Arduino Rover Doubles Up On Obstacle Avoidance

June 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Eduard Ros] wrote in show off his first attempt at building an autonomous rover (translated). As with many of these projects, he started with the base of a remote control toy truck. This solves so many mechanical issues, like steering, locomotion, and power source.

He just needed a way to control the vehicle. The recent LayerOne badge hacks either did this through the wireless controller protocol or by adding an Arduino directly to the vehicle. [Eduard] chose the latter, and also included obstacle avoidance sensors in the process. We’ve seen quite a few that use these ultrasonic rangefinders. He decided to go a different route by adding two of them rather than scanning by mounting one on a servo motor.

The video after the break shows the vehicle successfully navigating through a tight space. This makes us wonder how much data can be processed from the stationary sensors? We’re not familiar with how wide the horizontal sensitivity is on the devices. If you have some insight, please share you knowledge in the comments section.

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Building A Quiz-show Style Buzzer System

June 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Theses are the team buzzer boxes which [Philippe Chrétien] built for his mother. She’s a big fan of quiz shows (we’re thinking Jeopardy and the like) and he thought she’d enjoy a proper setup for home gaming.

Each unit consists of an arcade button and one LED, both housed in a project box. He uses telephone wire to connect each buzzer to the base unit. We like that idea since we’ve got a lot of old telephone cable lying around and our RJ-45 crimp includes an RJ-11 slot. This is perfect for making our own cables.

The base unit houses an Arduino board which polls the buttons to see which is pressed first. The LED on the appropriate buzzer box is illuminated so the players know who got in first. One special feature of this setup is the ability to choose from 30 different buzzer sounds.

There are several other quiz buzzer projects kicking around Hackaday if you’re interested. One of our favorites is this system which uses plastic bowls as the buttons.

[via Adafruit]

ATtiny85 Sketch Flashing Rig

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

We’re happy to see Arduino enthusiasts championing the use of smaller hardware when the need for a full-blown ATmega-based board just isn’t there. [Chris] has been doing just that, using ATtiny85 chips in his projects. But he’s tired of hooking jumper wires to flash the sketches. He finally got around to etching this ATtiny85 programming adapter.

If the project is not pin hungry, an ATtiny85 can run Arduino sketches without the need to port the code. The best news is that the Arduino board you used to prototype the project can be used as the programmer for the standalone chip. Here that’s a Boarduino, and [Chris] laid out a double row of female pin headers for quick plug-in. To the right you can see the DIP socket for the target chip. Although this works perfectly well, we would have liked to also see the inclusion of a 2×3 AVR ISP programming header which could be used with the full range of AT chips.

One Enormous Breadboard

May 30, 2012 by Jesse Congdon 16 Comments

[Franklyn] wrote in to tell us about the The Hack Factory Big Board project. The Twin Cities Maker group, a Minneapolis/St Paul based hackspace, set out to provide an education tool to help students make the leap from schematic diagrams to bread board connections. Naturally their conclusion was to create a humungous 10x scale bread board. The board features scaled up yet fully functional capacitors, resistors, a dip switch, and the jumbo-est LEDs we’ve seen in a long while.

Like its 0.1″ pitch counterpart, passive components can be thrown in 1″ pitch breadboard to create a myriad of analog circuits. The Twin Cities folks even tossed together an optical theremin using a scaled up photoresistor. Beyond analog circuits the board can also demonstrate various ICs using either a custom breakout board featuring an 8-pin DIP socket or a vacuum formed Atmega 328 which boasts an internal Arduino Uno. The cool thing about the giant 28-pin DIP is that it does not necessarily function as a microcontroller. Instead the UNO will be loaded with chip emulation programs geared towards the lesson at hand, jumpers select programs to teach debouncing, logic, flip-flops, and a whole slew of other basic concepts.

We are a bit concerned that the next logical step is a gigantic soldering iron, but at least we finally have something to interface to the huge liquid crystal display. If you still want more giant circuit stuff check out this 555 footstool.

Check out a quick intro video after the jump!

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Physical Email Box — Mail Flag And All

May 29, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

We gave you a side view because we really like the red new-mail flag. Sure it works the opposite of how USPS boxes do (where the flag tells the letter carrier there is outgoing mail to be picked up) but it’s still a fun touch. What you can’t see here is that this physical email box has a character LCD screen to read your messages and a set of buttons on the top to send back replies.

[Eraclitux’s] project puts an Arduino, LCD, a few buttons, and a servo motor inside of a metal project box. It connects to his computer and takes commands over the USB cable. The Python script is where most of the magic happens. This is a good reference project if you’re interested in using POP and SMTP packages to interface your Python scripts with an email server. You’re pretty limited on responses, with preprogrammed messages to reply “Yes”, “No”, or “Read”. But it’s journey that matters, not the destination.

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An Arduino Based Quadruped Robot

May 27, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 6 Comments

Sure, we see hexapods all the time at [HAD], but moving around with four legs can be more tricky kinematics-wise. This Instructable shows you how to make one out of balsa wood.

Although one might not think of balsa to make their robot out of [vexedpheonix] explains that this was chosen because it’s extremely light and easy to work with. Since he was trying to keep costs down, the cheapest servos available were used. These weren’t all that powerful, so the lighter the body the better! According to the included bill of materials, he was able to keep the entire robot build under $100.

According to the article, the hardest part was making four copies of the same leg. We might suggest using a CNC router, but building one would obviously add a huge layer of complication to the project!

Thanks for the tip on this one [SteveT]! Be sure to check out the video of this little robot waving one of it’s legs or trying to walk after the break! Continue reading “An Arduino Based Quadruped Robot” →

Small Life On A Character LCD

May 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Duality] just finished programming Conway’s Game of Life on a character LCD. The game is a great programming exercise that everyone should undertake at one point or another. It uses a very simple set of rules to evolve the playing area from a given starting state. In this case the game grid is only 64 pixels, one for each of the positions on this 16×2 character LCD screen. This makes for very quick games as the cells tend to quickly reach an equilibrium as they arrive at the outer borders. See for yourself in the clip after the break.

We could have sworn we’ve seen this before, but with four times the playing space thanks to some custom characters. We couldn’t find an example of that, but the idea is to use a larger grid (something more like what’s seen on this graphic LCD) by generating a set of custom characters that slices each 5×8 pixel character into four smaller discrete areas. Something along the lines of what is being done with this spectrum analyzer.

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