[LDX] first noticed the odd sounds coming out of his ceiling fan, regularly, on the hour and half-hour. Then he noticed that the lights were flickering as well. Figuring something was up, he built a logging power-line monitor to see if he could decode the shadowy signals and figure out what cryptic messages were being transmitted over the power lines. Naturally, he suspected the Illuminati were behind it.
Continue reading “Decabit: Or The Conspiracy Theory That Wasn’t”
[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.
In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, switches, and a wire maze that requires the player to navigate without bumping into the wire (think 2D Operation).
A proper battlestation — or more colloquially, computer desk — setup can sometimes use a bit of technical flair to show off your skills. [fightforlife2] has shared their DIY ambilight monitor backlighting that flows through different colours which mimic what is displayed on the screen.
[fightforlife2]’s setup uses fifty RGB LEDs with individual controllers that support the FastLED library, regulated by an Arduino Nano clone — although any will suffice. The power requirement for the display was a bit trickier, ultimately requiring 3 amperes at 5V; an external power brick can do the trick, but [fightforlife2] also suggests the cavalier solution of using your computer power supply’s 5V line — adding the convenience of shutting off the ambilight display when you shut down your PC!
Last time, I talked about how my storage situation and my cheap nature led me to build an RC joystick controller with a cell phone app and an ESP8266. The key to making this easy was to use the GUI builder called Blynk to make a user interface for an Android or Apple phone. Blynk can communicate with the ESP8266 and makes the project relatively simple.
The ESP8266 Blynk code is straightforward. You do need to set up the Arduino IDE to build for the ESP8266. That can vary by board, but here’s the instructions for the board I was using (from Adafruit; see below).
Depending on the type of ESP8266 device you are using, you may need a 3.3 V serial cable or some other means of getting the firmware into the device. For the Adafruit device I had, it has a 5 V-tolerant serial connection so a standard USB to serial dongle plugs right in. There’s also two switches on my device. To get into bootload mode, you have to push the one button down, hold it, and then press the reset button. Once you release the reset button you can release the other button. The red LED half-glows and the device is then waiting for a download.
Continue reading “Blynk With Joy”
There’s an iconic scene from the movie Big where [Tom Hanks] and [Robert Loggia] play an enormous piano by dancing around on the floor-mounted keys. That was the first thing we thought of when we saw [jegatheesan.soundarapandian’s] PC joystick rug. His drum playing (see the video below) wasn’t as melodious as [Hanks] and [Loggia] but then again they probably had a musical director.
At the heart of the project is, of course, an Arduino. An HC-05 provides a Bluetooth connection back to the PC. We thought perhaps an Arduino with USB input capability like the Leonardo might be in use, but instead, [jegatheesan] has a custom Visual Basic program on the PC that uses SendKeys to do the dirty work.
The switches are more interesting made with old CDs, foil, and sponges. The sponge holds the CDs apart until you step on them and the foil makes the CDs conductive. He uses a lot of Fevicol in the project–as far as we can tell, that’s just an Indian brand of PVA glue, so Elmer’s or any other white glue should do just as well.
A tachometer used to be an accessory added to the dash of only the sportiest of cars, but now they’re pretty much standard equipment on everything from sleek coupes to the family truckster. If your daily driver was born without a tach, fear not – a simple Arduino tachometer is well within your reach.
The tach-less vehicle in question is [deepsyx]’s Opel Astra, which from the video below seems to have the pep and manual transmission that would make a tach especially useful. Eschewing the traditional analog meter display or even a digital readout, [deepsyx] opted to indicate shift points with four LEDs mounted to a scrap of old credit card. The first LED lights at 4000 RPM, with subsequent LEDs coming on at each 500 RPM increase beyond that. At 5800 RPM, all the LEDs blink as a redline warning. [Deepsyx] even provides a serial output of the smoothed RPM value, so logging of RPM data is a possible future enhancement.
The project is sensing engine speed using the coil trigger signal – a signal sent from the Engine Control Unit (ECU) which tells one of the ignition coilpacks to fire. The high voltage signal from the coilpack passes on to the spark plug, which ignites the air-fuel mixture in that cylinder. This is a good way to determine engine RPM without mechanical modifications to the car. Just make sure you modify the code for the correct number of cylinders in your vehicle.
Simple, cheap, effective – even if it is more of a shift point indicator than true tachometer, it gets the job done. But if you’re looking for a more traditional display and have a more recent vintage car, this sweeping LED tachometer might suit you more.
Continue reading “Quick Arduino Hack Lets Tach-less Car Display Shift Points”
Food. A necessary — often delicious — interruption of whatever project you’re currently hacking away at. Ordering takeout gets expensive and it’s generally unhealthy to subsist solely on pizza. With the Sandwich-O-Matic, a simple voice command fulfills this biological need with minimal disturbance of your build time.
Built for a thirty-six hour hackathon, the Sandwich-O-Matic is controlled by a Photon and an Arduino. The backend is running node, hosted on AWS, and Google Cloud was used for voice to text recognition. This thing is a fully automated and voice controlled sandwich building station. A DC motor services the toaster, while the rest of the device is actuated by servos. Simply tap the ‘begin recording’ button on the site, tell it your ingredient choices, and off it goes.
Continue reading “Sandwich Robot Keeps You Fed So You Can Keep Hacking”
