Guitarduino show and tell

June 14, 2013 By 12 Comments

guitarduino-show-and-tell

[Igor Stolarsky] plays in a band called 3′s & Sevens. We’d say he is the Guitarist but since he’s playing this hacked axe we probably should call him the band’s Guitarduinist. Scroll down and listen to the quick demo clip of what he can do with the hardware add-ons, then check out his video explanation of the hardware.

There are several added inputs attached to the guitar itself. The most obvious is the set of colored buttons which are a shield riding on the Arduino board itself. This attaches to his computer via a USB cable where it is controlling his MaxMSP patches. They’re out of the way and act as something of a sample looper which he can then play along with. But look at the guitar body under his strumming hand and you’ll also see a few grey patches. These, along with one long strip on the back of the neck, are pressure sensors which he actuates while playing. The result is a level of seamless integration we don’t remember seeing before. Now he just needs to move the prototype to a wireless system and he’ll be set.

If you don’t have the skills to shred like [Igor] perhaps an automatic chording device will give you a leg up.

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Filed Under: Arduino Hacks, musical hacks Tagged With: ,

Arduino-compatible, quad-core ARM dev board

June 1, 2013 By 36 Comments

UDOO

The Advent of the Raspberry Pi has seen an explosion in the market for ARM dev boards, sometimes even with pinouts for Arduino shields. The UDOO, though, takes those boards and ramps up the processing power for some very, very interesting builds.

The UDOO comes equipped with a dual or quad-core ARM CPU running at 1GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Also on board is the Atmel SAM3X8E – the same chip in the new Arduino DUE - and has pinouts for all those Arduino shields you have lying around.

In addition to serving your next project as a souped-up Raspberry Pi, UDOO also includes 78 (!) GPIO pins, Gigabit Ethernet, a camera connector, one SATA port (on the quad-core version), and an LVDS header for attaching LCD monitors. Basically, the UDOO is the motherboard of an ARM-powered laptop with the pinouts to handle Arduino shields. It’s just like [Bunnie]‘s laptop, only this time you can actually buy it.

The UDOO doesn’t come cheap, though: on the UDOO Kickstarter, the dual-core version is going for $150 while the quad-core is priced at $170. Still, if you need the power to run a pair of Kinects or want to build an awesome torrent box, you’d be hard pressed to find a more powerful board.

Filed Under: ARM, hardware Tagged With: , , ,

Arduino particle light box generates animations from sound

May 28, 2013 By 13 Comments

arduino-particle-display

Simple tools used well can produce fantastic results. The hardware which [Gilad] uses in this project is the definition of common. We’d bet you have most if not all of them on hand right now. But the end product is a light box which seems to dance and twirl with every sound in the room. You should go watch the demo video before reading the bill of materials so that the simplicity doesn’t spoil it for you.

A wooden craft box serves as the enclosure. Inside you’ll find an Arduino board, microphone, and an 8×8 RGB module. The front cover of the project box diffuses the light using a sheet of tracing paper on a frame of foam board. It’s the code that brings everything together. He wrote his own particle system library to generate interesting animations.

If you don’t have a project box on hand this might work with an extra-deep picture frame.
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Filed Under: Arduino Hacks, led hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Tracking cicadas with Radiolab and an Arduino

May 23, 2013 By 27 Comments

Cicadia

Once every 17 years, a population of cicadas ranging from Connecticut to the Appalachian highlands of North Carolina emerges to annoy everyone within earshot. The last time east coasters saw this brood was in 1996, making 2013 yet another year of annoying insect pests. The only question is, when will we start to see this year’s cicada brood?

Radiolab, the awesome podcast and public radio show, has put together an awesome project that asks listeners to track when the cicadas in their area will emerge. Cicadas generally enter their loud and obnoxious adult stage when the ground temperature 8 inches below the surface reaches 64º F. Armed with an Arduino, thermistor, and a few wires and resistors, any Radiolab listener can upload soil temperature data to Radiolab servers where all the data will be correlated with documented cicada sightings.

