It’s no secret that hackers like to measure things. Good numbers lead to good decisions, like when to kick your wastrel teenager out of a luxuriously lengthy shower. Hence the creation of this wireless Arduino-based water meter interface.

We’ll stipulate that “wireless” is a bit of a stretch. Creator [David Schneider] chose to split the system into two parts – a magnetometer and an Arduino to sense impulses from the water company meter, and a Raspberry Pi to serve the web interface. The water meter is at the street rather than in his house, so the sensor is wired to the Pi with some telephone cable. But from there the system is wireless.

[David] goes into some good detail on the sensing problem he faced, which relies on detecting the varying magnetic field due to the spinny-bits inside the flowmeter and cleaning up the signal with the Arduino; he also addresses aliasing errors that occur when flow rate approaches the sampling rate of the magnetometer.

We like the fact that there’s a lot of potential to leverage this technique to monitor other processes with rotating magnetic fields. And like this optically coupled gas-meter monitor, it’s not invasive of the utility’s equipment either, which is a plus.

[via reddit]

In this post I am going to show how to use an Arduino board and BitVoicer Server to control a few LEDs with voice commands. I will be using the Arduino Micro in this post, but you can use any Arduino board you have at hand.

The following procedures will be executed to transform voice commands into LED activity:

read more

With so many amazing projects being done with both boards, it can be difficult to know which is right for you. Read on to make your decision.

Read more on MAKE

The post Raspberry Pi or Arduino? One Simple Rule to Choose the Right Board appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Dear: LMR

Just to let you know guys it wasn't that long ago I asked my Dad if we could start a robot club at school. My dad brought it up to my princible and he did not have a problem with it. This robot club is probably going to teach people in highschool to build there first robot. I have no idea what robot I am going to teach highschoolers to build.

read more

I just uploaded a new video tutorial on how to use the Grove dual H-Bridge module with the DynamixShield and an Arduino Due to control DC motors. 

read more

Humble Bundle unveiled its latest book pack on Wednesday and, hoo boy, is it a doozy. The pay-what-you-want charity is teaming up with Make for a huge book pack that teaches the basics of Arduino and Pi programming. Pay anything you want for six Maker handbooks geared towards amateur roboticists. Throw down more than the current $10 average and Humble Bundle will double that figure to include a full dozen titles as well as a $5 - $10 discount off a year of Maker Magazine. You can also round out the deal for $15 total and receive two more titles -- Make: Sensors and Making Things Talk. Proceeds from these sales will benefit Maker Ed.

[Image Credit: Getty]

Source: Humble Bundle

Humble Bundle unveiled its latest book pack on Wednesday and, hoo boy, is it a doozy. The pay-what-you-want charity is teaming up with Make for a huge book pack that teaches the basics of Arduino and Pi programming. Pay anything you want for six Maker handbooks geared towards amateur roboticists. Throw down more than the current $10 average and Humble Bundle will double that figure to include a full dozen titles as well as a $5 - $10 discount off a year of Maker Magazine. You can also round out the deal for $15 total and receive two more titles -- Make: Sensors and Making Things Talk. Proceeds from these sales will benefit Maker Ed.

[Image Credit: Getty]

Humble Bundle unveiled its latest book pack on Wednesday and, hoo boy, is it a doozy. The pay-what-you-want charity is teaming up with Make for a huge book pack that teaches the basics of Arduino and Pi programming. Pay anything you want for six Maker handbooks geared towards amateur roboticists. Throw down more than the current $10 average and Humble Bundle will double that figure to include a full dozen titles as well as a $5 - $10 discount off a year of Maker Magazine. You can also round out the deal for $15 total and receive two more titles -- Make: Sensors and Making Things Talk. Proceeds from these sales will benefit Maker Ed.

[Image Credit: Getty]

Source: Humble Bundle

With the ability to run a full Linux operating system, the Intel Edison board has more than enough computing power for real-time digital audio processing. [Navin] used the Atom based module to build Effecter: a digital effects processor.

Effecter is written in C, and makes use of two libraries. The MRAA library from Intel provides an API for accessing the I/O ports on the Edison module. PortAudio is the library used for capturing and playing back audio samples.

To allow for audio input and output, a sound card is needed. A cheap USB sound card takes care of this, since the Edison does not have built-in hardware for audio. The Edison itself is mounted on the Edison Arduino Breakout Board, and combined with a Grove shield from Seeed. Using the Grove system, a button, potentiometer, and LCD were added for control.

The code is available on Github, and is pretty easy to follow. PortAudio calls the audioCallback function in effecter.cc when it needs samples to play. This function takes samples from the input buffer, runs them through an effect’s function, and spits the resulting samples into the output buffer. All of the effect code can be found in the ‘effects’ folder.

You can check out a demo Effecter applying effects to a keyboard after the break. If you want to build your own, an Instructable gives all the steps.

For those who haven’t addicted themselves to Super Hexagon yet, it’s pretty… addicting, to say the least. Normally this 80’s arcade-style game would run in a browser but some of the people at Club de Jaqueo in Buenos Aires decided to cram all of that into an Arduino. They didn’t stop there, though, and thought that it would work best with a POV display.

To navigate the intricate maze of blending a POV display with a fast-paced game like this, the group turned to the trusty Arduino Micro. After some frustration in the original idea, they realized that the game is perfectly suited for a POV display since it’s almost circular. The POV shouldn’t take up too much of the processing power of the Arduino, so most of the clock cycles can be used for playing the game. They couldn’t keep the original name anymore due to the lack of hexagon shape (and presumably copyrights and other legal hurdles), but the style of the original is well-preserved.

The group demonstrated their setup this past weekend, and the results are impressive judging by the video below. They’ve also released their source code and schematics as well, in case you have an old fan (or maybe even a bicycle?) lying around that is just begging to be turned into a mini-arcade game.