GSM Remote Control With The TiDiGino

January 6, 2012 by Mike Nathan 4 Comments

tidigino-gsm-remote

If you’re looking to remotely control things around the house, but can’t do it over the Internet or via WiFi, the TiDiGino just might have what you’re looking for. [Boris Landoni] from Open Electronics sent some information on the TiDiGino our way, and it certainly looks like a useful device if you’re in need of a solid GSM remote control module.

At the heart of the TiDiGino lies an ATmega2560, which is normally used in the Arduino Mega, so there’s plenty of processing power to go around. While the form factor differs just a wee bit from what you would expect from an Arduino, the TiDiGino sports all the proper connectivity to support any standard Arduino shield along with the requisite libraries required for use.

Through a contest/community effort, the TiDiGino supports remote alarm, gate control, remote thermostat control, and DTMF remote control functionality right out of the box. We imagine that our readers can dream up a litany of other uses as well, since GSM remote control tends to be pretty popular around here.

Be sure to check out the Open Electronics site if you’re interested in learning more about the TiDiGino – you’ll find a complete BoM along with code and schematics, making it easy to build your own.

LED Cube Is A Little Bit Of Kit, A Lot Of Point-to-point Soldering

January 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[Craig Lindley] recently finished building his own RGB LED cube project. It’s made up of four layers of 4×4 LED grids, but you may notice that the framework that supports the structure is not the usual ratsnet of wires we’ve come to expect. They’re actually long, thin circuit boards. [Craig] grabbed the Rainbow Cube kit sold by Seeed Studio for this project. But instead of pairing it with their Rainbowduino driver, he built his own to give him more options on how to control the blinky lights.

He’s using an Arduino Uno to control the display, choosing TLC5940 driver chips to safely provide the juice necessary to light up the grid. These drivers also offer 12-bit pulse-width modulation for easy color mixing. Driving the LEDs directly would have taken a large number of these expensive chips (over $4 a piece), but if multiplexed the design only calls for two of them.

Check out a video of the finished cube reacting to music thanks to the microphone and amplifier circuit [Craig] build into the driver board.

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OsPID: The Open Source PID Controller

January 5, 2012 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

Need PID control in your next project? Perhaps this little beauty can help. It’s an Open Source PID controller that also follows the Open Hardware guidelines. [Brett Beauregard] based the project on the newly minted Arduino PID library which he wrote. In the video after the break [Brett] takes apart the device, walking through some of the ways this might be hacked. If you want an overview of every part of this project to-date the best resource is probably his personal blog post.

The front circuit board is the meat and potatoes of the device. It hosts the user interface in the form of buttons, LEDs, and a graphic LCD screen. You can also see the USB mini-b connector which gives you access to the Arduino compatible ATmega328 microcontroller on the back. There is also a piezo buzzer for your alarm needs.

The prototype that [Brett] shows off uses pin connectors to join the main board to the two daughter boards. Unfortunately, the production model moved to dual-sided edge connectors. That’s fine if you you’re using it in its stock condition, but it makes it a bit harder to replace those boards with your own hardware. None-the-less, we love to see great Open Hardware projects brought to market! Continue reading →

Reading NAND Flash With An Arduino

January 5, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 15 Comments

[HC] took a gander around the Googles and saw a number of people trying to read NAND flash chips with an Arduino. It’s an interesting problem; at 16 Megahertz, [HC] is looking at about 60 nanoseconds per instruction cycle, and flash chips normally operate around 20 ns. He got the build working, and was able to read the memory contents and ID of a flash chip.

Right now, it’s just a proof-of-concept to demonstrate that reading flash memory is possible. [HC] used an Arduino Mega to pull the manufacture ID off a flash chip. Because there isn’t exactly a whole lot of storage on an Arduino to hold Megabytes of data, so [HC] is looking for a way to pull data off his flash chip. He’s considering sending it over Ethernet or storing it on an SD card.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a roundabout way to use those cheap, ubiquitous NAND flash chips. Considering we’ve got a few dozen of them housed in unused thumb drives, [HC]’s work shows a lot of potential. He posted a topic on his forum to see if there’s any interest in further developments, something we’d like to see.

Securing Your Keurig With RFID

January 4, 2012 by Mike Nathan 42 Comments

keurig-hacking

[Andrew Robinson] and his co-workers are lucky enough to have a Keurig coffee maker in their office, though they have a hard time keeping track of who owes what to the community coffee fund. Since K-Cups are more expensive than bulk coffee, [Andrew] decided that they needed a better way to log everyone’s drinking habits in order to know who needs to cough up the most cash at the end of the month.

He started by tearing down the Keurig B40, making note of the various PCBs inside while identifying the best way to go about hacking the device. The coffee maker is controlled by a PIC, and rather than try to re-engineer things from the bottom up, he left the core of the machine intact and focused on the control panel instead.

He disconnected all of the unit’s buttons from the control board, routing them through an Arduino before reconnecting them to the machine. This essentially rendered the machine inoperable unless triggered by the Arduino, giving [Andrew] control over the brewing process. He wired in an RFID reader from SparkFun, then got busy coding his security/inventory system. Now, when someone wants coffee, they merely need to swipe their office access card over the machine, which enables the use of its control panel.

As you can see in the video below the system seems to work well. If we were to offer some constructive criticism, we would suggest ditching the laptop and rolling the RFID reading/verification into the Arduino instead – other than that, we think it’s great.

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Arduino Heliostat Calculates The Position Of The Sun

January 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

We’re past the winter solstice and the days are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean we’re not sick of the sun setting around 5 in the afternoon. There is a way to get more sunlight through our windows – a heliostat. Lucky for us, [Gabriel] sent in his Open Source Sun Tracking / Heliostat project that can reflect sunlight through our windows all winter long.

Using mirrors to brighten up a room is an ancient practice; a few thousand years ago, heliostats went by the archaic term, “slaves.” Luckily there’s a far more elegant way of doing things nowadays – an Arduino. [Gabriel] came up with an Arduino sketch that calculates the altitude and azimuth of the sun using only latitude, longitude and time zone. [Gabriel] used this sketch to drive a pair of stepper motors and reflect sunlight through his window.

You can check out [Gabriel]’s demo of his heliostat after the break.

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Hackerspace Light Wall Plays Video At 30 Fps

January 1, 2012 by Mike Nathan 24 Comments

The folks at The Quad Cities Collaboration and Hackerspace (QC Co-Lab) were trying to find something to build for their first big project, and had to look no further than the wall for inspiration. The north end of their facility is home to a huge 15×17 glass block wall that happens to face a well-traveled roadway.

They decided that turning the wall into a huge LED display would be a great way to attract attention from passers-by, so they picked up some GE Color Effects lights and got down to business. Once they found out that the technical college next door was putting on an open house, the race was on to get the light display assembled as quickly as possible to maximize their exposure.

The team mounted the 255 LEDs in vacuum-formed reflective cones, which were attached to wooden frames before being installed behind the glass wall. An Arduino drives the entire display at a smooth 30 frames per second, a task they say tests the very limits of the board’s capabilities.

They finished the job in time for the open house, and as you can see in the video below, the display looks great.

Nice job QC-Co-Lab!

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