Arduino Hacks

3036 Articles

The Face-Tracking Confectionery Cannon!

January 13, 2014 by 39 Comments

A team of mechanical and electrical engineering students at Olin College came up with a very fun semester project — a pneumatic powered marshmallow cannon that can track faces, and aim for the mouth!

The device — dubbed the Confectionery Canon — is an impressive mechanical build which required many of Olin College’s manufacturing resources such as the laser cutter, the mill, and the lathe. The majority of the device was made out of acrylic, which was chosen for easy laser cutting, and affordability. Specific aluminum pieces provide strength and were made using mostly scrap found in the shop.

Four servos, a webcam, a solenoid and an Arduino Uno make up the electrical system, which uses Python and OpenCV to track faces (GitHub). A PVC tank is used as the pneumatic reservoir, charged with a safety release valve at 30PSI. To fire the cannon, a sprinkler valve is controlled by a beefy solenoid. It currently only has a magazine capacity of 4 large marshmallows, but the team is planning on upgrading soon.

They have put together a great website with tons of information on the project, and following the break is a fun promo video they made for the project — they even got the VP of  the college to try it!

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SquareWear 2.0 A Wearable Opensource Arduino

January 12, 2014 by 37 Comments

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Are you guys tired of redesigned Arduinos yet? Usually we are, but [Ray] just released the SquareWear 2.0, and we have to admit, it’s a pretty slick design.

It’s an update to SquareWear 1.1 which we covered a year ago. That version made use of a 18F14K50 microcontroller, measured a tiny 1.6″ x 1.6″ and could easily be sewn into wearable circuits. But after receiving lots of requests to design a new Arduino based board, [Ray] obliged and made v2.0.

The new SquareWear is slightly bigger, measuring in at 1.7″ x 1.7″, but it packs a much bigger and more functional punch — just check out the image schematic above! The only catch is it doesn’t actually have a USB-to-serial chip on-board, which is why [Ray] was able to get the board so small and inexpensive. Instead it simulates USB in the software using the V-USB library. That method is much slower but still functional. To perform serial communication through the USB port it uses the onboard USBasp bootloader.

The board also features large through-holes to accommodate sew-able pin pads, making it super easy to integrate this into fabric!

For a complete explanation of the SquareWear 2.0, check out the video after the break.

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I Am The Midnight Message Board What Messages At Midnight

January 11, 2014 by 15 Comments

Photoluminescent stars on your bedroom wall or ceiling are pretty cool, though the stationary shapes can become boring. [Adi] felt this way, too. While doodling with a bright white light on some glow in the dark vinyl, it occurred to him that this could make for an interesting display. He set about making GLO, the midnight message board and RSS display.

[Adi]’s light writer uses 12 UV LEDs on a linear axis powered by a stepper motor to write RSS headlines, Twitter trends, or custom text on his wall. He finds the slow fade of the text very soothing to fall asleep by, and it’s easy to see why. The LED array imprints a section of a character consisting of a 6×5 bit pattern. The 12 LEDs are split into two groups, so it can write two lines at 45-50 characters each. [Adi] designed his own pixel font for this project, and advises that only upper case letter forms be used.

[Adi]’s write-up is quite admirable and comprehensive. In the circuit build section, he advises that the LEDs must be very close to the vinyl for optimum results, but that they should protrude farther than the shift registers so the chips don’t rub the vinyl. Of course you could opt for more intense light sources, like laser. See it in action after the break.

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Printer Up-cycled CNC Machine Uses More Than Just The Stepper Motors

January 11, 2014 by 15 Comments

Sometimes you just know from the photo that this is going to be a really cool project. When most people salvage parts from an old printer, they usually chuck the rest. In this case [Shane] made use of the entire printer to build his CNC machine.

He started with an old HP 2500C A3 printer, which he had planned to salvage for parts only. While he was taking it apart he realized the chassis would make a great frame for his actual CNC machine! With that in mind he quickly changed his game plan to making each axis inside of the printer.

He’s using regular ball bearing drawer runners for both the X and Z axes, covered with a clever design of aluminum angle to keep any possible chips from jamming them. The Y axis on the other hand makes use of the original shaft runners from the print head carriage. Each axis is driven by threaded rod using recycled stepper motors from the printer.

An Arduino UNO sits at the heart of the project with a Protoneer CNC shield to control the stepper drivers. He’s also included an emergency stop, hold, resume, and cancel buttons for manual control.

It’s a great project, and an amazing example of using what is on hand for a project. Stick around after the break to see a demonstration of it printing!

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A Business Card That Plays Simon Says

January 10, 2014 by 16 Comments

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When your name is Simon and you want to build your own circuit board business card, it makes perfect sense to incorporate a game of Simon Says, and that’s exactly what [Simon] did with his Business Card.

You may see a resemblance to the Engineer’s Emergency Business Card; that’s because [Simon] took inspiration from that card to build his own.  The game of Simon Says is played via 4 low-profile pushbuttons and 4 0805 LEDs.  The microcontroller of choice to run the game is an ATtiny45 set up to work with the Arduino IDE.  But with only 5 pins available for I/O, [Simon] had to give up 4 pins to the LEDs and configure the remaining pin as an analog input.  The buttons are tied into a voltage divider that feeds the analog input, so depending which button is pressed, a different voltage is read in, thus a value from 0 to 1023 determines which button was pressed.

One of the great things about this write-up is that it goes through the process of etching PCBs at home using the toner-transfer method.  We’re not sure how many home-etched business cards he’s willing to pass out, but surely whoever does get the card, will never forget his name.

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Christmas Tweetball

January 9, 2014 by 4 Comments

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The holidays are long over, but we’re still getting a smattering of holiday themed hacks. For this one, the [Han’s] family decided to make a Christmas bauble that relays their tweets to them!

They call it the Tweetbal which is Dutch for — well — Tweetball! Whenever someone tweets with the hashtag #tweetbal it gets displayed on the 20×4 serial LCD display. They’re using an Arduino Uno with an RN-XV WiFly module to receive and send the tweets to the display. A large white plastic ornament ball houses it all secured very firmly with our favorite adhesion method — duct tape. It’s a pretty simple project, but a great holiday hack if we do say so ourselves — plus it could be easily used for non-holiday purposes — like a desktop trinket twitter feed!

Stick around after the break to see its tweeting capabilities in action.

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Arduino Ball Throwing Game

January 9, 2014 by 8 Comments

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Building your own gaming platform is pretty cool on its own, but when the game actually looks like fun to play, well that’s on a different level of cool. [Zippy314] designed an Arduino based game platform as a Christmas present to his son called the Das Blinken Bonken!

Like all highly addicting games, the gameplay is simple; the player throws a ball at the target board while aiming to hit a specific ‘pad’. As shown in the video after the break, there are many game possibilities with this platform, like trying to hit the illuminated target each time, or just trying to hit all of the pads on the board as fast as possible.

A pad is registered as a ‘hit’ with the help of home-made pressure sensors, which are each constructed in a ‘sandwich’ of pressure-sensitive conductive sheets. This is the same material used in these LED Sneakers. Since the resistance through the sheet lowers as pressure is applied, a simple voltage divider circuit is used to feed the analog inputs on the Arduino, thus making it very easy to detect a ‘hit’. An I2C 4-Digit 7 Segment display keeps score and displays the game title, while a strip of addressable RGB LEDs give player feedback and other vital gameplay information.

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