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.
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:.
Building an LED cube usually means a heck of a lot of delicate soldering work. Bending jigs, assembly jigs, and lots of patience are the name of the game. The problem multiplies if you want to build with RGB LEDs. [Shawn and Alex] are hoping to change all that with their L3D cube. Yes, L3D is a Kickstarter campaign, but it has enough good things about it that we’re comfortable featuring it here on Hackaday. What [Shawn and Alex] have done is substitute WS2812b surface mount LEDs for the 5mm or 3mm through hole LEDs commonly used in cubes. The downside is that the cube is no longer visible on all sides. The upside is that it becomes a snap to assemble.
The L3D cube is open source hardware. The source files are available from separate software and hardware Github repositories. Not next week, not when they hit their funding goal, but now. We seriously like this, and hope all crowdfunding campaigns go this route.
The L3D cube uses an open source Spark Core as its processor and WiFi interface. Using WS2812b’s means less I/O pins, and no LED driver chips needed. This makes it perfect for a board like Spark or Arduino. On the software side, the team has created a Processing Library which makes it easy to create animations with no coding necessary.
L3D has all the features one would expect from an LED cube – a microphone for ambient sound visualizations, and lots of built in animations. It seems [Shawn and Alex] have also created some sort of synchronization system while allows multiple cubes to work together when stacked. The team is hoping someone will come up with a 3D printed light diffuser to make these cubes truly a 360 degree experience.
The L3D cube campaign is doing well, [Shawn and Alex] are close to doubling their $38,000 goal. Click past the break to check out their Kickstarter video!
Just before the days where every high school student had a cell phone, everyone in class had a TI graphing calculator. In some ways this was better than a cell phone: If you wanted to play BlockDude instead of doing trig identities, this was much more discrete. The only downside is that the TI calculators can’t easily communicate to each other like cell phones can. [Christopher] has solved this problem with his latest project which provides Wi-Fi functionality to a TI graphing calculator, and has much greater aspirations than helping teenagers waste time in pre-calculus classes.
The boards are based around a Spark Core Wi-Fi development board which is (appropriately) built around a TI CC3000 chip and a STM32F103 microcontroller. The goal of the project is to connect the calculators directly to the Global CALCnet network without needing a separate computer as a go-between. These boards made it easy to get the original Arduino-based code modified and running on the new hardware.
After a TI-BASIC program is loaded on the graphing calculator, it is able to input the credentials for the LAN and access the internet where all kinds of great calculator resources are available through the Global CALCnet. This is a great project to make the math workhorse of the classroom even more useful to students. Or, if you’re bored with trig identities again, you can also run a port of DOOM.
