The Artisan's Asylum has a few guiding principles, one of which is anyone can "make." We assume one of the others is "you can never have too many hexapods." If Stompy, the giant rideable bot, is a bit much for you to handle (or store), then maybe Hexy is more your speed. He's got six legs and 20 servos, but at only $200, he's much cheaper than similar hexapod kits and, most importantly, more adorable. The bot is the brain child of Joseph Schlesinger, a resident at the Somerville hacker space who saw a need for a low-cost but serious robotics kit. Since hitting Kickstarter in May, his creation has raked in roughly $86,000 in pledges, far surpassing his original goal of thirteen grand. We swung by Joe's booth to get a taste of what exactly his hundreds of backers have bought into and to find out what's next for the budding bot entrepreneur.

Gallery: Hexy the hexabot hands-on

Continue reading Hexy: hands-on with the adorable, affordable hexapod (video)

Hexy: hands-on with the adorable, affordable hexapod (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Jun 2012 18:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Many solutions exist for publishing data coming from Arduino boards on the web. Bangon Kali, in his detailed tutorial, proposes his novel approach, which makes use of several widespread and open-source technologies, such as Node.JS, jQuery and Apache:

Using the USB, the Arduino Board is connected to the PC serially to a certain COM port which the OS allocates. Node.JS, the asynchronous server side JavaScript engine then listens for the port using a Node.JS module called SerialPort2. When a signal is received, using the Node.JS Socket.IO module, data is then served also asynchronously to the web providing a real time feed of the Arduino signal.

The tutorial (which can be applied on Linux, Mac OS and Windows) can be found here.

[Via: DangerousPrototypes and The Code Project]

En este nuevo tutorial Arduino by ARDUTEKA, estudiamos a fondo los módulos GPS, en concreto los módulos diseñados por LIBELIUM, para aprender a extraer y comprender todas las tramadas de datos que recibimos de los GPS y posteriormente, tratar esa información para mostrar en un display con bus i2C datos como la latitud, longitud, altura y hora UTC…

[Via: Arduteka]

There are people who use the Arduino for some serious electronics related stuff.

Then, there are folks who use it just for fun. Alan Chatham and his team over at UnoJoy have developed a concept for Arduino Uno based USB Controllers.

Here is an excerpt of our interview with Alan:

Me: What made you choose the Arduino Uno as the heart of the controller? There are many development boards available which incorporate an ATmega8U2/16U2 or even 32U2.

Alan: This is easy – everyone loves Arduino!  It comes down to ease of use and reach.  Our primary goal with this project is to make a tool that is both easy to use and accessible.  There’s lots of code out there to make joysticks with other chips, but all the Atmel USB chips are surface-mount, and they all need a whole big toolchain to use. Plus, USB is super-complicated, and we want to encourage people, even non-technical ones, to spend their time thinking up really sweet new ways to play games, not trying to figure out what an HID descriptor is for.  On the reach side of things, Arduino is a perfect platform – even those of us that love our inline assembly and fuse settings tend to have an Arduino around for quick prototyping, and of course, Arduino’s a great platform for students and designers.

 

Me: Any problems that you faced while developing the prototype?

Alan: I think the biggest challenge we faced was to make it much easier for non-experts to do some more complicated things, like re-flash the ATmega8u2 on the Arduino. Let’s face it, any instructions that open up with ‘First, install XCode’ aren’t exactly user-friendly. In that vein, I put together some simple one-click batch files for installing the appropriate drivers on Windows and OSX, as well as ones for reflashing the ATmega8u2 chip between Arduino and UnoJoy firmwares.  It’s still not as simple as I’d like, so if anyone out there is handy with basic OSX GUI application programming, or the program installation chain on Windows, drop me a line!

In the end, we’re hoping that our code and examples can inspire other designers and builders and gamers to make some really awesome controllers. If they do, I of course encourage them to send their pictures and videos our way, at unojoy.tumblr.com!

