Vinduino Water-Smart Farming – Now With LoRa!

October 25, 2018 by Roger Cheng 9 Comments

Our five rounds of Hackaday Prize 2018 challenges have just wrapped up, and we’re looking forward to see where the chips fall in the final ranking. While we’re waiting for the winners to be announced at Hackaday Superconference, it’s fun to take a look back at one of our past winners. Watch [Reinier van der Lee] give the latest updates on his Vinduino project (video also embedded after the break) to a Hackaday Los Angeles meetup earlier this year.

Vinduino started with [Reinier]’s desire to better understand what happens to irrigation water under the surface, measuring soil moisture at different depths. This knowledge informs more efficient use of irrigation water, as we’ve previously covered in more detail. What [Reinier] has been focused on is improving usability of the system by networking the sensors wirelessly versus having to walk up and physically attach a reader unit.

His thought started the same as ours – put them on WiFi! But adding WiFi coverage across his entire vineyard was not going to be cost-effective. After experimenting with various communication schemes, he has settled on LoRa. Designed to trade raw bandwidth for long range with low power requirements, it is a perfect match for a network of soil moisture sensors.

In the video [Reinier] gives an overview of LoRa for those who might be unfamiliar. Followed by results of his experiments integrating LoRa functionality into Vinduino, and ending with a call to action for hackers to help grow the LoRa network. It sounds like he’s become quite the champion for the cause! He’s even giving a hands-on workshop at Supercon where you can build your own LoRa connected sensor. (Get tickets here.)

We’re always happy to see open-source hardware projects like Vinduino succeed, transitioning to a product that solve real world problems. We know there are even more promising ideas out there, which is why Hackaday’s sister company Tindie is funding a Project to Product program to help this year’s winners follow in Vinduino’s footsteps. We look forward to sharing more success stories yet to come.

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A Robotic Arm For Those Who Like Their Kinematics Both Ways

October 19, 2018 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

A robotic arm is an excellent idea if you’re looking to get started with electromechanical projects. There’s linkages to design, and motors to drive, but there’s also the matter of control. This is referred to as “kinematics”, and can be considered in both the forward and inverse sense. [aerdronix] built a robotic arm build that works in both ways.

The brains of the build is an Arduino Yun, which receives commands over the USB interface. Control is realised through the Blynk app, which allows IoT projects to easily build apps for smartphones that can be published to the usual platforms.

The arm’s position is controlled in two fashions. When configured to use inverse kinematics, the user commands an end effector position, and the arm figures out the necessary position of the linkages to make it happen. However, the arm can also be used in a forward kinematics mode, where the individual joint positions are commanded, which then determine the end effector’s final position.

Overall, it’s a well-documented build that lays out everything from the basic mechanical design to the software and source code required to control the system. It’s an excellent learning resource for the newcomer, and such an arm could readily be used in more complex projects.

We see plenty of robotic arms around these parts, like this fantastic build based on an IKEA lamp. If you’ve got one, be sure to hit up the tip line. Video after the break.

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Just In Time For Halloween: Another Talking Skull

October 16, 2018 by Al Williams 4 Comments

It isn’t a unique idea, but we liked [Eric Wiemers’s] take on the classic animated skull for Halloween. In addition to showing you the code and the wiring, the video spends some time discussing what the audio looks like and what has to happen to get it into a format suitable for the Arduino. You can see the spooky video, below.

Of course, this is also a 3D printing project, although the skull is off-the-shelf. We wondered if he felt like a brain surgeon taking the Dremel to the poor skull. To fix the two parts of the device, he used brass threaded inserts that are heat set, something we’ve seen before, but are always surprised we don’t see more often.

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The 3D Printed Plotter You Didn’t Know You Needed

October 15, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

We’ve been seeing an influx of repurposed 3D printers recently. Thrifty hackers have been leveraging cheap 3D printers as a way to bootstrap their builds, on everything from laser engravers to pick and place machines. There’s nothing wrong with that, and honestly when you can get a cheap 3D printer for less than the cost of the components separately thanks to the economies of scale, you’d be foolish not to.

