Single Sided Arduino Is A Great Introduction To PCB Etching

October 9, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 20 Comments

After you’ve taken the plunge and decided to learn how to etch your own circuit boards, you’ll quickly find even the simplest boards are still out of your grasp. This is due mostly to the two-layer nature of most PCBs, and turn making a homemade Arduino board an exercise in frustration and improving your vocabulary of four-letter words.

After looking around for an easy-to-manufacture single-sided Arduino board, [Johan] realized there weren’t many options for someone new to board etching. He created the Nanino, quite possibly the simplist Arduino compatible board that can be made in a kitchen sink.

Billing it as something between the Veroduino and the Diavolino, [Johan]’s board does away with all the complexities of true Arduinos by throwing out the USB interface and FTDI chip. A very small parts count makes the Nanino much less expensive to produce in quantity than even the official Arduino single sided board.

For an introduction to etching your own PCBs at home, we couldn’t think of a better first board. As an Arduino, you’re guaranteed to find some use for it and the ease of manufacture and low parts count makes it the perfect subject for your hackerspace’s next tutorial series.

Sensor Based Dehumidifier System For Your Home

October 8, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

The apartment [Angus] lives in must be sealed up pretty tight. It was so humid during the winter that there was a mold issue. We usually have the opposite problem, needing to add humidity to the air in the colder months. To combat the issue he bought a small dehumidifier, but wanted to automate the system a bit more than what was built into its meager controls. He combined a set of wireless sensors and remote control outlets to switch the dehumidifier automatically.

The sensors are from a weather station he bought on eBay. It came with a base station and three remote units, all of which monitor both temperature and humidity. He wanted a system that could compare temperature with dew point and make decisions based on a simple look-up table. An Arduino with a custom milled shield reads these measurements from the sensors and feeds them to a router which is running a cron job script every minute. When that script judges the time and weather conditions warrant a change it tells the Arduino to switch the wireless outlet to which the dehumidifier is connected.

Finally, An ARM-powered Arduino

October 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 70 Comments

Far removed from the legions of 3D printers featured at this year’s Maker Faire in New York was a much smaller, but far more impressive announcement: The ARM-powered Arduino DUE is going to be released later this month.

Instead of the 8-bit AVR microcontrollers usually found in Arduinos, the DUE is powered by an ATSAM3X8E microcontroller, itself based on the ARM Cortex-M3 platform. There are a few very neat features in the DUE, namely a USB On The Go port to allow makers and tinkerers to connect keyboards, mice, smartphones (hey, someone should port IOIO firmware to this thing), and maybe even standard desktop inkjet or laser printers.

The board looks strikingly similar to the already common Arduino Mega. That’s no mistake; the DUE is compatible with existing shields, so connecting a RAMPS board for your 3D printer should be a snap.

Here’s a PDF the Arduino and Atmel guys were handing out at their booth. A few DUE boards have already made it into the hands of important people in the Arduino community, including 3D printer guru [Josef Prusa]. Sadly, the folks at Arduino didn’t think media personalities needed a DUE before its release, so you’ll have to wait until we get our hands on one later this month for a review.

Controlling Your Webcam With An Old Guitar Hero Pedal

October 3, 2012 by Mike Nathan 1 Comment

Hackaday reader [Tom Price] often uses Skype to communicate with family near and far, but he was getting tired of adjusting his webcam each time his kids moved out of frame. While the solution he came up with isn’t fully automated, it is hands-free, which is good enough for his purposes.

[Tom] was looking around for an electronic foot pedal of some sort when he came across a wireless 3rd party Guitar Hero peripheral that happened to fit the bill. Using an Arduino library created by [Bill Porter], he was quickly able to get the toy to communicate with an Arduino-flashed Atmega8, but things kind of fell flat when it came time to relay signals back to his computer. Using another Atmega8 along with the PS2X library, he was able to emulate the Guitar Hero controller that his foot pedal was looking for.

With the pedal portion of his project wrapped up, he focused on his webcam. [Tom] mounted the camera on a small servo, which he then wired up to the receiving end of his foot pedal rig. As you can see in the video below, he can now pan his camera across the room with a tap of his foot, rather than leaning in and manually adjusting it.

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Dry Erase Marker Opens All Hotel Room Doors

October 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

If you’re carrying around an exposed circuit board and a bunch of wires people are going to notice you. But a dry erase marker won’t turn any heads. And this one holds its own little secret. It acts as a master key for hotel room door locks.

This is really more of a repackaging hack. The exploit is already quite well-known. The Onity brand of key card locks most commonly used in hotels have a power jack on the bottom that doubles as a 1-wire communications port. The first published proof of concept used an Arduino board and a simple adapter to unlock any door in under one second. Now that hardware has been reduced in size so that it fits in the hollow shell of a dry erase marker. Even better, the felt tip has been replaced with the appropriately sized barrel jack. Check out the ultra-fast and inconspicuous use of it after the break. We think using this is no more obvious than actually having the key card.

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Using A 555 Timer And ADC As A Random Seed

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Most toolchains for embedded system include support for random number generation. But if you’ve read the manual you’ll know that this is really just pseudo random number generation (PRNG). When calling this function the same numbers will always return in the same order unless a different random number seed is supplied in advance. [Gardner] put together a simple and cheap solution for deriving better random number seeds. He reads a voltage from a 555 timer using the ADC on the microcontroller. At first glance it may not seem like a great source of randomness, but he performed some testing and the results look quite promising.

The project is aimed at Arduino-based circuits, but any chip with an ADC will work. The 555 timer is used as a free running oscillator. We know that this not be very stable when compared to even the worst of crystal oscillators, but that’s what makes it work so well as a random seed source. Add to this the low parts count and small size of the additional circuitry and you’ve got a winning combination. So keep this in mind when you need a random number but don’t necessarily need rock solid entropy.

[via Reddit and Freetronics]

Fantastic Programming Makes This Arduino Gaming Device Something Special

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

The hardware that went into this Arduino gaming console is just fine. But the coding that produced this game called Twisted SNAKE is beyond compare. [Rodot] has programmed several games for the hardware, which uses an Arduino, 160×168 TFT screen, a 3 axis accelerometer, and two input buttons. If you’re interested, there is a forum thread in which he talks a bit more about the hardware design. But you’re not going to want to pass up either of the two videos embedded after the break.

The first clip shows off a bouncing-ball platforming game. The accelerometer moves the ball back and forth, and the top scrolling level brings more ledges into play. This in itself is a great game. But the Twisted SNAKE game shown off in the second video makes our own ARM-based Snake game look like a 3-year-old programmed it. [Rodot] filled up all of the program memory of the ATmega328 chip to make this happen. There’s a menu system which allows for color themes and difficulty selection. The game play itself lets the snake travel anywhere it wishes with the tail following behind in graceful curves. Wow!

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