Your Robot Stand-in Has Arrived

March 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Meet TIPI, the Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion. TIPI is something of a surrogate, giving physical presence to telecommuters by balancing an LCD screen and camera atop its six foot frame. The user has full control of the robot’s movement, with their own camera image shown on the display so that others interacting with the bot will with whom they are conversing.

A pair of 12.5″ wheels connec to DC motors via a gear box with a 37:1 ratio. These specs are necessary to recover from a sudden 20 degree loss of equilibrium, quite impressive for a bot of this stature. An Orangutan SVP board monitors a two-axis accelerometer and a gyroscope for accurate positioning data. This board automatically keeps balance, while taking user commands from a second control, a Beagle Board. The Beagle Board handles the communications, including sending and receiving the video signals, and delivering incoming position control data to the Orangutan. Separating the two systems guards against a screen-shattering fall by making sure the hardware likely to face slow-down or lockup is physically separate from that responsible for balance.

Check out the video clip after the brake to see some balancing goodness. It shouldn’t be hard to build your own version for much less than the $15k price tag enjoyed by some commercial versions.

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Nano Sumo Robot Takes On All Comers

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

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While most Sumo-style robots are fairly sizable, there is a subsection of the Sumo robot movement that focuses on making small robots. Really small robots.

[Patrick] wrote in to share his latest creation, a Nano Sumo robot measuring a scant 1 in. x 1 in. The Nano Sumo is operated by an ATMega 328 micro controller housed on a custom-built PCB. The board was designed to interface directly with the 1A Dual Motor Driver from SparkFun, which provides all of the PWM signaling to the motors for speed control and braking. A small 50mAh Li-poly battery is attached to the robot, which can be charged using 4 AA batteries via a custom charging circuit. The mechanical components of the bot were handled by his friend [Gary], which you can read about here.

As you can see in the video below, the bot does its job pretty well. It does seem like the object detection gets confused every once in awhile, but that can likely be remedied with a few software tweaks.

Check out his page for additional build videos, including the PCB construction and programming processes.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sumo bots, check out this slightly larger robot we covered a short while back.

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Nintendo Hacked To Fit Inside An NES Cartridge

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 22 Comments

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Instructables user [dany32412] recently built what is arguably one of the smallest NES consoles we have seen to date. Using a Nintendo on a Chip (NOAC) board, he has fabricated an NES system that fits inside a hollowed out NES cartridge.

He purchased a NOAC system at a local resale shop and got to work disassembling it. As most of these devices typically consist of a game system built into the controller with a Famicom game slot added for good measure, he knew he had a lot of work ahead of him if he was going to convert it to work properly with actual NES games and controllers.

He hacked apart most of the NOAC’s board, leaving just the CPU and the controller interface chip. He then built a custom controller interface board in order to properly map his NES controller’s buttons to the pads on the NOAC. He wired in a 72-pin NES cartridge slot, then added a pair of controller ports and a power switch. Once he had everything connected and tested, it was all secured in a Super Mario Brothers NES cartridge.

Check out the video below of his mini NES in action.

If you can’t get enough Nintendo hacks, be sure to take a look at this portable NES as well as this emulator-based NES in a cartridge.

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Breathing New Life Into A Broken IPod

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

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[Craig] had a busted 2nd Gen iPod Nano that was well out of warranty. The play/pause button no longer worked, leaving him unable to play or pause music, nor power off the device. He didn’t want to scrap the iPod, so he figured out a way to add an external play/pause button instead.

He ordered an iPod dock connector from SparkFun and found that it had just enough space inside for the electronic components he would be adding. He consulted some online references for pinout information, then got busy cramming an ATiny13 and a pushbutton into the dock connector.

To minimize the drain on the iPod’s battery, he puts the ATiny into sleep mode when it is not being used. When the button is pressed, it wakes up the microcontroller and sends the proper signal to the iPod. Based on his estimations, it would take nearly 250 years for the ATiny to drain the iPod’s battery completely, so he’s pretty comfortable leaving the dongle attached at all times.

If you have an iPod with similar issues, he has made his source code available so you can save yours from the trash heap as well.

Motion Sensing Minecraft Creeper Will Scare The Pickaxe Offa’ya

March 28, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 15 Comments

[Chris] Writes in to tell us about his motion sensing, Arduino powered Creeper. As if these buggers were not frightening enough in game, [Chris] had to go and make the closest (legal) real world facsimile. The Creeper utilizes an Arduino Uno with a wave shield to playback creeper noises, PIR sensor to detect victims, and an RC car as a motorized cart. The creeper sits and waits for a signal from the PIR detector, when it sees motion the RC remote is triggered, Creeper noises played and (we assume) panic ensues.

We might have forgone the entire RC part of the toy car and found the H-bridge motor controller, but using the RC remote has potential. The whole triggering mechanism can be placed remotely allowing the Creeper to jump out from some kind of cover.

Not enough Minecraft? Check out some our other Minecraft projects if you are interested in more tree-punching goodness.

A video of the creeper in action is available after the jump!

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LED Floor Lamp Really Ties The Room Together

March 28, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

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Instructables user [lincomatic] was doing some home decorating and was trying to find something that would really tie the room together. He decided against adding a nice rug, a light fixture is what he was after. Rather than settle on a simple lamp for the corner of the room, he constructed an 8×8 RGB LED fixture he calls the Lampduino.

He constructed the 8×8 grid using some leftover cardboard packaging, then got to work wiring up the LED strands. In a rather unorthodox move, he decided to wire wrap the LED leads instead of soldering them. Once the LEDs were in place, he wired everything up to his Colorduino, an Arduino derivative specially made for driving large quantities of LEDs. A thin sheet of drafting film was placed on both sides of the board, then it was mounted on a stand for display.

His Daft Punk-esque lamp can be programmed to display just about anything from color patterns to video game sprites, and it can also be timed to music if desired. We think it looks great, and could make for a nice wall hanging if he ever got sick of the stand. While the wire wrap technique sounds like it sped up the development of this project significantly, we would be interested in hearing how it holds up after a few months of use.

Check out the trio of videos embedded below to see the Lampduino in action.

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HIDUINO: Your Arduino Is Now A MIDI Interface

March 28, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 17 Comments

[Dimitri Diakopoulos] dropped into our tip line to let us know his HIDUINO project. The HIDUINO is a set of firmware for the ATmega8u2 used in the new revisions of the Arduino (Uno, and Mega2560 for example). Once the HIDUINO is loaded your Arduino can show up as any HID compliant device you wish, no extra drivers necessary. This means that using this firmware, music software such as Max, Ableton, Reaktor etc can read and write MIDI directly to/from the Arduino. Currently the project is for direct USB-MIDI communication but could be altered to act as a variety of HID devices.

Flashing the ATmega8u2 with your own device type or name requires a bit of work on the developers part like owning an ISP programmer, soldering header pins to the board, and re-flashing the ATmega8u2 every time you want to load new code into the Arduino. Users without an ISP can still flash HIDUINO using Atmel’s FLIP software (Windows) or the DFU programmer (Mac OS X and Linux) and a precompiled HIDUINO firmware. They still have to solder a jumper on the underside of the board to use the DFU bootloader.

This firmware could certainly benefit anyone building an Arduinome , Joystick, or any variety of devices that users simply want to interface to a PC without additional software.

A guide for ISP flashing can be found at [Dimitri]’s site.