The connected birdhouse is a project prototyped during a workshop ran by Massimo Banzi at Boisbuchet, last August in France. It was developed using Arduino Yùn, by Valentina Chinnici, who shared with us the project, and two other students taking part to  the week of learning-by-doing around the theme of  the Internet of Trees.

They redesigned a traditional object, a wooden birdhouse to be placed outdoor, and connected it to a lamp shaped like a nest, to be placed indoor:

The connected birdhouse was in fact an interactive object able to communicate to the nest/lamp the presence of a bird inside the house, and accordingly to a color coded signal was giving also some informations about the size of the bird itself. In the event of a bird entering into the house, the nest/lamp remotely controlled via WiFi by an Arduino Yùn, was turned on. The nest/lamp received the notification from the birdhouse translating it firstly with a rainbow effect. After few seconds the light changed according to the weight of the bird (green, yellow or red).

The LED strip used for the nest lamp was an Adafruit Neopixel strip controlled by an Arduino Yún.

On this blog you can find the sketch to make it work and create one yourself.

Trent Brook is a designer based in Sydney who created an elefant-shaped night lamp for his daughter Harpa (1 and a half years old). It has evolved from a small paper origami elephant with blinking LEDs, to a large 3-d printed elephant lamp shade with Wifi controlled RGB LEDs, microphone, speaker, and a custom designed iPad application to teach her about colour:

The electronics are driven by an Arduino MEGA 2560 microcontroller with ethernet shield for network control. Connected to the board is a 50cm 5V RGB addressable LED strip with 30 LEDs, a 3.3V microphone module for sound detection, and an 8ohm speaker for playing back generated ‘white-noise’ audio. Total cost for the all the electronics was less than $100.

Check the details of this cute project on his page on Behance.

Orbis is a kinetic & lighting  lasercut sculpture controlled by Arduino Mega and created by an engineering design service located in Long Island NY which submitted it to our blog:

Orbis has several unique features and modes of operation not usually seen in Kinetic Art work. There are six specialized lighting modes and two motion modes which are all controlled via two independent Arduino Atmega 2560 control boards.
Orbis was created for a client’s new home who wanted something truly unique. The client specifically requested something which blends the classic look of wood with electronics and mechanics in a simple artistic manner.

It also had to be large enough to highlight a central wall in the home while combining elements of old and new technologies. The client also wanted a separate control box which would allow guests to his home the ability to interact with the Kinetic Sculpture.
In order to create such a unique Kinetic Sculpture and control box, custom 3D models were developed. Once the client approved, these same files were sent out to a laser wood cutting service. Each piece was then hand stained and carefully assembled.

In the picture below you can see the inside of the control box:

More pictures and videos on the project’s website.

Interacting with objects in a new way has always been the main focus of Digital Habits, a design studio based in Milan.  Today we are proud to announce they’ve become a partner  of the Arduino At Heart program with their new project called Cromatica (it was exhibited at the coveted Fuorisalone Milan Design Week in the Superstudio Temporary Museum for New Design and started the crowdfunding campaign just some days ago!).

Cromatica is half speaker and half desk lamp: it can be controlled through a natural gestural interface, touch sensors or remotely via the Cromatica Android and iOS app. Designed to deliver both light and sound functions, Cromatica features wireless 4.0 Bluetooth connection for streaming music and a RGB lamp for multiple ambient effects.

Cromatica is embedded with an Arduino allowing for a highly digital, multi-sensory music and desktop working experience.  It blends  light and sound functionalities in unexpected ways, taking IoT products to a new level of quality.  For example you can download the app for natural awakening: light will rise and music streaming will start allowing you to wake up to your favourite playlist, perfect for early mornings.

Take a look at the video for the Natural Interaction:

In the video below you can see how you can create your favorite ambient  to match with your mood:

Innocenzo Rifino, Director of Digital Habits, told us:

“The Cromatica is a multi-purpose light-speaker but it is also our vision of the evolution of electronics, a vision that is moving in a more human and open direction. Crowdrooster have helped tremendously by opening our product up to a wider community whilst giving us the chance to generate enough funding to share our concepts more widely.”

The Cromatica is also true to its maker roots being Open Source and hackable, opening the doors for endless innovation from the maker community as it can be adapted to integrate with other tech and the Internet of Things. To enable this there will be a special ‘Maker Edition’ campaign reward complete with digital file to 3D print the shell.

Take a look at their campaign Crowdrooster and make your pledge!
Crowdrooster, the new ‘all tech’ crowdfunding site, introduced Cromatica as the first maker project available for funding on the site.

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]

Even with the added hardware that lamp still looks relatively normal. But its behavior is more than remarkable. The lamp interacts with people in an incredibly lifelike way. This is of course inspired by the lamp from Pixar’s Luxo Jr. short film. But there’s a little bit of most useless machine added just for fun. If you try to shut it off the lamp shade is used to flip that switch on the base back on.

[Shanshan Zhou], [Adam Ben-Dror], and [Joss Doggett] developed the little robot as a class project at the Victoria University of Wellington. It uses six servo motors driven by an Arduino to give the inanimate object the ability to move as if it’s alive. There is no light in the lamp as the bulb has been replaced by a webcam. The image is monitored using OpenCV to include face tracking as one of the behaviors. All of the animations are procedural, making use of Processing to convey movement instructions to the Arduino board.

Do not miss seeing the video embedded after the break.

[via Gizmodo]

LED(Lamp) is an advanced bluetooth lighting system made with arduino, has been realized using a very cheap bluetooth module.

The cool part is the control app for Android device that allows you to control the lighting system.
The firmware for Arduino is open source. The app for android offers: brightness control, color, 8 memories, save favorite color on start.
You can find more on the official [website]

Whenever there is a shadow, somewhere is light.

The Party Lumibot is a remote controllable and autonomous lamp-bot that is somekind of desktop-robot. It consists of white and pink LEDs that are controlled from an Arduino. The pink LEDs are prepared with shrink-tube to get water resistant and submarine able. The head is composed of seven transparent one-way plastic cubs. The body is a 1.5L PET bottle filled with water. Controlled via remote control through a IR sensor to the microcontroller.

The Story

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We keep seeing a lot of RGB lamps, but they’re also constantly increasing in size and complexity. Take this rendition, which uses a lot of RGB LEDs and has smartphone control (translated).

The lamp itself uses 31 RGB LEDs arranged in a sphere that organizes them into three vertical rings. They’re all ganged together (not individually addressable) with one transistor per color. An Arduino board is responsible for control, and the build includes a Bluetooth module for incoming commands.

As you can see above, the Android app driving the device is really quite good. In addition to sliders for color mixing there is a separate window with a color picker. [Remick] included options like favorite color combos, color scrolling, and a timer that will shut the lamp off. We couldn’t embed it here, but you’ll find some demo video at the link above.

This chandelier is something we’d expect to see on sale in the local gallery store. [Starkec] made it a couple of years back and we just love the look. The materials are pretty common, and you can throw it together in an afternoon.

The diffuser are made from clear glass soda bottles. After removing the labels and giving them a good cleaning, they were each set upside down and sprayed with some glass frosting spray. A four-conductor telephone wire serves both as the support for the bottle and electrical path for the RGB LED inside of each. The original screw cap for the bottles makes it a twist to install them after the soldering is done. There are two common color buses so that alternating colors can be shown at the same time. After seeing the video we think you’ll agree that the wiring scheme makes for some great animated effects.

[Thanks Craig]