Hi good people!

I have alot of robotic projects,and now I'm trying to make the one remote to control them all.

I have a lasercut box with a raspberry pi 3 inside, with the original 7 inch touch display, there is also two 3 axis joysticks. The touch display will do everything that I can't do with the joysticks. I currently have a quadroped robot using Phoenix Code controlled with a PS2 joypad. The interfacing on the touch display will be made in Kivy and python.

read more

Hi good people!

I have alot of robotic projects,and now I'm trying to make the one remote to control them all.

I have a lasercut box with a raspberry pi 3 inside, with the original 7 inch touch display, there is also two 3 axis joysticks. The touch display will do everything that I can't do with the joysticks. I currently have a quadroped robot using Phoenix Code controlled with a PS2 joypad. The interfacing on the touch display will be made in Kivy and python.

read more

Hi good people!

I have alot of robotic projects,and now I'm trying to make the one remote to control them all.

I have a lasercut box with a raspberry pi 3 inside, with the original 7 inch touch display, there is also two 3 axis joysticks. The touch display will do everything that I can't do with the joysticks. I currently have a quadroped robot using Phoenix Code controlled with a PS2 joypad. The interfacing on the touch display will be made in Kivy and python.

read more

Turn an old headlamp into a power assist for your eyebrows. Use an infrared remote control to raise, lower, waggle, and adjust.

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The post Strap a Robot to Your Face! Your Expressions Are Now Controlled by Technology appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

What do you get when you mix together all of the stuff that you can get for cheap over eBay with a bit of creativity and some PVC pipe? [Austiwawa] gets a table lamp, remote-controlled by a toy gun, that turns off and falls over when you shoot it. You’ve got to watch the video below the break.

This isn’t a technical hack. Rather it’s a creative use of a bunch of easily available parts, with a little cutting here and snipping there to make it work. For instance, [Austiwawa] took a remote control sender and receiver pair straight off the rack and soldered some wires to extend the LED and fit it inside the toy gun. A relay module controls the lamp, and plugs straight into the Arduino that’s behind everything. Plug and play.

Which is not to say the lamp lacks finesse. We especially like the screw used as an end-of-travel stop for the servo motor, and the nicely fabricated servo bracket made from two Ls. And you can’t beat the fall-over-dead effect. Or can you? Seriously, though, great project [Austiwawa]!

Dave Stein is a software engineer during the day and a tinkerer on Arduino projects in his free time after work. He submitted on the blog his first Arduino project with the goal of powering his old AT-AT Walker toy (mid 1980s) with Arduino Uno and make it walk and perform some of the functions we see in the Star Wars movies.

AT-AT (All Terrain Armored Transport) are four-legged combat walkers 22.5mt (73.8ft) tall of the Galactic Empire, one of its most famous military symbols introduced  in “Star Wars V: The Empire strikes back”, and we may see them again in the next weeks on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” the upcoming episode of the saga opening December 18th.

The AT-AT walker toy updated by Dave is controlled by a wired Xbox 360 controller that interfaces with a computer and transports a signal to the Arduino Uno for walker movement:

The left and right triggers move the walker forward and backward while the right stick moves the head horizontally. If you have ever played with this toy you may remember it was clumsy and difficult to move. In my project I wanted to learn about and conquer the difficulties of quadrupedal movement. The realization process for my project involved a massive amount of trial and error, research, and failures. I have to say that I failed many more times than I succeeded with configuring the servos with the Arduino. I went down many long roads to learn about prototyping with the breadboard, soldering, and redesigns of the final product. The most difficult part of the project aside from adjusting the gait of the walker for balance and movement was providing enough power to the servos without frying the microcontroller or any of the components. I was finally able to overcome these difficulties by implementing the Adafruit servo shield.

Check AtAt Project website for all info, parts list and upcoming tutorial!

With all of the cool features on the Raspberry Pi, it is somewhat notable that it lacks a power button. In a simple setup, the only way to cut power to the tiny computer is to physically remove the power cord. [Dalton63841] found that this was below his wife’s tolerance level for electronics, and built a simple remote control for his Raspberry Pi.

