Minions Turn Your Keyboard Into A Bluetooth Keyboard

April 14, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

Evil geniuses usually have the help of some anonymous henchmen or other accomplices, but for the rest of us these resources are usually out of reach. [Evan], on the other hand, is on his way to a helpful army of minions that will do his bidding: he recently built a USB-powered minion that turns a regular PS/2 mouse and keyboard into a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

[Evan] found his minion at a McDonald’s and took out essentially everything inside of it, using the minion as a case for all of the interesting bits. First he scavenged a PS/2 port from an old motherboard. An Arduino Nano is wired to an HC-05 Bluetooth chip to translate the signals from the PS/2 peripherals into Bluetooth. The HC-05 chip is a cheaper alternative to most other Bluetooth chips at around $3 vs. $40 for more traditional ones. The programming here is worth mentioning: [Evan] wrote a non-interrupt based and non-blocking PS/2 library for the Arduino that he open sourced which is the real jewel of this project.

Once all the wiring and programming is done [Evan] can turn essentially any old keyboard and mouse into something that’ll work on any modern device. He also put an NFC tag into the minion’s head so that all he has to do to connect the keyboard and mouse is to swipe his tablet or phone past the minion.

If you’re looking for an interesting case for your next project, this McDonald’s Minion toy seems to be pretty popular. PS/2 keyboards are apparently still everywhere, too, despite their obsolescence due to USB. But there are lots of other ways to get more use out of those, too.

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Arduino Comes To The Raspberry Pi, Linux ARM Devices

April 12, 2016 by Brian Benchoff 67 Comments

Arduino is the perfect introduction to microcontrollers and electronics. The recent trend of powerful, cheap, ARM-based single board Linux computers is the perfect introduction to computer science, programming, and general Linux wizardry. Until now, though, Arduino and these tiny ARM computers have been in two different worlds. Now, finally, there are nightly builds of Arduino IDE on the Raspberry Pi and other single board Linux computers.

The latest Arduino build for ARM Linux popped up on the arduino.cc downloads page early this week. This is the result of an incredible amount of work from dozens of open source developers across the Arduino project. Now, with just a simple download and typing ‘install’ into a terminal, the Arduino IDE is available on just about every single board Linux computer without having to build the IDE from source. Of course, Arduino has been available on the Raspberry Pi for a very long time with sudo apt-get install arduino, but this was an older version that cannot work with newer Arduino boards.

Is this distribution of the Arduino IDE the same you would find on OS X and Windows? Yep, everything is the same:

While this is really just arduino.cc improving their automated build process and putting a link up on their downloads page, it does make it exceptionally easy for anyone to set up a high school electronics lab. The Raspberry Pi is almost a disposable computing device, and combining it with Arduino makes for a great portable electronics lab.

Brazillian Class Creates Digital Board Game

April 10, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 10 Comments

A class in Brazil was given the assignment to make a board game. [Marcelo], presumably, heard his son lamenting how lame it was going to be if the board was just cardboard with some drawings on, and came to the rescue.

fusion between Operation and one of those disease transmitters at the doctors office — A match meant to be.

Working with the class, they came up with the rules of the game. We’re not certain what those are, but it involves a regular game board, a flashing light circle with numbers, and a fusion between Operation and one of those disease transmitters commonly found at the doctor’s office. You can try to puzzle them out from the video after the break.

The brains of the board is an Arduino with an external EEPROM for all the sound effects and other data needed for this construction. Everything is laid out on a beautifully done home etched PCB. It’s too bad the other side of the board isn’t visible.

We’re sure the kids learned a lot working with [Marcelo]. It would have been nice if a traveling wizard came to some of our earlier classes in school and showed us just how much cool stuff you can do if you know electronics.

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Meet Cartesio, Robot Artist

April 9, 2016 by Al Williams 4 Comments

[Robottini] released plans for his robot, Cartesio, that is essentially an Arduino-controlled plotter made to create artwork. The good part about Cartesio is the low cost. [Robottini] claims it cost about $60 to produce.

The robot has an A3-size drawing bed and is practically the XY part of a 3D printer. In fact, most of the parts are 3D printed and the mechanical parts including M8 smooth rod. LM8UU bearings, and GT2 belts and pulleys. If you’ve built a 3D printer, those parts (or similar ones) should sound familiar.

The Arduino uses GRBL to drive the motors from GCODE. [Robottini] has three different workflows to produce drawings from applications like Inkscape. You can see some of the resulting images below.

We’ve covered GRBL before, and it is the heart of many motion control projects. If you’d rather draw on something less permanent, you might try this project.

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Tetris Everywhere: Character LCD Edition

April 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.

Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.

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Put Words In Your Dog’s Mouth With A Talking Dog Collar

April 7, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 21 Comments

It’s just a little past Halloween, but Adafruit’s talking dog collar, modeled after the movie Up, is still a nice fusion between crafting and hacking.

One reason that Adafruit is so popular is that every time they sell us something, they give us some of the worlds best tutorials and libraries for free. For this project they’re using their Bluetooth LE board and their Audio FX board with a few more mundane vitamins to construct the collar. We’re sure the enterprising hacker could find alternatives if they so choose.

The collar is made of leather and 3D printed props. They went with alkaline batteries rather than lithium, to keep their doggy companion a little safer. All the electronics are hidden under the various props and the wiring is routed behind the belt. To control the app, the different sound bytes are mapped to buttons on their Bluetooth-to-serial phone app.

It’s a good starter tutorial, and the concept applied differently would definitely be good for at least one good prank on a coworker or friend.

EP Composes A New Chiptune Each Time

March 31, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 19 Comments

[Captain Credible] is a chiptune music artist. He wanted to release an EP, but a regular old em-pee-three was too lame for him, so he made a tiny board with a coin cell, an ATtiny85, and a 3.5mm socket on it.

Rather than just writing some code to generate the tones for a pre-composed song, his “Dead Cats” EP generates the music itself. Using the arduino-tiny library, which adds the tone() function to the ATtiny, he has the chip pick its own time signature, key, subdivisions, and tempo. The melody and drum beat is randomly generated into an array. In addition to that, there are some code “one-liners” which insert unique sounds. After that the code just loops through the music.

If you don’t like the song, simply unplug the audio cable and plug it back in. The 3.5mm jack he chose has a built-in micro-switch, so the board is only powered up if someone is listening. If you’d like to see the circuit diagram, purchase the EP, or take a look at the code, all of that is available on his site.