OLED Name Badge With Rechargeable LiPo Cell

December 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

Here’s a project that let [Rick Pannen] try his hand with an OLED display and a rechargeable power source. He calls it OLEDuino which is a mashup of the display type and the Arduino compatible chip running the whole thing. He figures it will serve nicely as a geeky name badge but also ported a Breakout type game to play when he’s bored.

The project is an inexpensive way to attempt a more permanent trinket than simply using Arduino and a breadboard. [Rick] sourced the OLED display and USB LiPo charging cable on eBay. The ATmega328 hiding below the display is being driven from the 3.7V LiPo cell without any power regulation. The four buttons at the bottom provide the only user input but it should be more than enough for a few simple tricks.

Head over to his code repo for a bit more information. The schematic and board are both Eagle files. We generated an image of the schematic and embedded it after the break if you want to take a quick look at how simple the hardware really is.

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USB NeXT Keyboard

December 9, 2012 by Eric Evenchick 24 Comments

[Ladyada] and [pt] had an old keyboard from NeXT, but since it used a custom protocol it wasn’t usable with modern hardware. So they built a custom device to convert the NeXT protocol to USB.

The device uses a Arduino Micro to read data from the keyboard and communicate as a HID device over USB. It connects to the keyboard using the original mini-DIN connector, and is housed in the classic Altoids tin enclosure.

Since the protocol used by NeXT isn’t standard, they had to figure it out and write some code to interpret it. The keyboard communicates bidirectionally with the computer, so they needed to send the correct frames to key data back.

Fortunately, they hit on a Japanese keyboard enthusiast’s site, which had protocol specifications. They implemented this protocol on the Micro, and used the Keyboard library to create a HID device.

The final product is an adapter for NeXT to USB, which allows for the old keyboards to be used on any computer with USB. It’s a good way to bring back life to some otherwise unusable antique hardware.

RS-485 Node Control For Arduino

December 4, 2012 by Mike Szczys 55 Comments

rs-485-arduino-nodes

Wanting to control a split flap display that was not near a computer [Tom] looked to a common solution for communicating over distances not practical for I2C or SPI. He developed his own hardware and packet format using the RS-485 protocol.

This is part of a larger project he has been working on to feed data to a split flap display that he plans to hang on the wall. RS-485 is designed to work over long distances and overcome noise issues. The core of the communications system is the board seen on the left. It uses a MAX1483 chip, a pair of RJ45 jacks for Ethernet cables, and two terminal blocks for power and communications. There are a few nice things about this. The board acts as a pass-through making it easy to chain nodes together, and the data structure is completely independent of the hardware itself. Because of this [Tom] developed his own packet format that will be a bit more resilient than the Arduino networking scheme we looked at the other day.

Inventing Networking Protocols For Dozens Of Arduinos

December 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 35 Comments

chain

When you don’t want to use I2C or SPI, and MIDI and DMX are old hat, [Scott] comes along and invents a very strange networking protocol that is just daisy chaining a few Arduinos together with serial connections.

Strange as it may seem, this networking protocol actually makes a whole lot of sense. [Scott] is working on an animatronic birdhouse in the vein of Disney’s Imagineers and needed to network a whole bunch of Arduinos without using up precious IO pins.

The networking stack [Scott] came up with capitalizes on the hardware UART in each Arduino by simply daisy-chaining several boards together. By adding an FTDI breakout at the beginning of the chain, [Scott] can control dozens of Arduinos straight from a terminal

[Scott] isn’t using off-the-shelf Arduinos for this project – a few months ago he found 100 Arduino-compatible stepper motor controllers while dumpster diving at his job, giving him more than enough nodes to come up with some pretty crazy networking protocols. It’s a great use of the hardware he has on hand, and a very clever solution to controlling dozens of microcontrollers at once.

Check out [Scott]’s demo after the break.

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Color LED Matrix VU Meter Shows How To Use FFT With Arduino

November 30, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

If you’ve ever wanted to make your own VU meter but were scared off by the signal process you need to study this tutorial.

Hackaday Alum [Phil Burgess] developed the device using an RGB LED matrix, microphone, and an Arduino. You’ll notice that is doesn’t include an MSGEQ7 chip which we see in most of these types of projects. We have seen a few that use the Fast Fourier Transform to map the audio signal on the display as this one does. But [Phil’s] choice of an assembly language Library for ATmega chips makes this really simple to roll into your own projects.

The one drawback to the hardware choices made here is that there are only eight bits of vertical resolution. It takes a little creative interpretation to make this look good, but the use of color mixing really makes a difference. See for yourself in the demo after the break.

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MariaMole – An Alternate Arduino IDE Aimed At Advanced Users

November 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 49 Comments

[Alex] has been working with Arduino for some time now, but always thought it lacked some features which advanced users would really find useful. He decided to devote some free time to fixing the problem and ended up coding an Arduino IDE for more advanced users. A screenshot of his work — called MariaMole — can be seen above. It is obviously different from the standard IDE, bot not so much as to scare off new users.

This is meant to complement the original IDE, so it actually uses those configuration settings as dependencies. Once running, the program allows you to have multiple projects open at once. These are managed with the tree in the left hand column and a series of tabs along the top of the code window. When it comes time to compile and load the sketch you can click one button like normal, or use the program to fine tune your compiler flags, libraries includes, and the like. It also allows for interaction through one or more serial terminal windows. We haven’t tried it ourselves, so please leave a comment with your thoughts after having given it a go.

thanks for the tip [Rodrigo].

Kickstarter Incurs The Wrath Of Arduino Creator

November 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 183 Comments

[Massimo], one of the creators of the Arduino, is a little perturbed over what passes for the truth over on Kickstarter.

While [Massimo] does recognize that Kickstarter can be a force of good launching garage-designed projects into the hands of willing consumers, he noticed something was a little fishy with the recent smARtDUINO kickstarter (notice the capital letters, by the way). Right near the top of the smARtDUINO’s kickstarter page is the phrase, “For years we manufactured the ARDUINO in Italy. Now we created a new Open System: modular, scalable, the world’s cheapest and smallest!”

Being at the top of the Arduino organization, you’d think [Massimo] would have heard of these former Arduino manufacturers. The name didn’t ring a bell to him, so he called up the factory. No one at the factory had heard of them, and after a long search it was finally revealed the head of the smARtDUINO project hired two factory workers who worked for a supplier the official Arduino manufacturer uses.

[Massimo] makes the comparison of, “if he hires two factory workers from Ford he can claim he used to manufacture Ford cars.” We’re thinking that’s a little generous. It’s more like hiring two people who used to restock the vending machines in a Foxconn plant and claiming you used to build Apple computers.

With a simple trademark infringement on his hands, [Massimo] contacted Kickstarter to see what could be done. Kickstarter replied:

Thanks for writing in and bringing this to our attention. This is a matter that must be taken up directly with the project creator. You can contact them by clicking “Contact me” on the project page.
Best,
Kickstarter

For [Massimo], and us, that’s just not a sufficient answer. We’re thinking Kickstarter has an obligation to vet their projects and make sure the creators of these projects are who they say they are.

But enough about what we think. What do you, the Hackaday reader, think about this situation?