Solenoids (a type of electromagnet) are at the heart of pinball machines, and at one time, many other machines. They work by inducing a magnetic field using a coil of copper wire. This makes them ideal for pushing or pulling mechanical things fast and with force. They have become unnecessary […]
The post Convert a Pinball Score Reel into a Clock appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Digistump has recently announced a partnership with Particle over cloud infrastructure that may well be a signal that the diasporan expansion in microcontroller market may be coming to an end.
The post Digistump Announces Partnership with Particle’s IoT Cloud appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Maker Faires are great places to see some interesting combinations of both art and technology that can be found nowhere else. Where else could you see Robotic Chimps on Scooters, an autonomous machine that creates objects based on the influences that surround it or get your own 3D printed portrait […]
The post Digital Dreamer Offers Up Interactive Story Time Fun appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Self-driving cars are in the news almost daily, but they are not exactly in my automotive budget for this decade. Today, that has changed. While this car might be smaller and not capable of giving me a ride, it’s still autonomous and, best of all, it is a project that I […]
The post Self-Driving R/C Car Parks Itself Just Like a Lexus appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
As more and more of our technology becomes automatic, wireless, invisible, and connected, it simultaneously has a greater potential to slip from our immediate attention. Matt Martin, a Masters student at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, is most interested in how technology affects us. He designed “Wearable Beacon,” […]
The post LED Shirt Lights Up When You’re Bombarded by Bluetooth appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
This project is part 4 in the building a robot arm tutorial. In the first part I show how to design the arm, the second part shows how to design the base, and the third shows how to design the mount. After all of the Computer Aided Drafting (CAD) and 3D modeling […]
The post Building a Robot Arm Part 4: Adding Control with an Arduino appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Use some simple electronics to build an IoT printer, like this "Thinking Man" who prints titles from Reddit's Shower Thoughts subreddit.
The post Build a Reddit Shower Thoughts Printer appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
Moushira Elamrawy is an Egyptian multidisciplinary designer and technologist based in the city of Cairo and founder of Rishalaser, a new concept for laser cutters that is opensource, portable, DIY, and easy to use. She wrote a piece on iAfrikan about becoming a maker and discovering Arduino. It’s an inspiring text and we want to share it on this blog.
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Confession: I used to be an architect (possibly still am!), and then I started tinkering with things.
The architecture engineering school I graduated from did not have a workshop space. The first time I met a CNC router in real life was three years after i graduated.It is hard to discover what you don’t know even exists. Which is somehow, why I had zero imagination of how those awesome Theo Watson installations could possibly work.
I had no business fiddling with electronics whatsoever. My coding and programming skills were limited to some knowledge of ActionScript, some C, and that was about it.
I read about Openframeworks, installed it, went through examples, tutorials and thought “Nice, I can change parameters that in return would change behavior, fantastic..but ..then..what?!”
By that time, I was an architect working in Morocco, between an office that was based in Fez and a construction site based in a beautiful small southern village close to the Algerian borders, called Mhamid ElGhizlane. It normally took me a little over a day and a half to travel from Fez to the construction site.
I had a radio, which I considered my companion in those interesting border areas. Before Morocco, I was living in Sinai mountains, working on a similar desert development project, where the radio would normally catch signals of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Jordan. The Moroccan Sahara, on the other hand, got me signals from Algeria, with lots of different dialects. Radio feels like travelling within time within places. It makes you really feel the distance you crossed.
[...]
In May 2012, I attended a beginners workshop for Arduino, lead by Bilal, who was visiting Egypt. During the workshop, I controlled an LED via Arduino.
It was magical.
I never used the board before, I barely understood any syntax, yet in 15 min, I did something cool . . that actually works. Arduino: I am in Love, I thought.
It is easy. It is just that starting alone isn’t easy. Going back home, I went through some examples and I felt oh..I can do stuff. I can do all these stuff actually. Oh, wait, there is also: Processing!
By September 2012, I moved to Barcelona for my masters, which started by a fabrication course in Fablab. I was Alice in wonderland. Then physical computing course started, and Alice’s wonderland was getting more vast.
Everything was awesome. The exact skill set that I wanted to learn. But I needed more, a lot more, time to absorb this whole new world. I thought of taking a gap year, but then, week after week, it turned out that once the ball gets rolling everything is accelerated.
Thanks actually to my sister for pushing me to trust that the ball will get rolling. She herself was moving from translation to graphics design one year before me. It is a family thing.
Arduino was THE treasure.
At the end of the day, all those fantastic surreal systems that I was fascinated by could be done with some components and an Arduino. The amount of associated open source resources is tremendous. The forum is awesome and people actually respond.
Through Arduino, I learned more about microcontrollers, I could program standalone circuits. Then the ball kept rolling, I learned eagle, I can mill some boards, I can solder (err, that was troublesome!), I can interface stuff, I can build sensors, I can work with data, I can build RF sensors, then I became obsessed with antennas, signal processing, and RFID.
I am still learning and learning, but it is much easier now.
Coming from this background, I always go back with time 4 or 5 years ago and recall how I used to react to a “closed box” new technology?
How life would have changed if machine interaction have been made easier, or basically how my life would have changed if machines had the opportunity to step out of their labs and talk to more people.
Making technology more portable and more accessible, is one reason why I started the mobile operated laser cutter project last year, of course, the project would have never been realized without the team that continued with enthusiasm.
Another wonderful project that I just co-started is Jebaleya Talks, with the hope of giving voice to women of Saint Katherine village in Sinai, by introducing them to smart textiles! Well, lets see how this will evolve..
While working in the desert in Sinai, the project foreman was my mentor, his words of wisdom still echo in my ears
“Everything comes along..with patience. If you could just wait”.
Apparently, he had a point!
E-mails are a distraction.
Meetings are boring.
Regular jobs suck your inner clock.
Take a sabbatical and learn what you want to learn and start anew.
At least try.
Oh, and during your sabbatical, give Arduino a try, it might change your life as well.
Let’s just hope that Arduino founders will keep embracing the same energy they started the project with, and that the big whales leave Arduino alone, so that it stays, open and libre just as how it helped liberate many creative energies and minds.
Blynk is a new platform that allows you to build interfaces for controlling and monitoring your projects from your iOS and Android device.
The post Control an Arduino with Your Smartphone via Blynk appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.
If you’ve ever had to move around in a dark room before, you know how frustrating it can be. This is especially true if you are in an unfamiliar place. [Brian] has attempted to help solve this problem by building a vibrating distance sensor that is intuitive to use.
The main circuit is rather simple. An Arduino is hooked up to both an ultrasonic distance sensor and a vibrating motor. The distance sensor uses sound to determine the distance of an object by calculating how long it takes for an emitted sound to return to the sensor. The sensor uses sounds that are above the range of human hearing, so no one in the vicinity will hear it. The Arduino then vibrates a motor quickly if the object is very close, or slowly if it is far away. The whole circuit is powered by a 9V battery.
The real trick to this project is that the entire thing is housed inside of an old flashlight. [Brian] used OpenSCAD to design a custom plastic mount. This mount replaces the flashlight lens and allows the ultrasonic sensor to be secured to the front of the flashlight. The flashlight housing makes the device very intuitive to use. You simply point the flashlight in front of you and press the button. Instead of shining a bright light, the flashlight vibrates to let you know if the way ahead is clear. This way the user can more easily navigate around in the dark without the risk of being seen or waking up people in the area.
This reminds us of project Tacit, which used two of these ultrasonic sensors mounted on a fingerless glove.
