Magnetic Levitation With Arduino

November 2, 2015 by Will Sweatman 7 Comments

Getting a magnetic field to balance on another magnetic field is about as easy as balancing a bowling ball on the tip of an ink pen. With a little help from an Arduino mega, however, [EmmaSong] was able to balance a high density neodymium magnet in midair. He pulled off this tricky project using a set of four coils he got off of Taobao (the Chinese version of eBay), a hall effect sensor, and a handful of current regulation ICs.

The coils can be made in house if necessary, with each winding getting about 800 turns of enameled wire. The rest of the circuit is straightforward. It appears he uses a potentiometer for a rough regulation of the current going to the coils, doing the fine tuning in the code which can be found here (.RAR direct download).

We’ve seen magnetic levitation here before, and this project adds to the list of successful techniques to accomplish this difficult project.

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PIR Jack-o-Lantern Sees Them Coming

October 31, 2015 by Kristina Panos 4 Comments

Planning to make that carved a pumpkin last past Halloween night? Forget the tealight or LED candle—here’s an easy, no-solder project that will make it extra special. By default, this jack-o-lantern looks like it has a flickering flame, but get close enough to it and it goes crazy with color.

All you need is an LED matrix, a Rainbowduino to drive it, a PIR motion sensor to trigger the random colors, and a power source. [Alpha Charlie] kept the electronics from becoming pumpkin-flavored with some plastic bags. Since he used the PIR as the jack-o-lantern’s nose, there is a bit of plastic behind it to keep moisture from interfering.

[Alpha Charlie]’s build instructions are quite detailed, which makes this project even simpler if you’ve never used a PIR before. There are lots of ways you could build on this project to make it your own, like using trick-or-treater motion to trigger screams or spooky sounds, or add more sensors to make it more interactive. Watch it react after the break.

If you have nothing else at all to do between now and trick-or-treat time, you could bust out the soldering iron and recreate this 70-LED matrix jack-o-lantern. Blinkenlights too safe for your tastes? Fire-breather it is, then.

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Code Craft: Using Eclipse For Arduino Development

October 30, 2015 by Rud Merriam 43 Comments

As we work on projects we’re frequently upgrading our tools. That basic soldering iron gives way to one with temperature control. The introductory 3D printer yields to one faster and more capable. One reason for this is we don’t really understand the restrictions of the introductory level tools. Sometimes we realize this directly when the tool fails in a task. Other times we see another hacker using a better tool and realize we must have one!.

The same occurs with software tools. The Arduino IDE is a nice tool for starting out. It is easy to use which is great if you have never previously written software. The libraries and the way it ties nicely into the hardware ecosystem is a boon.

When you start on larger projects, say you upgrade to a Due or Teensy for more code or memory space, the Arduino IDE can hamper your productivity. Moving beyond these limitations requires a new, better tool.

Where do we find a better tool? To begin, recognize, as [Elliot] points out that There is no Arduino “Language”, we’re actually programming in C or C++. We chose which language through the extension on the file, ‘c’ for C and ‘cpp’ for C++. An Arduino support library may be written in C or C++ depending on the developer’s preference. It’s all mix ‘n match.

Potentially any environment that supports C/C++ can replace the Arduino IDE. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do, at least for inexperienced developers, because it means setting up the language tool chain and tools for uploading to the board. A developer with that much experience might eschew an integrated development environment altogether, going directly to using makefiles as [Joshua] describes in Arduino Development; There’s a Makefile for That.

The reality is the Arduino IDE is not much more than a text editor with the ability to invoke the tools needed to compile and download the code to the Arduino. A professional IDE not only handles those details but provides additional capabilities that make the software development process easier.

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Swimming Pool Dance Floor Enlightened With Leds

October 24, 2015 by Rud Merriam 11 Comments

In a well documented blog entry, [Loren Bufanu] presents a project that lit up a glass dance floor covering a swimming pool with RGB strips. We mentioned a video of his project in a Hackaday links but didn’t have any background information. Now we do.

The project took around 450 meters of RGB strips controlled by two Rainbowduinos and driven by sixty-four power Mosfets, sixty-four bipolar transistors, and a few other components. Producing white light from the LEDs draws 8 amps from the power supply.

