Arduino Hacks

3039 Articles

Arduino Day Is Today

March 29, 2014 by 67 Comments

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Did you know today is Arduino day? A day to pull that little teal board out of the bin and blink some LEDs or dive deeper to challenge your skills. There’s a map of local events, but unless you’re near Italy (the birthplace of the movement) events are a bit hard to find.

There can be a lot of hate for Arduino around here, but we consider it the gateway drug to learning hardware design so why not support wide-adoption of the platform? We’ve even seen Hackaday-associated projects adopting compatibility. Both the Mooltipass and the FPGA shield projects have the platform in mind. Break down the assumption that electronics require mythical-levels-of-wizardry to toy with and we’ll be on our way to a world filled with hardware hackers. If you do want to get some really cheap boards to hand out Sparkfun has Pro Mini’s for $3 today, as well as some other deals [Thanks Jeff].

Are you still unconvinced and ready to rage in the comments? Before you do head on over to our Arduino anger management site to exercise some of that aggression.

An Etch-A-Sketch To Fetch The Time

March 28, 2014 by 18 Comments

For someone who has never used stepper motors, real-time clocks, or built anything from scratch, [Dodgey99] has done a great job of bending them to his will while building his Etch-A-Sketch clock.

He used two 5V stepper motors with ULN2003 drivers. These motors are mounted on the back and rotate the knobs via pulleys. They are kind of slow; it takes about 2 1/2 minutes to draw the time, but the point of the hack is to watch the Etch-A-Sketch. [Dodgey99] is working to replace these steppers with Nema 17 motors which are much faster. [Dodgey99] used an EasyDriver for Arduino to drive them. He’s got an Arduino chip kit in this clock to save on the BOM, but you could use a regular Arduino. He left out the 5V regulator because the EasyDriver has one.

[Dodgey99] has published three sketches for the clock: one to set up the RTC so that the correct time is displayed once the Etch-A-Sketch is finished, some code to test the hardware and sample the look of the digits, and the main code to replace the test code.

The icing on this timekeeping cake is the acrylic base and mounting he’s fashioned. During his mounting trials, he learned a valuable lesson about drilling holes into an Etch-A-Sketch. You can’t shake an Etch-A-Sketch programmatically, so he rotates it with a Nema 17. Check it out after the jump.

If you’re paying attention, you’ll realize we just saw the exact opposite of this project a few hours ago: a CNC tool (laser cutter) controlled by turning Etch-A-Sketch knobs.

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3 DOF Open Source Robot Arm Is Just The Beginning

March 27, 2014 by 11 Comments

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[Dan Royer] of Marginally Clever had a dream. A dream to build an open-source 6 DOF robot that anyone can make! To do so, he’s been learning robotics for the past two years, and has just finished the first step — he’s designed and built an open source 3 DOF palletizing robot!

He’s based this little guy off of the commercial ABB 460 palletizing robot, which is a tried and true industrial robot. It features all laser cut parts, a few nuts and bolts, some stepper motors and an Arduino UNO for the brain. He’s released all of the design files on Thingiverse and the firmware on GitHub — yet another project we’d like to build if only we had a laser cutter!

And don’t worry, the Arduino UNO is only being used for this first prototype — he’s already started writing code for the RUMBA (Reprap Universal Mega Board with Allegro-driver) controller for revision 2.

Stick around to see it write its first greeting with a marker — Hello World!

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Vending Machine Is Now Cyborg Friendly

March 25, 2014 by 34 Comments

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Don’t you hate having to pull out your wallet or cellphone in order to pay for something? What if you could just wave your hand and transfer money that way? Well [David] did, so he decided to do something about it. He made the vending machine in his hackerspace, FamiLAB, cyborg friendly.

The problem was, the vending machine wasn’t technically his to play around with… so he had to do this hack without actually modifying the machine itself — which we admit, actually makes it quite a bit more interesting!

But first, why is [David] even doing this? Is he a cyborg or something? Well, not quite, but he’s quite enthusiastic about bio-tech (is that what we call it now?) — anyway, he has NFC implants in his hand, and magnets in his fingertips to give him a sixth “electro-sense”. Wanting to take the most advantage of these augmented abilities, he put together this clever NFC credit card emulator.

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Open Source SwitchMote Promises Easy Home Automation

March 21, 2014 by 30 Comments

[Felix Rusu] is fast becoming a big name in home automation with his clever Moteino systems. His latest is called the SwitchMote which is a super easy way to upgrade your light switches for home automation, and he’s just released the source!

The SwitchMote is a drop in wireless light switch which lets you control a standard AC load, limited to 100W at this time. It uses a solid state relay (SSR) to perform the switching, but like any project involving mains electricity… MAKE SURE YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!

It makes use of a Moteino (duh) which is a wireless Arduino clone that operates over RF. We’ve seen it used before to control a Keurig coffee maker, operate a garage door over the internet, and even text you when your sump pump fails and your basement is about to flood!

Excited? Take a look at his GitHub repository, and check out how it works in the following video.

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Need To Reference The US Constitution Fast? How’s 6 Seconds Sound?

March 21, 2014 by 34 Comments

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Well, unless you know exactly what you’re referencing it’s going to take you a lot longer, but this clever serial receipt printer hack will let you print the whole darn thing in just 6 seconds!

Commissioned by [Jeff Goldenson] for his LABRARY.bike (quite literally a pop-up library on a bike), it was actually shown off at SXSW Interactive — did anyone see it in person? The artist-hacker who created it is [Thibault Brevet], the guy who brought us the DRM chair that only works 8 times before it falls to pieces.

Anyway, this cool and rather suspicious looking tube with a serial cord hanging out contains an Arduino, a max232 chip and a small Li-Po battery. The Arduino communicates with the printer through the max232 chip by converting the TTL signal to RS-232. It has a single button on top, which when it is connected to the printer will send out the US Constitution over the serial interface via ESC/p language.

Did we mention how fast it is?

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Meet Lynx, A (costly) Offline Password Keeper

March 19, 2014 by 28 Comments

Maybe because he didn’t want to wait for the Mooltipass to be produced, [davidhend] built himself his own offline password keeper, named Lynx.

It is based around an Arduino Pro 328, a 2.8″ TFT touch screen, an RFID card reader, an FTDI basic breakout and finally a li-ion battery. Lynx is therefore self-powered and uses an RFID card to later read the XOR-encrypted passwords located in a SD card. A USB serial connection is used to send the passwords to the computer, which also charges the battery. The current BoM cost is around $220 but we’re quite sure it can be made for much cheaper when not using pre-made boards. Looking at the official GitHub repository tells us that the XOR key is stored inside the microcontroller and that Lynx checks the RFID card code to allow encryption/decryption.

On a side note, we recently published a FAQ on the official Mooltipass GitHub. You’re welcome to let us know what questions we may have forgotten.