Microsoft is getting their latest OS into the Maker scene through SBC integration. Their latest update adds support for Arduino and Dragonboard.
The post Microsoft Announces Windows IoT Support for Arduino and DragonBoard appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Amazon Web Services rolled out a new system today designed to simplify connecting embedded development boards to the cloud.
The post Amazon Just Made it Easier to Use AWS for Your Next IoT Project appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Learn how to pull realtime sensor data from a beehive to monitor its weight, temperature, and humidity over the internet.
The post The Internet of Bees: Adding Sensors to Monitor Hive Health appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
The Amazon Echo is an attempt to usher in a new product category. A box that listens to you and obeys your wishes. Sort of like Siri or Google Now for your house. Kickstarter creator [Joshua Montgomery] likes the idea, but he wants to do it all Open Source with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.
The Kickstarter (which reached its funding goal earlier this month) claims the device will use natural language to access media, control IoT devices, and will be open both for hardware and software hacking. The Kickstarter page says that Mycroft has partnerships with Lucid and Canonical (the people behind Ubuntu). In addition, they have added stretch goals to add computer vision and Linux desktop control to Mycroft.
With or without Mycroft, people are going to hack things like this together. If you dream of being able to start your teapot with the command “Computer. Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” then Mycroft might be a pretty good leg up on getting started. We’ve also seen Echo integration with Roku and even Nest. We imagine an open platform would spawn a lot of interesting hacks. You can find out more about Mycroft’s plans in the video below.
Mate Marschalko, who gave us the recent RC car over wireless and a racing wheel project now has a cool Ikea hack to share. He took an Ikea lamp and used a WiFi-enabled Arduino compatible microcontroller to create an alert notification light for his desk. He writes: This IKEA lamp […]
The post Get Media Alerts from Your Lamp with This Ikea Hack appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
An engineering student at the University of Western Macedonia has just added another appliance to the ever-growing list of Internet enabled things. [Panagiotis] decided to modify an off-the-shelf bread maker to enable remote control via the Internet.
[Panagiotis] had to remove pretty much all of the original control circuitry for this device. The original controller was replaced with an Arduino Uno R3 and an Ethernet shield. The temperature sensor also needed to be replaced, since [Panagiotis] could not find any official documentation describing the specifications of the original. Luckily, the heating element and mixer motor were able to be re-used.
A few holes were drilled into the case to make room for the Ethernet connector as well as a USB connector. Two relays were used to allow the Arduino to switch the heating element and mixer motor on and off. The front panel of the bread maker came with a simple LCD screen and a few control buttons. Rather than let those go to waste, they were also wired into the Arduino.
The Arduino bread maker can be controlled via a web site that runs on a separate server. The website is coded with PHP and runs on Apache. It has a simple interface that allows the user to specify several settings including how much bread is being cooked as well as the desired darkness of the bread. The user can then schedule the bread maker to start. Bread Online also comes with an “offline” mode so that it can be used locally without the need for a computer or web browser. Be sure to check out the video demonstration below.
[Thanks Minas]
You’ve amassed a small fortune in diamonds, wood, coal, iron, food, and the other resources you need. You’ve spent hours building the perfect Minecraft fortress to stockpile your goods. But who will watch your stash while you’re on another server? In this project guide, you’ll learn to use Arduino coding […]
The post Minecraft Activated Arduino Alarm appeared first on Make:.
You’ve amassed a small fortune in diamonds, wood, coal, iron, food, and the other resources you need. You’ve spent hours building the perfect Minecraft fortress to stockpile your goods. But who will watch your stash while you’re on another server? In this project guide, you’ll learn to use Arduino coding […]
The post Minecraft Activated Arduino Alarm appeared first on Make:.
If you’re not stuck in the tech news filter bubble, you may not have heard the Microsoft Build Developers Conference is going on right now. Among the topics covered in the keynotes are a new Office API and a goal to have Windows 10 running on a Billion devices in a few years.
There are, however, some interesting things coming out of the Build conference. Windows 10 is designed for hackers, with everything from virtual Arduino shields running on phones, Windows 10 running on Raspberry Pis, and Visual Code Studio running on OS X and Linux.
This is not the first time in recent memory Microsoft has courted the maker market. Microsoft begrudgingly supported the hardware dev scene with the PC version of the Microsoft Kinect, and a year or two ago, Microsoft rolled out drivers for 3D printers that were much more capable than the usual serial interface (read: the ability for printer manufacturers to add DRM). To the true, tie-die wearing, rollerblade-skating, acoustic coupler-sporting, Superman III-watching hackers out there, these efforts appear laughable – the product of managers completely out of touch with their audience.
Depending on your perspective, the new releases for the Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other ‘maker-themed’ hardware could go one way or the other.
As far as educational efforts go, the Windows Remote Arduino and Windows Virtual Shields for Arduino are especially interesting. Instead of filling a computer lab up with dozens of Arduinos and the related shields, the WVSA uses the sensors on a Windows 10 smartphone with an Arduino. Windows Remote Arduino allows makers to control an Arduino not through the standard USB port, but a Bluetooth module.
If Arduinos aren’t your thing, the Windows 10 IoT preview for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnowboard Max is out now. The Win10 IoT distribution does not yet have working WiFi or Bluetooth, making it the single most useless operating system for Internet of Things devices. It was, however, released at the Build conference.
Also announced was a partnership with a fabulous hardware project hosting site, Hackster.io. Microsoft and Hackster.io will be collaborating with hackathons and other events focused on Windows technology. I get why they wouldn’t want another, vastly more popular project hosting site doing this, but I’m a little confused at why Instructables wasn’t the top Microsoft pick.
As always, you may express your infinite derision in the comments below. Spelling Microsoft with a dollar sign will result in a ban.
Using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi to perform a task in the real world is certainly a project we’ve seen here before, and certainly most of these projects help to make up the nebulous “Internet of Things” that’s all the rage these days. Once in a while though, a project comes along that really catches our eye, as is the case with [Jamie’s] meticulously documented automatic garage door opener.
This garage door opener uses an ATMega328 to connect the internet to the garage door. A reed switch is installed which lets the device sense the position of the door, which is relayed back to the internet. [Jamie] wrote an Android app that can open and close the door and give the user the information on the door’s status. One really interesting feature is the ability to “crack” the garage door. This is done by triggering the garage door opener twice with a delay in between. From the video after the break we’d say this is how [Jamie’s] cat gets in and out.
We love seeing projects that are extremely well documented so that anyone who wants to make one can easily figure out how. Internet-connected garage door openers have been featured in other unique ways before too, but we’ve also seen ways to automatically open blinds or chicken coops!