The Rainbowduino is an ATmega328 Arduino compatible board with two MY9221 controllers. Each controller handles 12 channels of Adaptive Pulse Density Modulation. In other words, it makes the LEDs flash nicely. [Loren] used the Rainbowduino instead of some alternatives because multiple R’duinos can coordinate their activities over I2C.

The software part of the project did not work as well as the hardware. The light patterns were supposed to follow the music being played. A PC software package intended to drive the R’duinos produced just a muddy mess. Some kludges, including screen captures (!), driven by a batch file tamed the unruliness.

It’s been awhile, but a similar disco dance floor, built by [Chris Williamson] but not over a pool, previously caught our attention. [Chris] is a principle in Terror Tech that recently got a mention on Sparkfun.

The video after the break fortunately does not make a big splash, but is still electrifying.

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Leap Motion Wirelessly Controlling A Prosthetic Hand With An Arduino

October 22, 2015 by James Hobson 8 Comments

The Leap Motion controller is a rather impressive little sensor bar that is capable of generating a massive 3D point cloud and recognizing hands and fingers to allow for gesture control based computing. It’s been out for a few years now but we haven’t seen many hackers playing with it. [Anwaarullah] has messed around with it before, but when it came time to submit something for India’s first Maker Faire, he decided to try doing an actual project with it.

Checking out the latest Leap Motion SDK, [Anwaarullah] realized many improvements had been made and he’d have to rewrite some of his original code to reflect the changes. This time around he’s opted to use the ESP8266 WiFi module instead of a Bluetooth one. He printed off a Raptor hand (from the wonderful folks at e-NABLE) and hooked it up with some RC servos to give him a nice robotic hand to control.

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Arduino.cc Expands European Manufacturing

October 22, 2015 by Brian Benchoff 18 Comments

Maker Faire Rome is over, and that means it’s time for the Arduino media blitz. Arduino has already had a big announcement this week with the introduction of the Arduino / Genuino 101 board powered by the Intel Curie module. Team .cc hasn’t forgotten all their Atmel-powered boards though. The latest news is that Arduinos will be manufactured in Germany by Watterott Electronics (.de, Google Translate).

Right now, Arduino.cc boards are manufactured in China by Seeed, and in the US by Adafruit and Sparkfun. Watterott Electronics is one of the premier hobby electronics distributors in Germany.

Boards made by Watterott will carry the Genuino mark; Arduino.cc seems to anticipate a loss in the Arduino vs. Arduino trademark dispute outside the US. All boards produced under license from Arduino.cc sold outside the US will carry the Genuino trademark, whereas boards produced for the US market will carry the Arduino trademark. Interestingly, this Arduino vs. Arduino split began with a former manufacturer, with a maelstrom of pettiness stemming from that trademark dispute. In any case, the licensing for boards manufactured by Watterott is most assuredly worked out by now. The new manufacturing partner guarantees a greater supply of Arduinos for all.

Laser Rangefinder Brought To Life With Arduino

October 21, 2015 by Bryan Cockfield 17 Comments

Range finders are amazing tools for doing pretty much anything involving distance calculations. Want to blink some lights when people are nearby? There’s a rangefinder for that. Need to tell how far away the next peak of a mountain range is? There’s a rangefinder for that. But if you’re new to range finders and want one that’s hackable and configurable, look no further than the SF02/F rangefinder with the Arduino shield, and [Laser Developer]’s dive into what this pair can do.

Once the rangefinder and shield have been paired is when the magic really starts to happen. Using USB, the Arduino can instantly report a huge amount of raw data coming from the rangefinder. From there, [Laser Developer] shows us how to put the device into a “settings” mode which expands the capabilities of the rangefinder even more. The data can be dumped into a graph, for example, which can show trends between distance, laser strength, and many other data sets. [Laser Developer] goes one step further and demonstrates how to use this to calculate the speed of light, but from there pretty much anything else is possible as well.

And while you can just buy a rangefinder off the shelf, they are fairly limiting in their features and can cost exponentially more. This is a great start into using a tool like this, especially if you need specific data or have a unique application. But, if laser range finding isn’t for you or if this project is too expensive, maybe this $5 ultrasonic rangefinder will work better for your application.