Holding your phone up to take an occasional picture is no big deal, but for professional photographers who often need to manipulate heavier gear for hours on end, this can actually be quite tiring. With this in mind, Cornell University students Kunpeng Huang, Xinyi Yang, and Siqi Qian designed a two-axis gesture-controlled camera platform for their ECE 4760 final project.

Their device mounts a 3.6kg (~8lb) DSLR camera in an acrylic turret, allowing it to look up and down (pitch) as well as left and right (yaw) under the control of two servo motors. The platform is powered by a PIC32 microcontroller, while human operation is performed via a gamepad-style SparkFun Joystick Shield or through an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense. 

When in Nano mode, the setup leverages its IMU to move the camera along with the user’s hand gestures, and its built-in light and proximity sensing abilities activate the camera itself.

Our 2-DOF gesture-controlled platform can point the camera in any direction within a hemi-sphere based on spherical coordinates. It is capable of rotating continuously in horizontal direction and traversing close to 180 degrees in vertical direction. It is able to support a relatively large camera system (more than 3kg in total weight and 40cm in length), orient the camera accurately (error less than 3 degree), and respond quickly to user input (transverse 180 degrees in less than 3 seconds). In addition to orienting the camera, the system also has simple control functionality, such as allowing the user to auto-focus and take photos remotely, which is achieved through DSLR’s peripheral connections.

At a high level, our design supports three user input modes — the first one uses a joystick while the other two use an inertial measurement unit (IMU). In the first mode, the x- and y-axis of a joystick is mapped to the velocities in the yaw and pitch directions of the camera. In the second mode, the roll and pitch angles of the user’s hand are mapped to the velocities of the camera in the yaw and pitch directions, while the third mode mapped the angles to the angular position of the camera.

Infinity cubes use six mirrors arranged in such a way that they bounce light inside back and forth, making them appear to stretch on to infinity. While not the first to make such a device, Thomas Jensma created the frame for his as a single 3D-printed piece.

This method meant that the plexiglass mirrors surrounding the build are automatically quite flat, allowing the 144 LEDs inside to reflect beautifully with no adjustment. An external Arduino board controls the lights, producing an infinite number of patterns. A 5V supply is also used in order to power the assembly. 

Instructions for the project can be found here, and with this simplified design, Jensma was able to construct his in a day for just $25 in parts.

If your young child wants to listen to music, what better way than a beautiful wooden MP3 “radio,” with an array of buttons that select the album? After being inspired by a similar commercial product, Redditor “DerThes” decided to make such a device for a fraction of the cost using an Arduino Uno for control, along with a Music Maker Shield to play tunes off an SD card.

The toddler can select songs from a grid of 16 input buttons, which are sent to the Uno via a pair of shift registers. There’s also a “parent’s mode” with the ability to choose from up to 99 albums, and a volume knob for… adjusting the volume. 

Finally, the unt features a beautiful enclosure made out of oak and black walnut, with corners softened by dowels to reduce collateral damage “after the player has gone airborne.” More details can be seen on Imgur here and on GitHub.

This is an easy to use MP3 player for small children. I made this for my 2 year old for Christmas. Each of the top 9 buttons will play an album. The black buttons on the bottom are prev – play/pause – next. The player also supports an alternative playback mode that can be activated using a special key combination. That combination will turn the buttons into a 10 digit input matrix allowing playback of up to 99 albums. That way the player can be used by parents as well.

See GitHub for more details, the schematics for the button PCB and the firmware. https://github.com/MichaelThessel/arduino-stoerbert

This is heavily inspired by Hoerbert: https://en.hoerbert.com

When I first saw the Hoerbert at a friends place I wanted it for my child. After I heard of the $400 price tag I knew that I needed to spend 50 hrs and $100 to build my own.

We’re excited to announce that the official Arduino Amazon Alexa skill now supports television control.

You can now securely connect your TV set to Alexa using Arduino IoT Cloud and a few lines of code.

Here are some of the features which will be available to you:

• Power on/off
• Switch channel
• Volume up/down/mute
• Switch input sources

The easiest way to operate any kind of television is to act as if we were its very own clicker. In order to do so, we’ll show you how to capture the commands from the remote and play them back via Arduino (the TV will never know what hit it).

