Inventing Networking Protocols For Dozens Of Arduinos

December 3, 2012 by 35 Comments

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When you don’t want to use I2C or SPI, and MIDI and DMX are old hat, [Scott] comes along and invents a very strange networking protocol that is just daisy chaining a few Arduinos together with serial connections.

Strange as it may seem, this networking protocol actually makes a whole lot of sense. [Scott] is working on an animatronic birdhouse in the vein of Disney’s Imagineers and needed to network a whole bunch of Arduinos without using up precious IO pins.

The networking stack [Scott] came up with capitalizes on the hardware UART in each Arduino by simply daisy-chaining several boards together. By adding an FTDI breakout at the beginning of the chain, [Scott] can control dozens of Arduinos straight from a terminal

[Scott] isn’t using off-the-shelf Arduinos for this project – a few months ago he found 100 Arduino-compatible stepper motor controllers while dumpster diving at his job, giving him more than enough nodes to come up with some pretty crazy networking protocols. It’s a great use of the hardware he has on hand, and a very clever solution to controlling dozens of microcontrollers at once.

Check out [Scott]’s demo after the break.

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Teaching The Speak & Spell Four (and More) Letter Words

December 3, 2012 by 27 Comments

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Before it became the darling of circuit benders the world over, the Speak & Spell was a marvel of modern technology. Complete with a microprocessor and voice synthesizer, the Speak & Spell was able to speak a limited vocabulary that [Furrtek] thought should include words such as, “al qaeda”, “necrosis”, and “butt”. The Speak & Spell included an expansion port for cartridges containing a larger vocabulary, and with a huge amount of effort [Furrtek] created his own Speak & Spell carts that allow it to talk like a sailor.

The Speak & Spell ROMs were stored on a very strange memory chip; instead of a parallel or serial interface, the chip reads five nybbles at a time before returning the saved data. At first, [Furrtek] thought he could get an ATtiny microcontroller, but the way this memory chip is set up made it impossible to send and receive data even on a 400kHz I2C bus.

The project eventually found some decent hardware in the form of a CPLD-based cartridge that was more than fast enough to interface with the Speak & Spell. After that, it was only an issue of converting words into something the speech synth can understand with some old Windows 3.1 software and finally burning a ROM.

The end result is a Speak & Spell with a perverse vocabulary and is much, much more interesting than a circuit bent piece of hardware with a few wires crossed. Check out the video after the break.

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Turning Four Smaller Helicopters Into One Larger Quadcopter

December 3, 2012 by 8 Comments

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There’s a reason we’ve seen a menagerie of quadcopters over the past few years – the key piece of any quadcopter build is an inertial measurement unit. Historically a very complicated and expensive piece of kit, these IMUs came down in price a few years back, allowing anyone with a few dollars in their pocket and a handful of brushless motors to build a four-bladed drone in their workshop.

[Starlino] built a few quadcopters, but he wanted to shy away from IMUs and get most of the mass of his new ‘copter over the center of the chassis. He came up with a design he calls the quadhybrid that can be built out of a quartet of those cheap 3-channel helicopter toys.

Most of the lift for [Starlino]’s quadhybrid comes from a pair of coaxial rotors from a Syma 001 3-channel helicopter toy. Anyone who has played with one of these toy helicopters knows how stable they are; if the tail rotor breaks, you’re left with a helicopter that can only go up and down.

To give his quadhybrid a few degrees of freedom, he attached four tail rotors from 3-channel helis to a few booms laid out in a cross pattern. By taking the receiver out of a 4-channel helicopter and adding his own controller board, [Starlino] made each of the tail rotors control the pitch and roll of the craft.

In the video after the break, you can see the quadhybrid is amazingly stable even without an IMU and surprisingly agile. As [Starlino]’s ‘copter can be made out of replacement parts for cheap 3-channel helis, we’ll expect a rush on these tail motors at your favorite online RC retailer very shortly.

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Making 3D Printing Easy At The Staples Copy Center

December 2, 2012 by 37 Comments

Mcor Technologies and Staples are teaming up to provide 3D printing services via the online Staples Office Center service.

This announcement comes from Mcor, the company behind the Iris 3D printer. Unlike just about every other 3D printer, the Iris doesn’t squirt plastic onto a bed or glue powder together – it makes its models out of sheets of paper. You probably won’t be ordering working steam engines or other heavy-duty engineering models from the Staples copy center, but this system does allow for high-quality full-color models to be created very, very easily. You can see a few examples of what the Mcor Iris can print after the break.

Unfortunately, unless you live in Belgium or The Netherlands, your local Staples won’t be installing a 3D printer in their copy center anytime soon. For those of us outside these countries, we’ll have to wait until services like Shapeways and Ponoko figure out how to make their business model include a brick and mortar presence.

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Man Tracks Children Using A Quadcopter

December 2, 2012 by 65 Comments

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Instead of walking his kid to the bus stop like he used to, [Paul Wallich] lets this quadcopter watch his son so he doesn’t have to. It is quite literally an automated system for tracking children — how wild is that?

The idea came to him when wishing there was a way to stay inside the house during the winter months while still making sure his kid got to the bus stop okay. [Paul] picked up a quadcopter kit and started looking at ways to add monitoring. He found the easiest technique was to include a cellphone and watch via a video chat app. But that is only part of the build as he would still have to fly the thing. After searching around he found a beacon that can be placed in the backpack. It has a GPS module, an RF modem, and runs a stripped down Python scripting shell. Whenever the GPS data changes (signaling his son is on the move) it uplinks with the quadcopter and gives it the new coordinates.

This goes a long way to making your family a police state. May we also recommend forcing the children to punch a time clock?

[via: theGrue]

Raspberry Pi Model A Coming Soon

December 2, 2012 by 35 Comments

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[Liz] over at the Raspberry Pi foundation took a trip over to the manufacturing facility in Wales and found some of the very first Model A Raspi samples. They’re just samples, but this means we should be seeing a few Model A Raspberry Pis pop up on Element 14 sometime very soon.

As the lower-cost model of the Raspberry Pi, the Model A lacks a few features of the more complete Model B. For starters, there is no Ethernet port or controller, and only one USB port, This greatly reduces the power requirements for the Model A, measured by the Raspi Foundation at about 1/3rd of the power draw of the Model B.

To save costs, the Model A is using the same PCB as the Model B – the Ethernet controller and port simply aren’t populated. It may seem like a downgrade, but if you’re planning on building a Raspi-powered autonomous drone, high-altitude balloon, or other robotics project, the reduced power draw will be a great feature.

Hiding An Inductive Charging Station Inside Furniture

December 2, 2012 by 16 Comments

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[Tony] wanted to clean up his bedside table by getting rid of the cables used for charging his devices. He accomplished his goal by integrating an inductive charging station inside his furniture.

He chose to go with a product called Powermat. The base station for the device includes two inductive charging areas. [Tony] started by using a router to make a pocket in the underside of this shelf. He mentions that the remaining wood is only 2mm thick to allow for proper transmission. Before gluing the PCB in place he relocated the power jack so that it is still easy to get to. As you can see in the clip after the break, the system works just fine this way.

One note on the forums hosting this content. We must have loaded the thread three or four times when writing the feature and ended up locked out unless we registered. You can get around this by loading the link in a private/incognito browser.

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