Arduino Hacks

3036 Articles

Handheld Tetris Is Retro And We Love It

March 18, 2014 by 6 Comments

handheld tetris

[Eduardo Zola] has been playing around with Arduinos, and ever since he started, he wanted to try making a game. Having fond memories of playing Tetris back on Windows 3.1, he decided to try giving a handheld version of it a shot.

He started with two 8×8 Neopixel Matrices due to their simplicity — not to mention the massive library of code available! To make it truly portable, he’s also included a 3.7v 4400mAh lithium ion battery which will keep him gaming for hours. He found a 5-way navigation switch on eBay which makes up the joystick. A small LED bar display tells you what level you’re on, and he’s even included a smaller speaker for music, and a vibrating motor for successfully completed lines in the game!

He borrowed the Tetris algorithm (and added some improvements) from the source code by [Valentin Ivanov], who completed a similar project last fall. Stick around to see a demonstration video of it in action.

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Old Inkjet Turned Into An SVG Plotter

March 14, 2014 by 15 Comments

plotter

What do you do when you have an old printer, a portable CD player, and a handful of other electronics sitting around? Turn it into a plotter, of course.

The frame of the plotter was taken from a ye olde Epson printer, reusing the two stepper motors to move the paper along its length and width. The pen is attached to the laser head of a junked portable CD player. With this, it’s just three stepper motors that allow the Arduino control system to move the pen across the paper and put a few markings down.

The motors on the printer are, in the spirit of reuse, still connected to the printer’s driver board, with a few leads going directly from the Arduino to the parallel port interface. The motor in the CD player is another ordeal, with a single H-bridge controlling the lifting of the pen.

On the software side of things, a Processing sketch reads an SVG file and generates a list of coordinates along a path. The precision of the coordinates is set as a variable, but from the video of the plotter below, this plotter has at least as much resolution as the tip of the pen.

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Prop Replica Tesseract Case Has Some Serious Tech Inside

March 12, 2014 by 4 Comments

tesseractpng

[Dustin Evans] is a big fan of the recent Avengers movies — heck, we are too! So he decided to make this awesome Tesseract Case prop replica!

Tesser-what? A tesseract, or cubic prism is a geometric shape that is technically a four-dimensional hypercube — in the Avenger’s movie, it is an incredibly powerful and unstable alien energy source.

To make the replica, [Dustin] picked up a cheap aluminum tool case from the hardware store, took some measurements and began designing the inside of it using SketchUp. He’s crammed in an Arduino with a spectrum shield, a BlueSmirf Bluetooth modem, a Raspberry Pi, a 7″ LCD, speakers and an amp, a WiFi card for the Pi, and a few strips of Neopixels. It is running Raspbian with a stand-alone version of XBMC, which means using AllCast he can wirelessly control the box from a phone or tablet — now all he’s missing is a mini-generator that can put out a few million watts!

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Adding A Manual Z-axis To Your Laser

March 10, 2014 by 3 Comments

DSC07543 (Custom)

[Martin Raynsford] sells lasers, and laser cuts stuff for a living — we’re kinda jealous. Anyway, laser cutters from China are great, but sometimes lack certain functionality, so he decided to add his own z-axis feature!

The main laser cutter he uses has a very slow z-axis, and it’s also difficult to control — a job can’t be paused to adjust the height offset, the datum must be set every time manually, and you have to be in the very top level of the menu in order to do anything with it! With this in mind, [Martin] decided to add his own z-axis control, completely separate from the laser’s on board control system.

He’s using an Arduino Pro Mini to control the stepper motor with PWM. His new controller has four buttons — fast and slow, in each direction. He’s used the original end stops to protect the axis, and he’s also added a feature to set a datum by holding down both fast and slow buttons at the same time. It ended up being a very cheap upgrade to his system, and he’s also shared the source for anyone looking to recreate it.

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Black Orb Just Wants Someone To Talk With

March 10, 2014 by 22 Comments

spaceReplay

A team at the Royal College of Art has created Space Replay, a floating black orb that records and plays back conversations from passers-by. Space Replay is a neutrally buoyant helium balloon carrying a small payload. An Arduino, an Adafruit Wave Shield, and a small speaker make up the balloons’ brain. The team used the waverp library to record and play back sounds through their shield. 3 lithium coin cells power the system. A small vacuum formed plastic housing keeps all the internal parts together, as well as acts as a small speaker cone to amplify sounds entering and leaving the orb.

As the video shows, the final result is rather creepy. A slight breeze in a subway station caused the orb to move slowly down the hallway. One would think that space replay would freak a few people out, or at least entice the curious to touch it. Other than one amused elevator rider, the unflappable London public paid no mind to it. Maybe if it had some tea…

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Ask Hackaday: Wiping Your Bum With An Arduino?

March 9, 2014 by 83 Comments

TP

Over or under? Standing or sitting? Truly, toilet paper has been the focus of the most irreconcilable arguments ever. The folks on the Arduino Stack Exchange have a far more important question: how do you trigger an alarm when your TP supply is low?

[user706837] asked the Internet this question in response to his kids never replacing an empty roll. This eliminates the most obvious means of notifying someone of an empty roll – looking at it before you sit down – and brings up a few interesting engineering challenges.

Most of the initial ideas deal with weight or some sort of light sensor that can differentiate between the white TP and the brown roll. A much, much more interesting solution puts a radioactive source in the TP holder’s spring-loaded rod and uses a sensor to detect how much TP is left. A quick back-of-the-wolfram calculation suggests this might be possible, and amazingly, not too dangerous.

We’re turning this one over to you, Hackaday readers. How would you design an empty toilet paper alarm? Bonus points awarded for ingenuity and cat resistance.

Image source, and also one of the longest and most absurd Wikipedia articles ever.

A Cocktail Shaker With Android And Arduino

March 8, 2014 by 1 Comment

drinks

The most rewarding part of any project must be sitting down to see the fruits of your labors set in action for the first time and relaxing with a nice drink. [Tony DiCola] is really showing off his ability to think ahead, because his smart cocktail shaker takes care of the post-build celebration, measuring out drinks with exacting precision.

The build measures out precise amounts of any liquid with the help of a small electronic scale [Tony] picked up from Harbor Freight. Instead of trying to interface with the electronics in the scale, he instead connected a INA125 instrument amplifier to the load cell. An Arduino micro measures the weight on the load cell, and with the known densities of gin, vermouth, and Kahlua, [Tony] can get a very good idea of how much liquid is in the cocktail shaker.

The really neat part of this build is the interface: [Tony] wrote an Android app for his tablet that talks to the Arduino with an Adafruit Bluefruit Bluetooth adapter. The app receives the current weight on the load cell, displays the current amount of liquor in the cocktail shaker, and provides step-by-step instructions for making any cocktail.

It’s a handy little device to keep around the liquor cabinet, and with an absurd amount of pumps and valves could easily become the basis for a very cool cocktail bot.

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