Arduino Now Controlling – The Crop Harvest?

December 23, 2009 by Jake W 17 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDzHwy28kng]

We’ve seen the Arduino board in charge of some pretty unique tasks in the past. Harvesting locally grown soybeans was not one of them.

[Lance] rigged this beast up in order to automate the monotonous task of driving up and down the vast soybean fields of Iowa. The 15 ton farm combine’s hydraulic steering pump is at the mercy of a team of gadgets, including a GPS, Windows 7 PC, and the omnipresent Duemilanove (which acts as the output card, connecting the PC to the pump). So far, it is reported to be doing a great job, straying only about an inch and a half from its desired, GPS-programmed, path. Even if the Arduino decides to go totally berserk and drive the combine off course, speeding around at 5mph makes it pretty avoidable. A supervisor is also in the cabin at all times, looking out for errors. [Lance] eventually hopes to offload all steering-related calculations to the ATmega328P onboard.

Commenters are welcome to share heavier-duty uses for the Arduino (if they exist).

Temperature And Electricity Monitoring

December 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Willem] has been using an Arduino to monitor temperatures and electricity usage. For the temperature monitoring he picked up some 1-wire temperature sensors similar to those we’ve featured in the past. To pick up on electricity usage he’s not using an amp sensors, but because he’s in the UK he does have a flashing LED on his power meter. There’s a known trick to pick up these flashes with a photo cell to calculate energy usage based on meter readings. Finally, the data from the three sensors (indoor temp, outdoor temp, and energy usage) is piped over the Internet via an Ethernet shield so that it can be collected and graphed.

[Willem] has had the system running for a year. If you’re nosy you can look at the temperature graph generated from his collected data.

Nook Rooted Without Being Opened

December 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 16 Comments

If you’ve got a nook, and wanted to get root privileges, but really didn’t want to open up your fancy new toy. We have good news. The people over at nookdevs have found that the nook looks for updates from the external microSD slot at boot time. Simply download the patch, load it and boot. Though it was previously possible to get root privileges before, you had to physically open the device. While we would have opened it anyway, we understand that there may be people who prefer not to.

Bluetooth Handset Hacks

December 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Cramming Bluetooth headset circuitry into an analog telephone body has become an extremely popular hack. With declines in the prices of these headsets, and older telephones being seen as storage-room-clutter this hack is just waiting for you to get started. Join us after the break for a look at what others have already accomplished.

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Terminate RFID Tags

December 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 49 Comments

This gun hunts only RFID tags.[mnt], who brought us laser gesture control, built this RFID Zapper but included so much more. Any good weapon has to sound mean, a feat he’s accomplished by incorporating an MP3 player into the rifle. The coil that zaps the RFID tag is powered by a photo-flash unit, but for visual feedback he’s got a second unit that flashes light to signal the demise of your German passport (see the video after the break).

It’s hard to believe we haven’t covered RFID Zappers yet. The concept came out of the Chaos Communication Congress a few years back. This method works by sending a very strong electromagnetic field through the RFID tag that causes it to burn out. There’s a wiki post on RFID Zappers but Firefox threw a certificate warning when we loaded it up; read at your own risk.

Continue reading “Terminate RFID Tags” →

Subcycles: Multitouch Music Controller

December 22, 2009 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/7000376]

Subcycles is a sound controller application that [Christian] is using on the third multitouch display that he built. The screen is a sheet of acrylic in an aluminum frame. The image is rear projected onto an area covered with Digiline dispersion film. As with other projects that use the Community Core Vision package, a PS3 eye camera captures the touch information.

This build does a great job of including the audience in what the musician on stage is doing. [Chris] points out that the sight of artists staring at laptops on stage is becoming more and more common. The ‘Minority Report’-like interface that Subcycles uses makes not just for interesting music, but for an added visual reinforcement to the live part of the performance.

[Thanks Mark]

Punching Out Parts

December 22, 2009 by Jake W 13 Comments

If you’re more of a code monkey than artist, it may be tough to transform your ideas into the 3D models necessary for fabbing. The folks working on openSCAD apparently feel our pain.

openSCAD uses a language somewhat reminiscent of C for creating models. A preview of the model is rendered alongside your code. Fully cross-platform, it runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows. Much like SketchUp, openSCAD can also extrude 2D outlines into models. This feature comes in very useful if one already has a set of technical drawings for a part. With no price tag, it’s pretty affordable during this costly season.