Storing Sketches In The Cloud

March 16, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 21 Comments

There’s a fine line between solving problems that don’t exist and solving problems that no one recognizes until a solution is found. The former shows up with housewares peddled on late-night infomercials, while the latter is summed up by [Henry Ford], “If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” [Dave]’s method of storing microcontroller code in the cloud definitely falls into the ‘useful’ category.

[Dave] first realized the problem when he was digging around the IDEO Toy Lab and came across an orphan project, a Barbie credit card swiper. [Dave] had no idea if the firmware for this project was saved on the server, or even if the current version was available. One solution to this problem could be burning a copy of the source onto the Flash or EEPROM on the board.

There’s a problem with this idea, though: storing the source in an Arduino’s memory takes space. Thinking laterally, [Dave] realized that editing source happens on a computer, computers are connected to the Internet, so why not keep the source “in the cloud?”

[Dave]’s solution is to host the source on GitHub, and tie every piece of code to a board’s unique USB serial number. This gives every Arduno a unique ID, allows for version control, and libraries of multiple files.

This very clever addition to the Arduino IDE is up on GitHub, ready to be added to any Arduino installation. Why the Arduino IDE doesn’t already have this feature is beyond us, but that’s what you get when you want a faster horse.

Kid-friendly RFID Media Center Playlist Control

March 15, 2012 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

rfid-dreambox-control

While young children have the tiny hands and fingers that most hackers/tinkerers wish they possessed from time to time, their fine motor skills aren’t always up to par when it comes to operating complicated electronics. People are always looking for ways to make their home entertainment systems accessible to their kids, and [Humpadilly] is no exception. Much like some of the other hacks we’ve seen this week, he has devised a way for his little ones (1 and 2 years old) to control his Dreambox Media Player using RFID, which seems to be the go-to technology for this sort of thing.

His RFID remote consists of three major components aside from the media player itself. An Arduino runs the show, and is connected to both an Ethernet shield and a breakout board fitted with an ID-20 RFID reader module. The Ethernet shield allows the Arduino to talk to his Dreambox over a telnet connection, while the RFID reader does what you would expect.

The device is in its infancy at the moment, and while [Humpadilly] hasn’t published a ton of details about the actual RFID devices he is using to control the system, he says that more details and improvements are forthcoming. In the meantime, you can check out his code here.

Control An Arduino From Android Over Bluetooth

March 13, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 10 Comments

Whether you’d like to do some real-time logging of data, or just want to control a project with your Android phone, [Thomas]’s Arduino-Android Bluetooth connection instructable is sure to be useful

[Thomas]’ build uses the very inexpensive JY-MCU Bluetooth module that’s available on eBay or dealextreme. This Bluetooth module ties directly into the Tx and Rx lines of the Arduino so a wireless serial connection between an Android device can be established. On the Android side of the build, Python for Android and the Scripting Layer for Android allow for reading wireless sensor data over Bluetooth.

While connecting an Android device to an Arduino is also possible with an IOIO or an Android Open Accessory dev kit, we haven’t seen much (barring this) about controlling or reading simple electronics with Android over Bluetooth. Sometimes you just don’t need an awesome dev board to bodge up a simple project, so we hope [Thomas]’s very nice instructable will help get a few more builds off the ground.

Becoming The YouTube Loading Animation

March 12, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 75 Comments

Whether you’re used to dropped wifi connections, or your housemates are using up all the bandwidth for streaming, we’ve all see the spinning octet of disks that is the YouTube loading animation. [technocrat] thought it would be a great idea to actually become YouTube and set out on designing a physical manifestation of the loading animation.

[technocrat] used eight ping-pong balls as the main structure of the build. After drilling each ping-pong ball and gluing white LEDs in, the only thing left was to connect everything up to an Arduino. The code loops through each LED and provides the ‘light trail’ animation YouTube has burned into our memory.

To complete the build, [technocrat] attached his physical loading animation to a black t-shirt emblazoned with the YouTube logo to make everything more understandable. While it may not be as colorful as the beachball of death or as conceptual as the Windows ‘spinning hourglass’, we’re really liking this build. Check out the video after the break.

Continue reading “Becoming The YouTube Loading Animation” →

Wireless Solar Water Heater Controller Ensures Hot Water Every Time

March 9, 2012 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

water-heater-controller

[Peter Sobey] had a solar hot water heater installed in his home, which worked great until he relocated his kitchen to a neighboring room. Now a good bit further from the tank, the hot water reaching his sink was tepid at best due to the increased distance and temperature limiting mixer valve in the new heater.

He installed a salvaged solar panel and water tank solely for use in his kitchen, but as the panel was located above the tank, he had to find a way to actively monitor and control the water temperature. His pump and valve system was originally driven with an off the shelf PICAXE-based controller, but he eventually got the urge to add a wireless display and control panel to the mix.

A pair of Arduino Nanos run the show now, one of which resides in the pump controller box, while the other is used in the temperature display box in his kitchen. He uses a set of Bluetooth modules to link the Arduinos together, relaying temperature data and allowing him to send the pump controller manual commands if needed.

He says the system works a treat, and he’s much happier with his homebrew controller than the one he used originally.

Antique Phone Provides A Soundtrack Perfect For Restoring Old Cars

March 5, 2012 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

crank-phone-music

[Simon] is in the middle of restoring/building himself an Austin 7 Special out in his garage, and like most tinkerers, found that music helps to move the process along. He happened to have an old Bakelite generator phone out in the garage as well, and figured that he might as well have it do something other than simply hang on the wall.

Playing music from the 1930 seemed like a fitting enough task, so he picked up an Adafruit Waveshield and spent some time wiring it up to the old telephone. His new radio works simply enough, piping .wav files through the handset, provided someone has cranked the phone’s generator recently.

While cranking the generator is required to play music, the Arduino is actually powered off a pair of AA batteries. The cranking is all cosmetic, but he did program the Arduino to slow the music down every once in awhile, requiring that the generator be turned to get things back up to speed.

It really is a neat way to repurpose the old phone, and we like the fact that [Simon] did not gut it to put this project together.

Continue reading to see a short video of his new music player in action.

Continue reading “Antique Phone Provides A Soundtrack Perfect For Restoring Old Cars” →

R2R Ladder Connects Multiple Buttons To One ADC Pin

March 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 34 Comments

If you’ve run out of I/O pins on a project and need a way to add user input you can find a slew of port expanders that work with various communications protocols like I2C and 1-Wire. But if you just want to add in some buttons without reaching for an extra IC you’ll love this hack. [John Boxall] shows how to add four buttons using one ADC pin.

The concept is nothing new. The buttons make up an R2R resistive ladder. When one of them is pressed, it completes the circuit for a voltage divider. The results are measured by the analog-to-digital converter of an IC to tell which button was pressed. The difficult part is calculating the resistor values. [John] is using eight resistors made up of just two different values. Every button and every combination of buttons has a unique voltage result which can be discerned by the chip. He even made a truth table so you don’t have to.

The example circuit seen in the video after the break uses an Arduino. But this concept is directly applicable to any microcontroller. And it should be quite easy to use an ADC interrupt to drive all of the button-read events. Continue reading “R2R Ladder Connects Multiple Buttons To One ADC Pin” →