Now, you too can make yourself a USB Joystick/ Gamepad/ Controller by choosing any form of input that the Arduino boards can understand. The source code and all the necessary download files are available at Google Code. Don’t forget to check out the Controller for Gran Turismo:

Thank you Alan for sharing a wonderful project with us.

A nice, detailed, well linked article on Open source hardware, its impact and future scope along with real life citations about the key players.

Click here to read the full text.

Via:[ISGTW]

Have you ever wondered where all those magical Arduinos come from?  Surprise!  They come from Torino, Italy.  The video below will walk you through the PCB manufacuring and assembly process.  A quick history lesson for you: this revolutionary microcontroller platform was created in 2005 by founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles who wanted a device to make student learning less expensive.  For a full history rundown, check out Arduino History from IEEE Spectrum.

Top Arduino Projects

• DIY Star Trek Automatic Door
• DIY Capacitive Touch Made Easy
• Psychedelic Sphere of LEDs

Continue reading Insert Coin: BoardX is an open-source, modular motherboard for prolific prototypers

Insert Coin: BoardX is an open-source, modular motherboard for prolific prototypers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 01 Nov 2011 13:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I went to the  Santa Cruz New Tech Meetup on Friday 12 Aug 2011 to find out more about the Makers Factory that is starting in Santa Cruz in November.  (I blogged about the Makers Factory already.)  Details about the event are on the meetup web page.

At the meetup they confirmed that they will not be getting the sort of expensive shop equipment that places like TechShop (over the hill) have.  The initial setup will be suitable for mechatronics work, similar to what Gabriel Elkaim teaches in the Mechatronics class at UCSC.  Gabriel was the fifth of five speakers at the MeetUp and provided a nice overview of the Mechatronics class.

What the Makers Factory will have are low-cost 3D printing machines (which I suspect will not be useful for much, but are fun toys), a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, and some electronics equipment (soldering stations and some oscilloscopes, I guess).  They’ll probably also get some board shears.  I think I talked them out of trying to do their own PC board fabrication, in favor of ordering boards from some place like 4pcb.com.  You can probably do a class full of small boards as one $145 order from 4pcb.com (even without a .edu address) and give each person 4 copies of their board.  The 2-week turnaround time is fine for a class. It would probably take longer than that to make your own using low-cost tools in a classroom setting with only a few hours of class time a week, and the quality would be much worse.  I’d also hate to be the one in charge of getting rid of the hazardous waste produced by PC board etching.

I brought my HexMotor board with me to the MeetUp and showed it off to a few people, including Gabriel Elkaim, who was properly polite about it.  He also told me about the new PC boards he had just sent out for fab—they are redoing the electronic cockroaches that are used for the first lab in Mechatronics, since the old ones have started acquiring too much damage.  The problem is that students were much more inventive in discovering ways to damage the boards than originally expected, so the new design has a lot more protection circuitry.

I did get a chance to talk with Chris Yonge, who will be running Makers Factory.  It sounds like he is interested in having me teach an Arduino programming class and PC board design using free tools. I recommended Eagle for PC board design, even though it is not open-source, because it is fairly mature, the free version is enough for classes and hobbyists, it runs on both PCs and Macs, it has an adequate auto-router, and the licensed version is still fairly cheap.

There are open-source projects for PCB design, like FreePCB, which runs only on Windows and has no auto-router, KICAD which runs under Linux and Windows (but not Mac OS X, I believe), and many others.  There is a good list at http://www.olimex.com/pcb/dtools.html.  The general consensus of the hobbyist community seems to be that currently Eagle is most fully featured and robust free PCB editor, and that none of the open-source projects comes close yet.  Since I need Mac OS X software, and most of the open-source software is for Linux, my choices are more restricted still.  I don’t know what sort of computers Makers Factory is planning to get for classes—but they should choose software as much as possible that is platform independent.