One Dollar Board Targets Students

May 16, 2016 by Al Williams 75 Comments

The Raspberry Pi was made to be inexpensive with an eye toward putting them into schools. But what about programs targeted at teaching embedded programming? There are plenty of fiscally-starved schools all over the world, and it isn’t uncommon for teachers to buy supplies out of their own pockets. What could you do with a board that cost just one dollar?

That’s the idea behind the team promoting the “One Dollar Board” (we don’t know why they didn’t call it a buck board). The idea is to produce a Creative Commons design for a simple microcontroller board that only costs a dollar. You can see a video about the project, below.

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AV Remote Control Teams Arduino With – Visual Basic?

May 15, 2016 by Dan Maloney 33 Comments

A large installed base of powered speakers from a defunct manufacturer and a dwindling supply of working remote controls. Sounds like nightmare fuel for an AV professional – unless you take matters into your own hands and replace the IR remotes with an Arduino and custom software.

From the sound of it, [Steve]’s crew was working on AV gear for a corporate conference room – powered speakers and an LCD projector. It was the speakers that were giving them trouble, or rather the easily broken or lost remotes. Before the last one gave up the ghost, [Steve] captured the IR codes for each button using an Arduino and the IRRemote library. With codes in hand, it was pretty straightforward to get the Nano to send them with an IR LED. But what makes this project unique is that the custom GUI that controls the Arduino was written in the language that everyone loves to hate, Visual Basic. It’s a dirty little secret that lots of corporate shops still depend on VB, and it’s good to see a little love for the much-maligned language for a change. Plus it got the job done.

Want to dive deeper into IR? Maybe this primer on cloning IR remotes with an Arduino will help. And for another project where VB shines, check out this voice controlled RGB LED lamp.

Robo Face Speaks

May 12, 2016 by Al Williams 3 Comments

If you are doing a senior design project in engineering school, it takes some guts to make a robotic duplicate of the school’s president. He or she might be flattered, or completely offended. Us? We laughed out loud. Check out the video below. Spoiler: the nose/moustache wiggle at the end kills us every time.

The project uses a variety of parts including a plastic mask, an Erector set, and the obligatory Arduino with an MP3 shield. There are many articulated parts including eyes, nose, mouth, and wiggly moustache. The face uses RC servos, although [gtoombs] says he’d use stepper motors next time for smoother motion.

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Now You’re Printing With Water

May 12, 2016 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

How do you earn a place in a flower festival with a handful of Arduinos and a 3D printer? By building a water curtain that draws flowers. That’s exactly what Tecnoateneu Vilablareix, a hacking community in Spain did. They built this project specifically for Temps de Flors, a popular annual gathering in Girona, Spain. More than just a flower festival, the event opens gardens and courtyards of culturally importance to the general public that are closed the rest of the year.

The water curtain uses four Arduino Nanos to control the valves, which work in pairs to draw flowers, words, and patterns. A Mega provides a wifi connection to receive commands. Over 16 continuous days worth of print time went into the 128 valves and 64 nozzles that make up the water curtain. It took the group around 24 iterations to get the valve design just right—they have to be able to shut off quickly.

There’s an eight-video playlist after the break and a special video that shows how much we love pandering. Most of the ones in the playlist are quite short and demonstrate the final version of the water curtain. Others show the valve testing. The last is a time-lapse of the group setting it up at the festival. If you’re in the area, the festival runs until May 15th.

Now that you’re in the mood for computer-controlled water shows, here is a fountain controlled with a RaspPi.

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Don’t Take Photos Of Your Arduino 101 Either, It’s Light Sensitive

May 5, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 41 Comments

Wafer level chips are cheap and very tiny, but as [Kevin Darrah] shows, vulnerable to bright light without the protective plastic casings standard on other chip packages.

We covered a similar phenomenon when the Raspberry Pi 2 came out. A user was taking photos of his Pi to document a project. Whenever his camera flash went off, it would reset the board.

[Kevin] got a new Arduino 101 board into his lab. The board has a processor from Intel, an accelerometer, and Bluetooth Low Energy out of the box while staying within the same relative price bracket as the Atmel versions. He was admiring the board, when he noticed that one of the components glittered under the light. Curious, he pulled open the schematic for the board, and found that it was the chip that switched power between the barrel jack and the USB. Not only that, it was a wafer level package.

So, he got out his camera and a laser. Sure enough, both would cause the power to drop off for as long as the package was exposed to the strong light. The Raspberry Pi foundation later wrote about this phenomenon in more detail. They say it won’t affect normal use, but if you’re going to expose your device to high energy light, simply put it inside a case or cover the chip with tape, Sugru, or a non-conductive paint to shield it.

EDIT: [Kevin] also tested it under the sun and found conditions in which it would reset. Videos after the break.

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Not Even Hamsters Are Safe From The Internet Of Things

May 3, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 9 Comments

The internet of things is this strange marketing buzzword that seems to escape from the aether and infect our toasters and refrigerators. Now even a hamster is not safe.

[Mifulapirus]’s hamster, Ham, was living a pleasant hamster life. Then his owner heard about another hamster named Sushi, whose running wheel stats were broadcasted to the internet. Not to be left behind, Ham’s wheel was soon upgraded. Now Ham is burdened by the same social pressures our exercise apps try to encourage us to use. No, we are most certainly not going to tell our friends about two fourteen minute miles with a twenty minute coffee break in the middle, MapMyRun, we are not.

The feat of techno enslavement for the little hamster was accomplished with a custom board, an esp8266, and an arduino as described in the instructable. The arduino can be left out of the project now that the libraries have been ported to the esp8266. A hall effect sensor detects when the 3D printed hamster wheel is spinning.

If you’d like to check in on Ham, the little guy is alive and well, and the twitter is here. It looks like it’s been upgraded since the original article was posted. Now it shows when Ham is awake and running around the cage doing hamster errands.

Soda Fridge Hack To Fix A Lazy People Problem

April 29, 2016 by Donald Papp 13 Comments

[Paul] participated in a hackathon at work and created a hack to help solve what was ultimately a people problem. A soda fridge at work wasn’t getting refilled when empty. Instead of trying to make people less lazy, [Paul] went with making the fridge more needy.

The first thing [Paul] did was make a soda fridge refill sensor from a scale. As the fridge got emptier, it got lighter. The scale senses that and can decide it’s time for a refill. The only part missing was how to read the output from the scale. To do that, he took an unusual approach.
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