Sure, Red Bull may have gotten a lot of attention by sponsoring Felix Baumgartner's space dive, but it's not the only beverage-maker that has made some great accomplishments possible. The Prague-based brewery Staropramen was a sponsor at the recent Webstock 2012 conference, where the folks from Robofun Create showed off this so-called Beer Keyboard built with the brewer's backing. As you can see, it's more beer than keyboard, with 40 cans of Staropramen serving as "keys" that just need to be gently pressed to input a letter. To make that actually work, Robofun paired an Arduino board with some capacitive controllers for the base, and connected that to a Raspberry Pi that linked the keyboard to the TV. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the keyboard has since gone missing. Head on past the break for a video.

Continue reading Beer Keyboard combines Arduino and Raspberry Pi... and beer

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Beer Keyboard combines Arduino and Raspberry Pi... and beer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Oct 2012 20:36:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I was invited to speak at Tijuana Innovadora, a regional conference/expo. Mark Hatch of TechShop, Jason Short, an industrial designer by day and Drone programmer by night, as well as David Cuartielles of the Arduino team came as well to speak on an open source hardware panel. I must say that crossing the border into Mexico on foot the night before was an unexpected highlight of the trip. (The line leading in the opposite direction was unimaginably long.)

Our host for the event was Guillermo Montoya of Udrones.com, a Mexican company that is owned by 3D Robotics, which is run by Jordi Munoz and Chris Anderson. 3D Robotics is the business side of DIY Drones and sells the arduPilot controller along with planes and quad copters. It has a design and engineering center in San Diego and now does most of its manufacturing is in Tijuana, with plans to move all of it there eventually.

In the evening, after a tasty dinner at a Tijuana cervicheria, we visited the small manufacturing facility of Udrones on the outskirts Guillermo said they had been in the new facility for six months, after starting in his apartment. An electrical engineer, Guillermo is a childhood friend of Jordi Munoz, who is also from Tijuana and talked his friend into starting up this facility. They manufacture ArduPilot boards, cut body parts out on two CNC machines, and then assemble and test the quadcopters and ship them internationally.

The team of Udrones.com (from left to right, above) is Jesus Cain, Manuel Arriaga, Jose Guillermo Romero, Oscar Nunez, and Raul Montoya. Not shown is Lissana Lozano, who helped us find our way around the conference and the city. Raul and Jesus are also students at the university. They said it takes them about a half-hour to assemble a quadcopter.

Jason Short checks out a special black ArduPilot board.

One of the questions that Guillermo asked me was why there weren’t more signs of the maker movement in Spanish-speaking countries, particularly in Central and South America. He noted that there had not been a mini Maker Faire in those regions. There aren’t many hacker spaces either, although at World Maker Faire in NYC I met Tiburcio de la Carcova who had opened a makerspace in Santiago, Chile. I don’t have a good answer for Guillermo. David Cuartielles, who is Spanish, thought that the delays in translating technical information into Spanish is largely responsible. (MAKE is not published in a Spanish edition.) I would like to think that the example of Guillermo and his team might inspire others to see what’s possible.

Here’s an automatic parking gate for toy cars. There’s no need to press a button, the electronics detect the presence of a vehicle on either side of the gate, raising it after verifying that the lot is not already full. It’s the same idea as counting how many people enter a room in order to switch the lights but the hardware is just a bit different.

The system is controlled by a pair of sensors in the paper which serves as the parking lot. There are three sheets of heavy stock, the top and bottom both have aluminum foil on them, with the center layer  as a separator. There are holes cut in the separator where the hash marks are seen above. By adding a little pressure to the car when you drive it up to the gate this completes a circuit instructing the Arduino that there’s a vehicle in position.

You can see a demonstration, as well as the guts of the build, in two videos after the break.