But there’s still something to be said for the classic RepRap mentality of building things using printed parts and smooth rods. Case in point, the largely 3D printed plotter that [darth vader] sent in for our viewing pleasure. This isn’t somebody sicking a pen on the extruder of their open box Monoprice special, this is a purpose built plotter and it shows. In the video after the break you can see not only how well it draws, but also how large of a work area it has compared to a modified 3D printer.

If you know your way around a 3D printer, most of it should look pretty familiar to you. Using the same GT2 belts, steppers, end stop switches, and linear bearings which are ubiquitous in 3D printers, it shouldn’t be difficult to source the parts to build your own. It even uses a Mega 2560 with RAMPS 1.4 running Marlin 1.1.9 for control.

The biggest difference is the physical layout. Since there’s no heavy hotend or extruder assembly to move around, the plotter has a cantilever design which gives it far greater reach. As it only needs to sightly lift the pen off the paper, there’s no need for a complex Z axis with leadscrews either; a simple servo mounted to the end of the arm is used to raise and lift the pen. We especially like the use of a tape measure as strain relief for his wiring, a fantastic tip that we (and many of you) fell in love with last year.

While it’s hard to beat just tossing a pen onto the business end of your desktop 3D printer in terms of convenience, we think it’s pretty clear from this build that the results don’t quite compare. If you want a real plotter, build a real plotter.

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Flash: Arduino Vidor FPGA Instructions Hit France

October 14, 2018 by Al Williams 12 Comments

If you speak French and you have an Arduino Vidor 4000, you are in luck because there’s some good news. The good news is there’s finally some inside information about how to configure the onboard FPGA yourself. The bad news though is that it is pretty sparse. If your high school French isn’t up to the task, there’s always Google Translate.

We knew some of this already. You’ll need Quartus, the FPGA design tool from Altera — er, Intel — and we know about the sample project on GitHub, too. Instead of using conventional Verilog or VHDL, the new information uses schematic capture, but that’s OK. All the design entry winds up in the same place, so it should be easy to adapt to the language of your choice. In fact, in part 2 they show both some schematics and some Verilog. Google Translate does have a little trouble with code comments, though. If you want something even stouter, there’s an example that uses Verilog to output a video frame.

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Detect Elevated Carbon Monoxide (Levels)

October 14, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 27 Comments

The molar mass of carbon monoxide (CO) is 28.0, and the molar mass of air is 28.8, so CO will rise in an ambient atmosphere. It makes sense to detect it farther from the ground, but getting a tall ladder is not convenient and certainly doesn’t make for fast deployment. What do you do if you don’t care for heights and want to know the CO levels in a gymnasium or a tall foyer? Here to save the day, is the Red Balloon Carbon Monoxide Detector.

Circuit.io generates the diagram and code to operate the CO sensor and turn a healthy green light to a warning red if unsafe levels are detected. The user holds the batteries, Arduino, and light while a red balloon lifts the sensor up to fifteen feet, or approximately five ~~three~~ meters. It is an analog sensor which needs some time to warm up so it pays to be warned about that wire length and startup.

Having a CO sentinel is a wise choice for this odorless gas.

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WebSockets Embedded With The ESP8266

October 3, 2018 by Al Williams 15 Comments

It used to be that Web browsing was simple. You asked a server for some text, which was duly sent, and then formatted by your browser. Now a web page is as likely to be a full-blown application that is reading mail, editing text, or lots of other things and may use WebSockets to create a back channel to the server. Thanks to affordable hardware like the ESP8266 one of those things a modern web browser can do is sense and control the real world. [Acrobotic] has an interesting video about using WebSockets to allow a browser to talk to an ESP8266 web server in real time. You can see his simple demo in the video below.

Of course, you’ll use the usual language you use on the ESP8266 — [Acrobotic] uses C++ in the Arduino IDE. On the browser side you’ll use JavaScript, although that will be embedded in your C++ program which acts as a web server.

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