We’ll then create an Arduino IoT Cloud Thing with a TV property, and adapt the generated code to our needs. Finally, we’ll configure Alexa to access and control our TV.

Afterwards, we’ll be able to ask things such as:

• “Alexa, turn the volume up on TV.”
• “Alexa, mute TV” or “Alexa, unmute TV.”
• “Alexa, next channel on TV.”

The complete step-by-step guide is available on our Project Hub.

Share your creativity with us! Our community means a lot to us, so we would love to see what you create. Make sure you document and post your amazing projects on the Arduino Project Hub and use the #ArduinoAlexa hashtag to make it discoverable by everyone!

Have fun playing with Alexa and IoT Cloud. If you have questions and/or build this project, let us know in the comments below.

Our dev team is about to kick off their holiday breaks, but not without sharing some exciting news first: the release of arduino-cli 0.7.0!

Highlights include:

• Notarization compliance for macOS

• Some breaking changes:
  • Remove Sketchbook concept, introduce user data folder
  • “lib list” now returns an empty JSON array when there are no libraries installed
  • Change configuration file format
  • Terminate daemon command when parent process exits; added “–daemonize” flag to keep old behavior
• Added a lot of bugfixing and minor features

The latest version will be available on the other distribution channels (i.e. Homebrew) in the coming days. Stay tuned!

Apparently not satisfied to simulate flights on a single PC monitor, Ryan H came up with his own custom, 3D-printable cockpit setup for the Garmin G1000 avionics suite that uses a 12.1” LCD panel for flight data and a large number of additional inputs. The system is designed around the X-Plane 11 flight simulator, all controlled by an Arduino Mega with SimVim firmware.

The auxiliary display/inputs assemblies use the Arduino as an interface, enabling it to handle 32 tactile switches plus one standard and five dual rotary encoders via five CD74HC4067 16-channel multiplexers.

Build cost is around $250 per screen. 3D-print files and other information are available on Thingiverse. 

When Amir Avni made a busy board for his then-one-year-old daughter, he left a variety of buttons and switches unconnected. While these were still likely interesting at the time, now that she’s two, he’s added an Arduino Mega-controlled 32×64 LED panel to the rig, taking advantage of these formerly unused input devices.

The busy board images are changed using four potentiometers positioned above it, which select two icons that are each displayed on half the screen. It can also act as a drawing board when the first one is set to its maximum value.

Below that, more potentiometers and some switches are implemented for further image control, along with a power switch to cut things off when playtime is done.

While you may know on some level that an Arduino can help you make music, you probably haven’t seen as good an implementation as this MIDI controller by Switch & Lever. 

The device features a numeric pad for note input, which can also be used as a drum pad, and a variety of knobs and even a joystick for modifying the beats. Controls are housed inside a beautiful laser-cut, glued, and finished wooden enclosure.

An Arduino Mega (with its 54 digital IO and 16 analog pins) is used to accommodate the inputs, and data is passed on to a digital audio workstation, or DAW, to produce actual sound. 

Code and circuit diagrams are available here if you want to build one, though your setup can be customized however you like!

Unless you’re very good, personal synths are fun for you — though often quite annoying for onlookers. After making his own wristwatch-based synth in 2016, Clem Mayer decided to build a new version that’s larger and louder than ever, and programmable via an Arduino controller.

Mayer chose the MKR WiFi 1010 here to take advantage of its LiPo charging abilities. This enables the device to be entirely self-contained in its custom housing, with a variety of switches and sliders for an interface. 

Users can program their own “tune” to be played back, or even take advantage of a random sequence generated on startup, then modify the sound as it plays live.

Portal 2 is one of RobotsWithRyan’s favorite games, so he — of course — decided to build his own personality core character from this title. 

His Space Core is 3D-printed from a model that he found online, scaled up by 300% to fit the electronics inside, including an Arduino Uno and eight servo actuators. As with many projects, there was barely enough room to fit the electrical components, but as seen in the video below, it looks delightfully glitchy.

The Arduino controls the servo-driven eye movement and is linked to a smartphone over Bluetooth for remote operation. A second phone is integrated into the moving eye section, which displays an image of the personality core’s iris, and plays game quotes through its music app.