[Dalton63841] started this project by trying to use the UART TX pin, but this turned out to be a dead-end. He decided instead to use an Arduino to monitor the 3.3V power rail on the Pi. When the Pi is shut down in software, the Arduino can sense that the Pi isn’t on any more and disconnect the power. The remote control is used to turn the Pi on. The Arduino reads the IR code from a remote and simply powers up the Pi. This is a very simple and elegant solution that requires absolutely no software to be installed on the Raspberry Pi.

We know that this isn’t the most technically complex project we’ve ever featured, but it is a good beginner project for anyone just getting started with a Pi, Arduino, or using IR. Plus, this could be the perfect thing to pair up with a battery-backup Raspberry Pi shutdown device that allows it to power itself down in a controlled way when a power outage is sensed.

If you’re like us, you probably have more than one Apple Remote kicking around in a parts drawer, and if you’re even more like us, you’re probably really annoyed at Apple’s tendency to use proprietary hardware and software at every turn (lightning connector, anyone?). But there’s hope for the Apple Remote now: [Sourcery] has completed a project that allows an Apple Remote to control anything you wish.

The idea is fairly straightforward: A device interprets the IR signals from an Apple Remote, and then outputs another IR signal that can do something useful on a non-Apple product. [Sourcery] uses an Arduino to do the IR translation, along with a set of IR emitters and detectors, and now the Apple Remote can control anything, from stereos to TVs to anything you can imagine. It also doesn’t remove the Apple Remote’s capability to control Apple products, in case you need yours to do that as well.

[Sourcery] notes that sometimes working with RAW IR signals can be a little difficult, but the information on their project and in their 25-minute video discusses how to deal with that, so make sure to check that out after the break. Don’t have an Apple Remote? You can do a similar thing with a PS3 controller.

[AlxDroidDev] built himself a nice remote control box for CHDK-enabled cameras. If you haven’t heard of CHDK, it’s a pretty cool software modification for some Canon cameras. CHDK adds many new features to inexpensive cameras. In this case, [AlxDroidDev] is using a feature that allows the camera shutter to be activated via USB. CHDK can be run from the SD card, so no permanent modifications need to be made to the camera.

[AlxDroidDev’s] device runs off of an ATMega328p with Arduino. It operates from a 9V battery. The circuit contains an infrared receiver and also a Bluetooth module. This allows [AlxDroidDev] to control his camera using either method. The device interfaces to the camera using a standard USB connector and cable. It contains three LEDs, red, green, and blue. Each one indicates the status of a different function.

The Arduino uses Ken Shirrif’s IR Remote library to handle the infrared remote control functions. SoftwareSerial is used to connect to the Bluetooth module. The Arduino code has built-in functionality for both Canon and Nikon infrared remote controls. To control the camera via Bluetooth, [AlxDroidDev] built a custom Android application. The app can not only control the camera’s shutter, but it can also control the level of zoom.

It’s winter, and that means terrible weather and very few days where flying RC planes and helicopters is tolerable. [sjtrny] has been spending the season with RC flight simulators for some practice time. He had been using an old Xbox 360 controller, but that was really unsuitable for proper RC simulation – a much better solution would be to use his normal RC transmitter as a computer peripheral.

The usual way of using an RC transmitter with a computer is to buy a USB simulator adapter that emulates a USB game pad through a port on the transmitter. Buying one of these adapters would mean a week of waiting for shipping, so [sjtrny] did the logical thing and made his own.

Normally, a USB simulator adapter plugs in to a 3.5mm jack on the transmitter used for a ‘buddy box’, but [sjtrny] had an extra receiver sitting around. Since a receiver simply outputs signals to servos, this provides a vastly simpler interface for an Arduino to listen in on. After connecting the rudder, elevator, aileron, and throttle signals on the receiver to an Arduino, a simple bit of code and the UnoJoy library allows any Arduino and RC receiver to become a USB joystick.

[sjtrny] went through a second iteration of hardware for this project with a Teensy 3.1. This version has higher resolution on the joystick axes, and the layout of the code isn’t slightly terrible. It’s a great project for all the RC pilots out there that can’t get a break in the weather, and is also a great use for a spare receiver you might have sitting around.