Even three decades after the Chernobyl disaster and five years after the incident at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, each of the surrounding communities are still impacted by dangerous radiation levels. However, since the source of the problem is invisible, the relative risks remain difficult to communicate. As a result, the motivation and urgency to help those affected continue to diminish.

In order to visualize the threat, photographer Greg McNevin has mapped real-time measurements using long-exposure photographs of areas in Fukushima and Russia’s Bryansk region. To do this, McNevin and his team combined a custom Geiger counter with an LED stick and an Arduino-based controller. The detection device picks up radiation levels as it is moved around and outputs this data as an analog signal, which is then converted into white, orange or red lights — based on the severity of the reading.

Walking through a photo with shutter open anywhere from 20 seconds to five minutes allows us to create dynamic walls of undulating light, highlighting contamination in the environments it exists.

White shows levels under 0.23uSv per hour (1mSv per year), which is the Japanese government’s guideline for decontamination (which assumes people spend 8 hours a day outside and 16 hours inside). Russia’s official “norm” level is roughly the same, 0.20uSv/h.

Orange shows contamination levels elevated above this, up to 1.0uSv per hour (roughly 5mSv per year) – a range where protective measures to minimise radiation exposure should be considered. Protective measures can include resettlement, decontamination, special health services, food controls, etc. Russian communities are obligated to be resettled above this level.

Red shows radioactivity greater than 1.0uSv per hour (upwards of 5mSv per year) – a level where protective measures to minimise radiation exposure are necessary.

Using this tool in areas affected by Chernobyl and Fukushima, we found that places decontaminated by the authorities consistently exhibit radiation levels elevated above official guidelines. We also found that using the same scale, places in Russia’s Bryansk region demonstrated comparable levels of contamination now, 30 years later, as places in Fukushima do today.

As the photographer explains, this project is not a critique of the government’s decontamination efforts, but rather a demonstration of the long-term effects radioactivity has on the environments and those living within them. Be sure to check out all of McNevin’s photos, as well as learn more about the project here.

(Photos: Greg McNevin/Greenpeace)

With graduation season upon us, Makers are coming up with creative ways to decorate their mortarboards. One thing is for certain, Fahad Mirza will stand out in the crowd of his classmates with a movie-themed cap that would even impress Keanu Reeves himself. Inspired by The Matrix, the headpiece is equipped with an Arduino Pro Mini, an Adafruit NeoPixel ring for its green LED effects, and a 3.7V lithium-ion battery for power. The electronics are all hidden inside the cap which aptly reads, “Everything that has a beginning has an end.”

You've heard of "dancing" shoes, but have you heard of "disabling your contacts and notifications" shoes?

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This rover makes use of the following:

CPPM RC radio input from openTx RC radio

Arduino Nano to handle communcations from RC, Raspberry Pi via USB (not attached  yet), I/O to servos via i2c, I/O to/from Roboclaw motor controller via serial (gets velocity from encoders on motors), and output to various DC-driven devices (headlight, gripper).

5.8ghz video transmitter for FPV roving

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Electronic musical instruments are fun for Makers. With some cheap tools, know-how and passion, anyone can become a real synth geek. Just ask software developer Liam Lacey, who also happens to be a sound coder and freelance hacker. He recently won element14’s Open Source Music Tech design challenge for his Vintage Toy Synthesizer project — it’s an acoustic wooden toy piano converted into an open-source, standalone polyphonic digital synthesizer running on a BeagleBone Black and an Arduino Pro Mini.

Playing an instrument is about a lot more than just the sound you create – the way you play it; the physical feedback; and the overall feel and aesthetics of the instrument also play a big role in the overall experience, with these elements also helping to nurture inspiration, and can even affect your perception of the sound created.

Lacey developed the voice engine using the C++ audio DSP library Maximilian, and the keyboard mechanism uses homemade pressure sensors made out of Velostat. The instrument has 18 keys, with players able to also alter scales using the knobs on top of the mini piano’s lid.

Other dials are used to toggle dedicated waveform oscillators, various filters and onboard distortion effects, and there’s even vintage parameters for replicating old or broken analog synth voices. What’s neat is that the converted toy can also act as a MIDI controller to send velocity-sensitive note messages and polyphonic aftertouch to Logic Pro, Ableton Live and various music software programs.

Here’s a diagram of the software architecture of the synth:

You can read more about the hack here, as well as listen to some quick and rough sound/patch demos:

The project took three and a half months to bring to fruition, and let us just say, the final result is quite impressive! Check out the video below to learn more about  its specs and explore the complete documentation on GitHub.

The people behind the PocketNC heard you like CNC PCB mills, so they milled you a PCB mill out of PCB. They announced their surprising new open source hardware product, a pocket sized 3-axis CNC machine entirely made out of FR4 PCB material, aptly named “FR4 Machine Shield”, at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire.

We know the concept from quadcopters, little robots, and generally things that are small enough to make use of their PCBs as a structural component. But an entire CNC machine, soldered together from a few dozen PCBs certainly takes it to the next level.

There is no doubt that 2mm thick fiber reinforced epoxy can be surprisingly rigid, although the Achilles heel of this method might be the solder joints. However, it looks like all load bearing, mechanical connections of the machine are supported by tightly interlocking “dovetail”-joints, which may help protecting all the solder connections from the strain hardening effects of continuous stress and spindle vibrations.

