Arduino Hacks

3050 Articles

Automatically Weed The Celebrity Gossip Out Of Your TV Time

August 16, 2011 by 32 Comments

[Matt Richardson] came up with a doozy of an idea: using an Arduino to monitor the closed caption on TV and mute it when news about ridiculous celebrities is on-screen.

He’s using the video experimenter shield to monitor the captions. This shield connects via composite video, and can be used to decode the binary code that carries the captions in the overscan at the top of the screen. When a keyword comes through, an IR LED sends the mute command to the television, then waits until 30 seconds have gone by since the last keyword before un-muting. It’s like a troll-sniffing rat for your television! Now we just need to figure out how to use it to mute during commercials too.

[Matt] suggests we should imagine all of the cool stuff we could do with access to the closed caption data; we were already deep in thought by the time he got around to the suggestion. This would be a fantastic prank in a location were the television sound is not being used. You could put the Arduino inline with the video feed, then program it to wait for keywords in the news report and alter them in funny ways… like a live mad lib.

You can see [Matt’s] video explanation of the project after the break.

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Autonomous Tank Will Track You Down, Cover You In Welts

August 16, 2011 by 14 Comments

autonomous_airsoft_tank

[Dan] wrote in to share a project he recently finished up, an autonomous Airsoft tank. The toy tank makes use of a wide array of technologies to get the job done, and will stop at nothing to hunt you down (provided you are wearing an IR beacon).

An Arduino board is used to control the tank’s motors, while a Lego NXT module handles most of the other operations. The tank makes its way around using an ultrasonic sensor, which ensures it doesn’t get stuck on any errant furniture or hung up in a corner. While driving around autonomously is well and good, [Dan] upped the ante a bit by making the Airsoft turret completely autonomous as well.

He fitted a Wiimote IR sensor to the tank, successfully interfacing it with the NXT module after a bit of trial and error. Now that things are up and running, he can place his IR beacon anywhere in the room, and the tank will drive around scanning its surroundings until the target is found. Once the tank locks on, a flurry of Airsoft pellets take down whatever stands in its way.

We think that [Dan] did a fantastic job here, but see for yourself in the videos embedded after the break.

[via HackedGadgets]

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Head-to-head Mountain Climbing From The Safety Of Your Game Room

August 13, 2011 by 21 Comments

Why risk frostbite and altitude sickness when you can marvel at the view from atop your own mountain climbing game?

[Jeff] built this delightful piece which you can see in action after the break. he combined several very simple ideas and he did it really well. The climbers are both mechanical. They grip the mountain’s face (which is covered with of carpet) with a tack pointed downward on the end of each limb. Their motion is provided by two tiny servos that make up the body of the climber. The two potentiometers in each controller directly affect the movement of the top and bottom limbs. The game plays music during the contest, and precisely detects a winner by sensing when an arm comes in contact with the metal snow cap at the summit.

Obviously weight was an issue during the design process. After some hemming and hawing [Jeff] decided to tether the climbers in order to avoid rolling a battery into each. But he overcame the issue with weighted cable management on the inside of the mountain.

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Stream Music Anywhere In Your House With These WiFi Speakers

August 12, 2011 by 27 Comments

wifi_speakers

[Rui] needed an easy way to play music in several different zones from one centralized location, but he didn’t want to run any new wiring in the process.

He figured that the best way to do this would be to stream his music directly to his speakers over Ethernet. Earlier this year, he put together a handful of Ethernet-connected speaker nodes using a few Arduinos equipped with both Ethernet and MP3 shields. To interface with these speaker nodes, he wrote an application utilizing VLC’s network streaming engine. This software monitors his network for newly attached speakers, adding them to his inventory automatically. He can choose to play music on any set of speakers using a multicast audio stream.

The setup was pretty slick, but what about locations that didn’t already have Ethernet drops? He thought of that too, revising his design just recently. The newest set of speakers he constructed ditches the Ethernet board for a Wifly shield, all of which he crammed inside the speaker cabinets. Now, he has the ability to stream music anywhere he’d like, no matter what sort of infrastructure is in place.

If you have a need to do this in your home, [Rui] has made his software available for free on his site, so be sure to grab a copy.

Continue reading to see a short video of the speakers in action.

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Arduino Link Libraries

August 12, 2011 by 7 Comments

Arduino is great, but it sometimes gets in the way due to its entry level style of doing things. One limitation is making your own library that also includes other libraries.[Scott] has sent in a great tutorial that deals with just that issue.

He covers how to make your own custom libraries while building off of preexisting ones. That’s something Arduino’s automatic magic wont touch.He covers getting your library to compile while including aanother library, linking versus compiling, and getting it all linked up.

Add in clear examples, lots of explanation and a hand full of good practices for C with libraries (like Forward Class Declaration vs Includes, and Using Brackets vs Quotation Marks for Includes), and this is one tutorial that any aspiring AVR or Arduino developer should check out.

Nanode: A Low-cost Network-enabled Arduino Ethernet Alternative

August 11, 2011 by 32 Comments

nanode_ethernet_enabled_arduino_board

The folks over at Hackspace London have been working hard to create a “very low cost, open source, Internet connected platform on which others can develop their ideas”, which they have dubbed “Nanode”.

Essentially an Arduino with Ethernet networking on-board, the Nanode is armed with an ATMega 328 microcontroller along with all the other standard goodies you would expect from an Arduino-compatible device. The Nanode can be controlled with a web browser right out of the box, thanks to some custom Ethernet libraries. Additionally network of Nanodes can be easily configured to communicate with a “master” unit via a multidrop serial bus, allowing the device to be used for a wide array of distributed control tasks.

Obviously most of these features can be had in the form of an Arduino Ethernet board, or achieved by using an Ethernet shield. The Nanode is a touch cheaper than either option at $40 for a kit, and the native networking capabilities sound like they would be quite handy. That said, we are a bit bummed that it only has 10BaseT networking capabilities, though it is always nice to have options when it comes to choosing a microcontroller board.

[Thanks, TheHypnotist]

Control LED Lighting With An Old Stereo Receiver

August 10, 2011 by 8 Comments

stereo_controlled_home_lighting

[Marklar] needed an IR receiver for a project he was working on, and his local electronics store was fresh out. He dug through his junk pile and found an old stereo receiver, so he decided to pull the IR module from it before tossing it out. Once he had it taken apart, he figured that he could utilize the wide array of electronic components he found inside, and set off to start a new project.

The control panel housed the components which interested him most of all. Using an Arduino, he was able to easily interface with the rotary encoders as well as the buttons, giving him a cheap and easy way to control his home lighting system. With a bit of programming, he was able to map lighting presets to various buttons, as well as use the rotary encoder to control the LEDs’ brightness and color. As an added bonus, he kept the IR receiver intact and can control his setup wirelessly as well.

Check out the video we have embedded below to see his scavenged control system at work.

[via HackedGadgets]

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