Text Adventures For Arduino Starting With Hunt The Wumpus

April 27, 2012 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Let’s be honest, you’re going to have trouble getting kids to play text-based adventure games these days. But this is one way to get them interested. This weekend you should get together with niece, nephew, son, or daughter and help them build their own hardware and program it with an adventure game. One last project before school’s out and the weather’s nice.

This is [Dan’s] shiny example of Hunt the Wumpus. He used Adafruit’s RGB LCD shield for Arduino. It’s got a character LCD and five buttons. But you can easily breadboard this yourself using a few tactiles plus a screen and uC of your own choosing. One nice touch with this one is the RGB backlight which is used to add an element of danger to the story line. He also mentions a few bugs in the Arduino language which he found while setting up the game.

We’ve been meaning to make our version of Zork using an Arduino, GLCD, and PS/2 keyboard ever since we read “Ready Player One”. This is just a bit more encouragement to get moving on that project.

[Thanks PT]

Sip-and-Puff Ipod Dock Highlights Assistive Technology

April 26, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Check it out, a Sip-and-Puff Arduino shield. This is an assistive technology that allows the physically challenged to control things using a plastic air tube. Different combinations of sucking (Sip) or blowing (Puff) differentiate between control commands.

In this case the device is used to control an iPod dock, but [Bob Johnson’s] Kickstarter project seeks to put the Sip-and-Puff functionality out there so that it can bridge the control gap no matter what the need. One example that he mentions in the video after the break is a Morse Code keyboard.

This shield uses a pressure sensor to receive input from the plastic tubing. But we’ve also seen it done using mechanical pressure switches. That technique is what was used in the Sip-and-Puff Kayak build.

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Driving A T6963C Based Graphic LCD

April 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Tom Fleet] spent the dreary weekend inside learning how to drive this T6963C based graphic LCD controller. Although this is his first time venturing away from HD44780 character displays, the availability of an Arduino library helped him go from being a newbie to coding his own animated graphics.

The hardware setup is straight-forward. The screen has a 20-pin connector and operates at 5V. We don’t see it on his protoboard, but usually these displays also need a potentiometer which serves as a voltage divider for the screen contrast. The data and control pins eat up most of the available I/O on the ATmega328 chip he used, but the I2C and SPI pins are still open and he plans a future project to make this a wireless display for his PC using one of those protocols.

As for fonts and animation, [Tom] links to several tools which will come in handy. There’s a font program that will convert Windows system fonts into a C file for use on the Arduino. The animations start with a 1:1 ratio animated graphic drawn with his favorite image editing software. He then converts those to monochrome bmp files and used bmp2c to convert each frame to a C array. After the break there’s a seven second example that would work well as a boot screen for his project.

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Tank Wars: A Video Game Controlling A Physical Bot

April 23, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 2 Comments

[Joe] sent us an email to show off his latest build. Tank Wars is the beginning of a video game/robot hybrid. You control the tank via an iPad, telling it where to go and how to fire. You have real life targets, in this case another robot. When you hit your target, the interface is updated with game stats. Currently, this is only a step past being a wifi controlled robot. [Joe] is working on making the game part of it a little more interactive.

The tank and the target are both run by Arduinos with RN-XV WiFly modules. The tank has obstacle avoidance both forward and backward, which, from the video, seems like it might make navigating a bit challenging at times. The iPad interface is just a web page, so it could really be used on any device. This is pretty cool, we can’t wait to see how he proceeds from here.

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An Easy To Build Cat Feeder Driven By A DIY Linear Actuator

April 21, 2012 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

[Will Finucane] of Revolt Labs/Mad Science Blog was looking for a way to keep his cats happily fed while away on a short vacation, so he put together a cheap and easy automatic feeder to ensure that his pets didn’t go hungry while he was away.

We’ve seen different iterations of automatic pet feeders here before, some relying on rotating false bottoms, while others use crank-style feeders to get the job done. [Will’s] solution is a bit different, employing a cheap linear actuator to deliver feedings.

He emptied out a glue stick, replacing the glue with a brass tube. This gives him the rigidity that the glue lacked, allowing him to easily move a platform full of cat food up and down. He mounted the glue stick on a continuous rotation servo, installing the actuator and a feeding platform inside a cardboard box.

Using an Arduino, he lowers the movable platform every 12 hours, allowing a bit of cat food to fall from the hole he cut in the side of the box. While his creation might not stand up to years of use, it’s a quick solution that can cost very little, depending on what you have sitting around.

Check out the video below to see [Will’s] cat feeder in action.

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One Hackaday Reader’s Experience Going On The Ben Heck Show

April 20, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

In the Hackaday Froums, [Colecago] shares his experience collaborating with [Ben Heck]. They were building some “Robot Luggage”, and you can see the episode after the break below. The idea was that they would build a piece of luggage that would follow you through an airport instead of having to be dragged.

[Colecago] shares a little about the “behind the scenes process”. There’s a surprising amount of work that goes into a very little amount of video. From what we can gather, this video took over a month to make. [Jesse/Colecago] was quite embarrassed to have run into a mistake that he called “UART Dislexia”, where he repeatedly wired the circuit incorrectly. We say, don’t stress, it happens to everyone.

Another point he brings up is how much of a pain in the butt the Arduino was in this process. While people in the comments often argue about the use of the arduino, [Jesse] explains how this specific case would have been much easier without.

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A Locking Chest With A Musical Key

April 17, 2012 by Mike Nathan 31 Comments

music-detecting-box

[Basil Shikin] was thinking about different types of locks, and was trying to come up with a locking solution that he had yet to see. It dawned on him that he had never come across a lock triggered by music, so he set off to construct one of his own.

He ordered a wooden chest online, then proceeded to piece together the electronics required for the locking mechanism as well as the music detecting logic. Using an Atmega328P paired with an electret mic, his system listens for a particular tune (the Prelude of Light from the Ocarina of Time) to be played , which triggers a tiny servo to undo the latch. To do this, he implemented a version of the Goertzel Algorithm on the Arduino, allowing him to accurately detect the magical tune by frequency, regardless of what instrument it is played on.

Be sure to check out the video below to see his musical lock in action.

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