Now you can prove that you have the bumpiest commute in the office by measuring how rough your ride actually is. [Techbitar] calls the project the Bump-O-Meter. It uses an Arduino, GPS, and accelerometer to map out rough roads.

The hardware was built on a breadboard and [Techbitar] goes into detail about connecting and communicating with each module used. Once it’s running, the logger will read up to six sensors and record them to an SD card. In the video after the break he shows the method used to dump and graph the data. He starts by looking at the data in a spreadsheet. There are many fields included in the file but only three of them are needed to graph what is seen above. After narrowing down the number of columns he heads over to GPS Visualizer and uploads the data set which is then automatically plotted on the map.

In a Utopian society all city owned vehicles would have a system like this and the bad sections of road would automatically appear on the road crew’s repair list.

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Here is the GDR Mk 2. I've recycled the parts from the GDR Mk 1 and made some additions/upgrades:

- Built a body for the robot out of a couple of storage boxes

- Added a 2 POF Turret to the top

- attached a laser pointer to the turret and programmed it to aim and fire

- split the power so there is now dedicated power to the motors.

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Time to add my blog @ www.bajdi.com. Check out my photo gallery with lots of pictures of my robots and the stuff I have bought.

Read the full article on MAKE

This time Arduino for drinks, always from Romania.

Do you know what you get if you combine Facebook, Twitter, Arduino, Raspberry PI and alcohol ? Well, you get the Social Drink Machine and a lot of really happy people at HowToWeb Bucharest.
The Social Drink Machine involves a fully enabled robotic bar which prepares your dream cocktail, a Facebook application which you use to order the drink and also a Twitter bot as an alternative ordering method.

In order to “drink with Facebook”, all you have to do is to scan the QR code displayed next to the machine with your mobile phone. It will get you to a Facebook application which enables you to choose the drink you want. Once you have decided what you want to drink, the application displays a large QR code on your mobile phone. You show this to the machine camera, and you will get your drink prepared. Actually, a robotic machine will prepare it for you. All you have to do is to place the glass, which is then moved back and forth until all of the ingredients have been mixed. And if you wanna brag about this, the application allows you to post on Facebook about the crush you just got on the cool robotic bartender.

[Robofun - Create] also made this.

As one might imagine, there's plenty of shiny things to get excited about in BeatBots' San Francisco office, one of which is suspended on a wall in between paintings of Keepon and his power-promoting British cousin, Zingy. Marek Michalowski gave us a look at the still-unnamed wall drawing robot he's been fiddling around with. Still in its early stages, the 'bot is supported by wires that also power it, using an Arduino brain to drag a dry erase marker across the white surface of the wall. Check out a quick video explanation after the break.

Continue reading Keepon co-creator Marek Michalowski shows off his Arduino-powered wall drawing robot (video)

Filed under: Robots

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Well, the Romanians at Robofun have built a drink mixing robot. It's not looking like the famous Bar2D2, it's looking more like a 2 axis CNC machine, but it has it's share of coolness. To order a drink, you scan the bar code with your smart phone, get to the site and choose a drink. Then wait for a bar code to be displayed on your phone, place a glass in the machine and show the bar code to the machine's webcam.

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How this actually works is described about below but also in the video. I suggest you watch the video as my writing is terrible.

Video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cEp7duDbNU&feature=plcp

The Processing code : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/v9hkdxuoazoyb0d/fCGQzEfBAK The OpenCV and Arduino libraries are needed. OpenCV also needs to be installed onto the computer.

The Arduino code : https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ujjlahx83ilv1j2/QB0bu8E-EJ

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Do you know what you get if you combine 44 beer cans with an Arduino board and a Raspberry PI ? I tell you : fantastic user engagement!

It happened at Webstock, event which took place in Bucharest this month. Staropramen, one of the sponsors of the event asked us for an innovative way to offer a trip to Prague to one of the event’s guests.

So, we came up with a keyboard made out of 44 Staropramen beer cans. Each beer can was a key, and whenever someone touched it, the corresponding letter appeared on a large plasma screen (just like any regular computer keyboard).

And the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.

Behind the scene, the system is built around an Arduino board and a few capacitive controllers (just like the ones which are inside smartphones’ touch screens), connected to a Raspberry PI board which controls the plasma screen display.

Other hardware we used was the Sparkfun MPR121 Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout Board (4 of them, each controlling 11 beer cans) and one Sparkfun MP3 Trigger Board which controls the sound effects.

A movie and some photos took during the event can be found on the [website]
(feel free to use them if you want, or download directly the photos as a zip archive).

[Webstock] is the biggest blogging and social media event in Romania.

[Robofun Create] is a Romanian company specialised in creating cool on-demand technology products.