As you might expect, most of the wiring is embedded into the FR4 frame construction, and to squeeze the maximum value out of the PCB material, the motor driver boards interface via card edge connectors with the (currently Arduino based) controller board. In addition to the milling head, which features a brushless DC motor and a tool coupler, the team wants to develop heads for circuit printing, microscopy, pneumatic pick and place, hot air reflow, and 3D printing.

With all those cost-driven design choices, from the one-step manufacturing process of the frame and wiring to the dismissal of screws and nuts from the frame assembly, the “FR4 Machine Shield” could indeed become one of the cheapest CNC machine kits on the market. The team targets an introduction price of $400 during a Kickstarter campaign in June 2016. Can they deliver? [Gerrit] check Pocket NC out at the Faire and ended up raving about how they run their business.

Enjoy their teaser video below!

[Great Scott] should win an award for quickest explanation of a buck converter. Clocking in at five and a half minutes, the video clearly shows the operating principles behind the device.

It starts off with the question, what should you do if you want to drop a voltage? Many of us know that we can dim and brighten an LED using the PWM on an Arduino, but a closer inspection with an oscilloscope still shows 5V peaks that would be dangerous to a 3.3V circuit. He then adds an inductor and diode, this keeps the current from dropping too fast, but the PWM just isn’t switching fast enough to keep the coil energized.

A small modification to the Arduino’s code, and the PWM frequency is now in the kHz range. The voltage looks pretty good on the oscilloscope, but a filter cap gets it to look nice and smooth. Lastly, he shows how when the load changes the voltage out looks different. To fix this a voltage divider feeds back the information to the Arduino, letting it change the PWM duty to match the load.

In the last minute of the video he shows how to hook up off-the-shelf switching regulators, whose support components are now completely demystified as the basic principles are understood. Video after the break.

Minecraft modding has become almost as popular as the block-based game itself, with tons of editors and tools available to create new kinds of blocks, mobs, and weapons. And now, with this mod framework that can talk to an Arduino, modders can build blocks that break out of the Minecraft world to control the real world.

While turning on a light from Minecraft is not exactly new, the way that MCreator for Arduino goes about it is pretty neat. MCreator is a no-code framework for building Minecraft mods, which allows modders to build new game capabilities with a drag and drop interface. The MCreator Arduino toolkit allows modders to build custom Minecraft blocks that can respond to in-game events and communicate with an Arduino over USB. Whatever an Arduino can do – light an LED, sense a button press – can be brought into the game. It’s all open-source and free for non-commercial use, which is perfect for the upcoming STEM-based summer camp season. We can think of some great projects that would really jazz up young hackers when presented through a Minecraft interface.

Back in 2014, Josef Holmner built his own DIY quadcopter with a flight time of 30 minutes. Impressively, he also developed a wearable controller that enabled him to maneuver his device through the air using just one hand.

As you can see in the video below, pitch and roll are dictated by the angle of his hand, yaw is handled by two push buttons in his palm, and throttle is achieved through the bending of his index finger.

To get started, Holmner needed a transmitter and receiver, an Arduino Nano, a digital potentiometer, a flex sensor, a pair of push buttons, an IMU, and a glove, of course. The Maker had torn apart the transmitter, replaced the regular potentiometer with a digital one that could be controlled by the Arduino. After taking out the electronics from its original enclosure, he housed them inside a 3D-printed box, and reused the old battery holder by gluing it to the bottom of the case. Velcro straps are used to keep it around his forearm.

The flex sensor was sewn to the index finger, while the buttons were placed in the palm and the IMU set on the back of the hand. He also made a connector between the glove and the box, and added four LEDs that illuminate to show the angle of the glove.

Holmner has made the Arduino code and schematics available online. Be sure to see it in action!

[Rob Bailey] likes to build things and he likes ham radio. We are guessing he likes mints too since he’s been known to jam things into Altoids tins. He had been thinking about building a code practice oscillator in a Altoids Smalls tin, but wasn’t sure he could squeeze an Arduino Pro Mini in there too. Then he found the TinyLily Mini. The rest is history, as they say, and 1CPO was born.

The TinyLily Mini is a circular-shaped Arduino (see right) about the size of a US dime. most of the pads are arranged around the circle and there is a small header that takes a USB programmer. A small rechargeable battery can run the device for a long time.

If you’ve ever written Morse code software, one challenge is to compute the actual sending speed in words per minute (WPM). If you are doing a serial port, for example, the speed is easy because the sent elements are the same length. However, with Morse code, some things are very short (like an E, for example) and some are much longer (like a zero). In fact, the code tries to reflect the frequency certain letters occur. E is the shortest character and the most common in English texts.

You might think [Samuel Morse] was responsible for this, but his original code was only numbers. The idea is you would get numbers and look them up in a code book. Presumably, some of the codes would have been single letters forming an early coding like ASCII, Baudot, or EBCDIC. [Alfred Vail] expanded the system to include letters and other characters and assigned lengths based on the examination of type cases at the local newspaper. That code also used dots, dashes, and long dashes, but it is almost recognizable as the Morse code in use today.

So [Rob] looked for a way to determine the speed and found that the ARRL uses the timing of the word PARIS as an average word. [Rob] wasn’t quite convinced that was the right way to go, so he compiled a list of the 1,000 most common English words, the 100 largest cities in the word, and a few other groups of words and computed the average element length of the words. PARIS has 50 elements total. The average of [Rob’s] list was 49.489. Pretty close.

If you think Morse code is dead, there are still a number of hams who enjoy it. Also, the US Air Force trains 10 Morse code operators every year. Morse has been used to transfer data over cell phones cheaply, and we’ve seen plenty of larger practice devices.