Handheld Sudoku (Assuming You Have Large Hands)

October 31, 2016 by Al Williams 11 Comments

[Hari Waguna] wanted to build a computerized Sudoku game. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a big deal. You can buy one, of course, but what fun is that? There’s plenty of apps for phones, but again, not much of a challenge. If you want to preserve your hacker cred, you’d use a CPU board like an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen, right? But if you want to grow your hacker cred, you’d follow [Hari’s] lead and use 81 seven-segment displays and a membrane keyboard.

Driving that many displays takes some doing (in this case shift registers). [Hari] uses some other tricks, like reading the keyboard using a single pin (and a resistor network). He’s made several videos about the project, including the one below.

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What’s New, ESP-32? Testing The Arduino Library

October 31, 2016 by Elliot Williams 30 Comments

In case you missed it, the big news is that a minimal Arduino core is up and working on the ESP32. There’s still lots left to do, but the core functionality — GPIO, UART, SPI, I2C, and WiFi — are all up and ready to be tested out. Installing the library is as easy as checking out the code from GitHub into your Arduino install, so that’s exactly what I did.

I then spent a couple days playing around with it. It’s a work in progress, but it’s getting to the point of being useful, and the codebase itself contains some hidden gems. Come on along and take a sneak peek.

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Litter Basket Automation

October 30, 2016 by Al Williams 9 Comments

Sometimes the technology part of a project isn’t the hard part. It is having an idea for something both useful and doable. Sure, a robot butler that would do your cleaning and laundry would be useful, but might be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, there’s only so many use cases for another blinking LED.

[Martinhui] knows how to use an ultrasonic sensor with an Arduino. Driving a motor isn’t that hard, either. The question is: what do you do with that? [Martin’s] answer: Automate a trash can. You can see a video of the result, below.

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Dual-boot Your Arduino

October 25, 2016 by Elliot Williams 28 Comments

There was a time, not so long ago, when all the cool kids were dual-booting their computers: one side running Linux for hacking and another running Windows for gaming. We know, we were there. But why the heck would you ever want to dual-boot an Arduino? We’re still scratching our heads about the application, but we know a cool hack when we see one; [Vinod] soldered the tiny surface-mount EEPROM on top of the already small AVR chip! (Check the video below.)

Aside from tiny-soldering skills, [Vinod] wrote his own custom bootloader for the AVR-based Arduino. With just enough memory to back up the AVR’s flash, the bootloader can shuffle the existing program out to the EEPROM while flashing the new program in. For more details, read the source.

While you might think that writing a bootloader is deep juju (it can be), [Vinod]’s simple bootloader application is written in C, using a style that should be familiar to anyone who has done work with an Arduino. It could certainly be optimized for size, but probably not for readability (and tweakability).

Why would you ever want to dual boot an Arduino? Maybe to be able to run testing and stable code on the same device? You could do the same thing over WiFi with an ESP8266. But maybe you don’t have WiFi available? Whatever, we like the hack and ‘because you can’ is a good enough excuse for us. If you do have a use in mind, post up in the comments!

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Codebender Shuts Down

October 22, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 66 Comments

Codebender.cc was a cloud based IDE for Arduino development. It was made for hackers by a few fellows in Greece. Unfortunately, while they saw some serious success, they were never able to convert it all the way into a viable business.

By November 31st Codebender.cc will be completely shut down. They assure users that the site will be in read-only mode for as long as the end of the year, but longer if the traffic justifies it. Codebender made it all the way to 10,000 monthly active users, but hosting and administration overshadowed this success to the tune of 25,000 dollars a month. Not so much as far as businesses go, but without revenue it’s more than enough to shut down a site. Their business plan aimed to tailor their services for specific chip manufacturers and other companies but those deals never came together.

It’s a pity, we were excited to see if Codebender could continue to grow. They were certainly doing some really interesting stuff like remote code upload. As the comments on the site show, many users, especially educators and Chromebook users, loved Codebender — your code isn’t stuck on one computer and where there was a browser there was an IDE.

Two paid services will remain (starting at $10/month) at addresses with different TLDs. But the post does mention that the Codebender project started as Open Source. Their GitHub repo isn’t a clear path for rolling your own, but if you do manage to hack together a working Codebender implementation we’d love to hear about it.

Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends

October 21, 2016 by James Hobson 8 Comments

With All Hallow’s Eve looming close, makers have the potential to create some amazing costumes we’ll remember for the rest of the year. If you’re a fan of the hugely addict-*cough* popular game Minecraft, perhaps you’ve considered cosplaying as your favorite character skin, but lacked the appropriate props. [Graham Kitteridge] and his friends have decided to pay homage to the game by making their own light-up Minecraft swords.

These swords use 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, designed so as to hide the electronics for the lights and range finder in the hilt. Range finder? Oh, yes, the sword uses an Arduino Uno-based board to support NewPixels LEDs and a 433Mhz radio transmitter and receiver for ranged detection of other nearby swords that — when they are detected — will trigger the sword to glow. Kind of like the sword Sting, but for friendlies. Continue reading “Minecraft Sword Lights Up When Nearby Friends” →

Newsflash: A Bunch Of Arduinos Is Not An Autonomous Car

October 19, 2016 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

Nobody’s perfect. Sometimes you’re up late at night writing a blog post and you stumble upon an incredible story. You write it up, and it ends up being, well, incredible. IEEE Spectrum took the bait on this video (embedded below) where [Keran McKenzie] claims to have built a self-driving car for under $1,000 AUS with Arduinos.

The video is actually pretty funny, and we don’t think it’s intended to be a mass-media hoax as much as a YouTube joke. After letting the car “take over” for a few seconds, it swerves and [Keran] pretends to have hit something. (He’s using his knees people!) There are lots of takes with him under the car, and pointing at a single wire that supposedly makes the whole thing work. Yeah, right.

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