix.

The prototype is demonstrated in the video below, and more info is available in the project’s research paper.

While there are tools that allow the visually impaired to interact with computers, conveying spacial relationships, such as those needed for gaming, is certainly a challenge. To address this, researchers have come up with DualPanto.

As the name implies, the system uses two pantographs for location IO, and on the end of each is a handle that rotates to indicate direction. One pantograph acts as an output to indicate where the object is located, while the other acts as a player’s input interface. One device is positioned above the other, so the relative position of each in a plane can be gleaned. 

The game’s software runs on a MacBook Pro, and an Arduino Due is used to interface the physical hardware with this setup. 

DualPanto is a haptic device that enables blind users to track moving objects while acting in a virtual world.

The device features two handles. Users interact with DualPanto by actively moving the ‘me’ handle with one hand and passively holding on to the ‘it’ handle with the other. DualPanto applications generally use the me handle to represent the user’s avatar in the virtual world and the it handle to represent some other moving entity, such as the opponent in a soccer game.

Be sure to check it out in the video below, or read the full research paper here.

3D printing, while revolutionary in many aspects, generally means you’re stuck with what you print. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the University of Tokyo, however, have created a printing system called Dynablock, which attaches specialized magnetic blocks together that can used over and over.

The system uses an array of 24 x 16 motors to push the blocks into position one layer at a time, giving a possible “print” resolution of 384 blocks per layer. An Arduino Uno, along with shift registers and motor drivers are used to directly control the block placement motors, and user interface is handled by a JavaScript-based application.

Dynamic 3D Printing combines the capabilities of 3D printers and shape displays: Like conventional 3D printing, it can generate arbitrary and graspable three-dimensional shapes, while allowing shapes to be rapidly formed and reformed as in a shape display. To demonstrate the idea, we describe the design and implementation of Dynablock, a working prototype of a dynamic 3D printer. Dynablock can form a three-dimensional shape in seconds by assembling 3,000 9 mm blocks, leveraging a 24 x 16 pin-based shape display as a parallel assembler. Dynamic 3D printing is a step toward achieving our long-term vision in which 3D printing becomes an interactive medium, rather than the means for fabrication that it is today. In this paper, we explore possibilities for this vision by illustrating application scenarios that are difficult to achieve with conventional 3D printing or shape display systems.

More info can be found in the project’s research paper here, or check it out in action in the video below:

While you may not give soda bottles much thought beyond their intended use, researchers in Germany and the U.S. have been working on a way to turn empty bottles into kinetic art. 

The result of this work is a program called “TrussFormer,” which enables one to design a structure made out of soda bottles acting as structural beams. The structure can then be animated using an Arduino Nano to control a series of pneumatic actuators.

TrussFormer not only allows for animation design, but analyzes stresses on the moving assembly, and even generates 3D-printable files to form the proper joints.

TrussFormer is an integrated end-to-end system that allows users to 3D print large-scale kinetic structures, i.e., structures that involve motion and deal with dynamic forces.

TrussFormer builds on TrussFab, from which it inherits the ability to create large-scale static truss structures from 3D printed hubs and PET bottles. TrussFormer adds movement to these structures by placing linear actuators and hinges into them.

TrussFormer incorporates linear actuators into rigid truss structures in a way that they move “organically”, i.e., hinge around multiple points at the same time. These structures are also known as variable geometry trusses. This is illustrated on the on the example of a static tetrahedron that is converted into a moving structure by swapping one edge with a linear actuator. The only required change is to introduce connections at the nodes that enable rotation, i.e. hinges.

As for what you can build with it, be sure to check out the bottle-dinosaur in the video below! 

Extremely good linear actuators can be expensive and heavy, but what if you need something for relatively light applications? In the video below, James Bruton explains how you can make one using parts including a DC motor with a quadrature encoder, 3D-printed mounting, and a lead screw assembly.

His device uses an Arduino Uno for control, using pins 2 and 3 as interrupts to ensure correct rotation—and thus linear travel—sensing. Proper movement is facilitated with a pair of PID loops to regulate both the position and velocity, even under differing load and battery conditions. 

Arduino code and CAD information can be found on GitHub, while an explanation of the project is seen in the video below. 

Besides, perhaps a longer battery life, what would make your smartphone experience better? If you said a more versatile interaction method than poking one side with your thumb, researchers in Germany may have just the thing.

InfiniTouch morphs two LG Nexus 5 phones into one, with their touchscreens stacked back-to-back. This allows for not only thumb interaction, but also program control with the four fingers that normally only grip the device. It can even tell what finger your using via a convolutional neural network. 

In order to save space, most of the electronics are housed in a separate hardware container, including the phone boards as well as an Arduino MKR1000. 

More info is available in the project’s research paper, and a short demo can be seen in the video below.

If you thought that automatic wire bending was solely the purview of expensive industrial machinery, think again. How To Mechatronics has come up with a bender that not only twists wire left and right, but can rotate to create three-dimensional shapes.

The heart of the system is an Arduino Nano, which controls three stepper motors for wire manipulation via DRV8825 driver boards. A servo motor is also implemented in order to push a piece of copper tubing into place to physically bend the wire. 

As noted, the device does have some trouble moving the wire when its straightening rollers are tight, but this likely could be perfected with a little more work. If you’d like to take a crack at it, code and build files are available here.