[via Reddit via Freetronics]

Guys, 

behalf of my Awesomeness,

I beg all of you to PLEASE HELP me on my very 1st robot :D 

I have an Arduino UNO Rev 3 and a Protyping Sheild 

And I need to control 6 DC motors via BLUETOOTH Bee 

and my remote control is a App in ANDROID the "BlueBots" 

My MAIN concern is 

How to combine that 3 products so that I can Control the 6 DC motors 

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Primary image

Parts:

Meduino Nano microcontroller

TB6612FNG motor driver on carrier board

Four HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors

i2c serial LCD display - 16X2

1 TI MSP430 Launchpad box

1 TI Stellaris Launchpad box

Tamiya twin motor gearbox

Tamiya truck tires

Tamiya ball caster Power switch

IDE ribbon cable

2 430 contact breadboards

AA battery pack

9V battery connector

Zip ties

Wire

You can read more at my blog: http://www.meanpc.com

Halloween is just around the corner, so of course we’re looking forward to a bunch of awesome costumes put together by Hackaday readers. In an effort to match his voice to his costume, [Phil Burgess] over at Adafruit (and former Hackaday alumnus) put together an Arduino-powered voice changer to give his voice the gravitas of [James Earl Jones] or the lightheartedness of a member of the Lollipop Guild.

If you’ve ever played with a turntable, you’ll know playing a 33 RPM record at 45 or 78 RPM turns your treasured copy of Dark Side of the Moon into a lighthearted aural experience with a pitch that is much too high. Likewise, playing a single at 33 or 16 RPM means those once dulcet tones are now recordings of tormented souls in an acoustic hell.

[Phil]‘s voice changer operates on the same principle by recording sounds from a microphone into a circular array and playing them back at a different rate; faster if the desired effect is a Munchkin, and slower if this year’s Halloween costume will be a Sith lord.

The completed build incorporates a 10k pot to dynamically change the timbre of the voice changer, as well as an Adafruit Wave Shield to play back a few pre-recorded sounds of lightsabers clashing. In all, a very cool project for your Halloween costume that’s also a very good introduction to DSP and real-time audio modifications with a microcontroller.

A quick primer is in order: when it comes to hobby brewing there’s two main types, extract brewing and all-grain brewing. The former uses a syrup that has been extracted from the grains at a factory while the latter adds the steps to do this yourself. But in both cases the brewing grains have already been malted. This is a careful process of soaking the grains and then kiln drying them. [Richard Oliver] built his own malt kiln controller to add the preliminary step to his home brewing ritual. Now the only thing he’s not doing himself is growing the grains (and perhaps culturing the yeast).

His original design used a food dehydrator for the drying step, but this didn’t work because the temperature wasn’t at the correct level. The new build uses the ceramic heating element from a 300W hot air gun. A blower directs air through the element and into the wooden box that serves as the kiln. An Arduino monitors the heated air to keep it right in the sweet spot. He’s included a graphing GUI for easy monitoring, which is shown in the video after the break.

[Matt] wanted to have more control over his meat smoker so he built this advanced PID smoker controller. It uses the solid state relay seen in the bottom-right of this image to switch the smoker’s heating element. But all of the other goodies that are included add several features not usually found in these builds.

This is a replacement for the commercial PID unit he used on the original build. That monitored the temperature in the smoker, using predictive algorithms to maintain just the right heat level. But this time around [Matt] is looking for extra feedback with a second sensor to monitor meat temperature. Using an Arduino with an SD shield he is able to data log the smoking sessions, and his custom code allows him to specify temperature profiles for resting the meat after it has hit the target temperature. It kind of reminds us of a reflow oven controller… but for food.

OK, so I got this nice little sensor, the ADXL345 and I have composed it into a new version of my "shield".

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The new improved Micro Magician V2 is here! It has all the features you loved in the original Micro Magician but with an ATmega328P, improved power supply that can work at lower input voltages and both 5V and 3.3V LDO regulators for powering all your sensors. The new black and yellow PCB looks great and is easier to read.

Features:

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