After following the page’s instructions for wiring up a bunch of LEDs and a thermistor to an Arduino, just upload the most well-commented code we’ve ever seen and go outside to take soil temperature measurements. The temperature is displayed in a pseudo-binary format on nine LEDs. To decode the temperature without counting by powers of two, Radiolab has an online decoder that also allows you to upload your data and location.

Filed Under: Arduino Hacks Tagged With: , , ,

Rolling your own minimal USB to serial Arduino programmer

April 6, 2013 By 13 Comments

usb-to-serial-programmer

[Hans Peter] wanted to move away from using full Arduino boards in his projects. One of the components he rarely used after the development stage is the USB hardware. Once the firmware is flashed to the chip he didn’t need it any longer. So he tried his hand with some really small SMD parts by building this USB to serial Arduino programmer.

The chip he went with isn’t the FTDI part we’re used to. Instead of using an FT232RL, he opted for its smaller cousin the FT230x. This chip doesn’t fully implement the communications protocol of the 232, but it does work with AVRdude and that’s all that really matters. Above you can see [Hans'] creation next to the official Arduino USB-to-serial programmer. He used the same connection scheme, but went with an edge connector for the USB instead of using a mini-B jack.

It’s pretty impressive to see his prototyping work with the 16-pin QFN package. He soldered it dead-bug style to a couple of SIL pin headers in order to test it on a breadboard. The first board he assembled was too loose in the USB port, but he added some tape to the back to make it thicker, and coated the edge connector traces with a bit of solder and that did the trick.

Filed Under: Arduino Hacks Tagged With: , , , , ,

CuteUino: Only use the parts of the Arduino that you need for each project

March 20, 2013 By 38 Comments

CuteUino

[Fran's] been working on her own version of the Arduino. She calls it CuteUino for obvious reasons. The size of the thing is pretty remarkable, fitting within the outline of an SD card. But that doesn’t mean you won’t get the power that you’re used to with the device. She’s broken it up into several modules so you can choose only the components that you need for the project.

The main board is shown on the right, both top and bottom. It sports the ATmega328p (it’s hard to believe we could make out the label on the chip package in the clip after the break) in a TQFP-32 package soldered to the underside of what she calls the Brain Module. You can also see the extra long pins which stick through from the female pin headers mounted on the top side of the board. Inside of these pin headers you’ll find the clock crystal, status LEDs, and a capacitor. The other module is an FTDI board used to connect the AVR chip to a USB port.

You’ll definitely want to check out her prototyping post for this project. She uses a very interesting technique of combining two single-sided boards to make a 3-layer PCB. The side that was not copper clad is fitted with copper foil by hand to act as a ground plane for the vias. Neat!

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Filed Under: Arduino Hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

DIY Arduino Pro Mini quadcopter

March 19, 2013 By 4 Comments

DIY-arduino-pro-mini-quadcopter

[execUc] took a stock V929 quadcopter and started making some crafty customizations. The main change – the control electronics were replaced by an Arduino Pro Mini (16Mhz model). He soldered all the modules on a prototyping board and, although admittedly a bit heavy, the little guy takes flight with no problem.

Among other details, an HMC5883L (magnetometer) and MPU6050 (accelerometer / gyroscope) are used as sensors. A LiPo 7.4V battery pack supplies the power. The brushed motors are controlled by pulse-width modulation from SI2302 MOSFET with added diodes. He plans to swap out the micro-controller for an ARM7 stm32F103 for extra computing power, and needs to play with the PID values to correct a slight problem he seems to be having when rotating.

Check out a test flight video after the break. [execUc] has a thorough list of all the alterations he made in the video description, so be sure to read it.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

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Filed Under: Arduino Hacks, drone hacks, toy hacks Tagged With: ,
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