Introducing The SquareWear Mini, With Its Chainable Color LED Matrix

February 10, 2014 by Mathieu Stephan 8 Comments

[Ray] just tipped us about his latest project: the SquareWear Mini, which basically is an improved version of the SquareWear 2.0 that we featured a month ago. For our readers that may have missed it, the SquareWear is essentially a wearable Arduino platform running at 3.3V and 12MHz. Both versions are based on an ATMega328 microcontroller running the V-USB library to provide USB connectivity, put together with diverse onboard peripherals.

As you can see in the picture above, the Mini includes 2 N-MOSFETs, one temperature sensor, one light sensor, a 16KB EEPROM memory, one buzzer, a one cell LiPo battery connector together with one charging controller, and finally a power switch (USB/battery). It is supposed to be 25% smaller than the SquareWear 2.0 and is optimized to work with a WS2812B-based 5×7 RGB LED matrix that [Ray] also designed. The latter can easily be cascaded in X/Y directions with other LED matrices in order to expand the overall display.

At last, [Ray] created a software to design animations and upload them to the SquareWear . A presentation video of the complete system is embedded after the break and you can download all the design files on GitHub.

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Upgrading Home Automation To Home Anticipation

February 9, 2014 by Marsh 9 Comments

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[Bithead’s] already built some home automation to control the lighting and temperature in his house while he’s away, but he wanted to take things a step further and have the house automatically anticipate his arrival and adjust the environment accordingly. The project takes advantage of geofencing to create a perimeter around the home that listens for a transceiver in [Bithead’s] car. We featured a similar project with a Raspi a few months ago, which locked the doors upon driving away.

[Bithead’s] implementation uses a pair of Digi Xbee Pro XSC radios with U.FL antennas to provide an impressive 2+ mile range of communication. The home-based Xbee hooks up to a Parallax Xbee USB adapter and subsequently into his computer—its antenna sits in a nearby window on the top floor of his house to maximize range. For his car, [Bithead] originally opted for an Xbee shield and an Arduino Uno, but he’s recently overhauled the build in favor of an Arduino Fio, which reduced the footprint and increased the range. Check out his page for the build log specifics and more pictures.

Pneumatic Powered Flight Simulator

February 8, 2014 by James Hobson 16 Comments

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Remember that feature a few days ago about the Cessna 172 flight simulator? It was pretty awesome. But do you know what it was missing? It was missing this. A fully motion-controlled, pneumatically driven, flight simulator cockpit.

[Dominick Lee] is a high school senior, and he was able to whip together this awesome flight simulator made out of PVC pipe, pneumatic cylinders, an Arduino, a projector, and a gaming PC — in just a few months time! He calls it the LifeBeam Flight Simulator, and he’s released all the information required to make one yourself.

It’s most similar to a Stewart platform simulator, which features 2 degrees of freedom, but instead of 6 actuators, this one runs on only two pneumatic cylinders. It works by exporting the roll and pitch (X and Y) data from the game, and then parsing it to an Arduino which controls the pneumatic valve amplifier, powering the cylinders.

It’s an amazing project, and it sounds like [Dominick] had an awesome physics professor, [Dr. Bert Pinsky], to help mentor him. Don’t forget to check out the demonstration video!

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8X8X8 Cube Invaders

February 8, 2014 by James Hobson 14 Comments

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Believe it or not, [Anred Zynch] had no soldering skills before starting this project! What we’re looking at here is an 8x8x8 LED cube set up as a Space Invaders style game with a Playstation 1 controller.

He was inspired by several other cubes like [Chr’s], and the Borg cube by [Das-Labour]. The project makes use of an Arduino Mega 2560 R3 to drive the 512-LED array, and an Arduino Uno to take care of the sound effects during game play. It’s kind of like Space Invaders — but in 3D!

Complexity of building and wiring it aside, [Anred] has provided great instructions and the code for the entire project, so if you’re looking to recreate it or something like it, you can! It’s also entered in an Instructable’s contest right now, so if you like it, we’re sure he’d appreciate the votes.

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Two-Wheel Balancing Robot Revived From The Dead

February 7, 2014 by James Hobson 1 Comment

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[Jouni] built a pretty nice little two-wheeled robot a while back — but he never got it working quite right. Taking inspiration and a bit of opensource code from another hacker featured here, he’s finished the bot, and it works great!

After seeing [Jose’s] 3D printed Air Hockey bot, he poked around the creator’s blog and discovered the B-Robot, a 3D printed, two-wheeled, stepper driven, balancing robot. As it turned out, it was incredibly similar to a robot [Jouni] had made himself previously!

[Jouni’s] robot features two NEMA-17 steppers, a 12v 2200mAh battery pack, an Arduino Pro Mini, a MPU6050 gyro and a FrSky receiver. Lucky for him, [Jose’s] B-Robot made use of the same steppers and gyro! Using some of [Jose’s] code from his GitHub, [Jouni] was able to bring new life into his little robot!

We’ve included videos of both the original project, and [Jouni’s] version. Aren’t opensource projects awesome?

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Robot Chameleon Teaches Little Girl About Camouflage

February 7, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

[Markus] has been teaching his daughter about animals using a big old animal encyclopedia. A few days ago, they stumbled upon the chameleon, and when he tried to explain its camouflage abilities, she didn’t quite understand. So he decided to make her a pet color-changing chameleon robot. The best part is he built it during her nap!

It’s a fairly simple circuit consisting of an Arduino Uno, a TCS3200 color sensor with breakout board, a ping pong ball, some resistors, and an RGB LED. He plans on adding temperature sensing as well as a capacitive sensor for touch later on. So far, his daughter loves it and plays with it all the time. She’s starting to learn how some chameleons can change their skin color in order to camouflage — and she’s learning the names of some new colors too!

As always, there’s a demonstration video following the break.

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Decascrap: A Three Servo Decapod

February 3, 2014 by James Hobson 5 Comments

[Drewtoby] loves making robots. His latest project is a 10-legged bot called the Decascrap, which makes use of only 3 servos!

What we like most about this project is the leg mechanism [Drew] has cooked up. The legs are made of guitar picks hinged to what look like popsicle sticks. Each guitar pick has a hole punched in it which allows the servo rod to go through the legs. Strategically placed globs of hot glue on either side of each leg on the servo rod allows for the parallel motion during the actuation of the legs. A third servo tilts the bot back and forth as the legs are moved, allowing the bot to scuttle about.

Stick around after the break to see it tackle some rough terrain — well, actually it’s just a piece of uneven foam, but hey!

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