Arduino Hacks

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Arduino And Pi Breathe New Life Into Jukebox

September 22, 2017 by 6 Comments

What do you do when someone gives you a Wurlitzer 3100 jukebox from 1969, but keeps all the records? If you are like [Tijuana Rick], you grab an Arduino and a Rasberry Pi and turn it into a really awesome digital music player.

We’ll grant you, making a music player out of a Raspberry Pi isn’t all that cutting edge, but restoration and integration work is really impressive. The machine had many broken switches that had been hastily repaired, so [Rick] had to learn to create silicone molds and cast resin to create replacements. You can see and hear the end result in the video below.

[Rick] was frustrated with jukebox software he could find, until he found some Python code from [Thomas Sprinkmeier]. [Rick] used that code as a base and customized it for his needs.

There’s not much “how to” detail about the castings for the switches, but there are lots of photos and the results were great. We wondered if he considered putting fake 45s in the machine so it at least looked like it was playing vinyl.

Of course, you don’t need an old piece of hardware to make a jukebox. Or, you can compromise and build out a replica.

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Sub-$20 Arduino-Based Telemetry System

September 12, 2017 by 15 Comments

[William Osman] set out to prove that unlike expensive commercial data logging rigs, he could get the same results for under twenty bucks. He wanted to build a wireless three-axis accelerometer for a race car project, allowing engineers to make modifications to the suspension based on the data collected.

The hardware consists of an Arduino Pro Mini connected to a three-axis accelerometer, and an nRF24L01 wireless module. Power is supplied by the race car’s 12 V, changed to 5 V by a linear regulator with the Pro Mini in turn supplying 3.3 V. The base station consists of an Arduino and another nRF24L01 module plugged into a laptop.

The telemetry system is based on COSMOS, an open-source, realtime datalogging platform put out by Bell Aerospace. COSMOS consists of fifteen separate applications depending on how you want to view and manage your telemetry. You can download [William]’s COSMOS config files and Arduino sketch on Google Docs.

We’ve published a bunch of pieces on telemetry, like this ESP8266 telemetry project, a rocket telemetry rig, and open sourcing satellite telemetry.

[Thanks, Dennis Nestor!]

Finding The Sun And Moon The New Old-Fashioned Way

September 7, 2017 by 3 Comments

The ability to build a robot to take care of a tedious task for you is power indeed. For a few centuries, the task of helping determine one’s location fell to the sextant. Now, you can offload that task to this auto-sextant, courtesy of [Raz85].

To be clear, this robo-sextant doesn’t give you your exact location, but it does find and display the bearing and altitude of the most luminous object around and display them on the LCD — so, the sun and moon. A pair of cheap servos handle the horizontal and vertical movement, an Arduino Uno acts as the brains and nervous system, and a photoresistor acts as the all-seeing eye. Clever use of some cardboard allow [Raz85] to keep the photoresistor isolated from most all light except what the sextant is currently pointed at. Servos have a limited field of movement, so you might need to adjust [Raz85]’s code accordingly if you’re rebuilding this one yourself.

After taking three minutes to make its rounds of the sky, the Uno records the servos’ positions when fixed on the sun or moon, translating that data into usable coordinates. Don’t forget the best part, it runs on batteries making it convenient for all your wave-faring excursions!

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Follow The Bouncing Ball Of Entropy

September 1, 2017 by 9 Comments

When [::vtol::] wants to generate random numbers he doesn’t simply type rand() into his Arduino IDE, no, he builds a piece of art. It all starts with a knob, presumably connected to a potentiometer, which sets a frequency. An Arduino UNO takes the reading and generates a tone for an upward-facing speaker. A tiny ball bounces on that speaker where it occasionally collides with a piezoelectric element. The intervals between collisions become our sufficiently random number.

The generated number travels up the Rube Goldberg-esque machine to an LCD mounted at the top where a word, corresponding to our generated number, is displayed. As long as the button is held, a tone will continue to sound and words will be generated so poetry pours forth.

If this take on beat poetry doesn’t suit you, the construction of the Ball-O-Bol has an aesthetic quality that’s eye-catching, whereas projects like his Tape-Head Robot That Listens to the Floor and 8-Bit Digital Photo Gun showed the electronic guts front and center with their own appeal.

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Fail Of The Week: Arduino Sand Matrix Printer

August 31, 2017 by 29 Comments

NYC beaches are where tropical beaches addicted to meth go to die. So says [Vije Miller] in his write-up for his Arduino sand matrix printer. It’s a clever idea, five servo-operated cardboard plungers that indent a pattern of dots in the sand as the device is pulled forward, resulting in something not unlike a dot matrix printer that can write messages in the sand.

He’s submitted it to us as a Fail Of The Week, because it doesn’t do a very good job of writing in the sand, and it’s burned out a servo. But we feel this isn’t entirely fair, because whether or not it has delivered the goods it’s still an excellent build. Cardboard isn’t a material we see much of here at Hackaday, but in this case he’s mastered it in a complex mechanism that while it may have proved a little too flexible for the job in hand is nevertheless a rather impressive piece of work.

You can see a brief video below the break showing it in action. He tells us his motivation has waned on this project, and expresses the hope that others will take up the baton and produce a more viable machine.

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Cluephone For Partiers

August 26, 2017 by 4 Comments

[Sam Horne] adapted an old school landline phone to deliver clues to birthday party guests. When guests find a numerical clue, they type it into the keypad to hear  the next clue, which involves decoding some Morse code.

The phone consists of an Arduino Pro Mini, a MP3/WAV trigger, and the phone itself, of which the earpiece and keypad have been reused. [Sam] had to map out the keypad and solder leads connecting the various contact points of the phone’s PCB to the Arduino’s digital pins. He used a digitally-generated voice to generate the audio files, and employed the Keypad and Password Arduino libraries to deliver the audio clues.

This seems like a great project to do for a party of any age of attendee, though the keying speed is quick. Hopefully [Sam]’s guests have a high Morse WPM or are quick with the pen! For more keypad projects check out this custom shortcut keyboard and printing a flexible keyboard.

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