Facebook Notifier Uses Some Papercraft And Simple Electronics

May 24, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

This weekend project will tell you when you’ve got something new to look at on your Facebook page (translated). The yellow flag on the side of the mini-mailbox automatically goes up, alerting you to your recent online popularity.

[Rocco’s] craftwork on this project is fantastic. We love the scale, the colors, and especially the artificial grass that adorns the base. Inside the mailbox an Arduino controls a small servo motor attached to the new mail flag. As with other Arduino-based notifiers (be it the Internet Furby, or our own troll sniffing rat) the USB connection makes it incredibly easy to convert online information to real-world signals. The client side of this is a Python script. It uses a package that we were previously unfamiliar with called mechanize. We’ve just made a cursory examination of how that package is used, but we’re going to keep it in mind as an alternative to our usual go-to package, BeautifulSoup, which tends to be a bit hairy when you’re just looking for some basic data.

Wireless 4 Channel Temperature Monitor From Arduino Libraries

May 23, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 4 Comments

Say what you will about the Arduino platform but there certainly are a ton of libraries one can choose from. That is precisely what [Dan Julio] set out to do when building his slick looking 4 channel temperature monitor. The monitor consists of an Arduino RBBB, 2×16 character LCD and four DS18B20 1-wire digital thermometers. [Dan] also includes a bluesmirf to interface with an OS X monitoring program. Using libraries for the Bluetooth, LCD, and temperature monitors the Arduino code is only about 200 lines, and pretty easy to follow. Check out more at [Dan]’s site.

If you’d like more temperature sensor projects check out this mug or this PIC based monitor or perhaps you’d like to keep it in the Atmel family.

BAMF2011: Google’s SKPR Bot, Not For Arachnophobes

May 23, 2011 by Phil Burgess 10 Comments

Google’s Maker Faire exhibit space is swarmed with robots…er, androids. Amidst some cool bipeds and Segway-balancers, our inner sci-fi nerd was most smitten with this hexapod design, which they’ve dubbed SKPR Bot. The “Skipper” is on hand to showcase the ease of various Google technologies: SketchUp, Android OS and the Android Open Accessory Development Kit. The whole project came together in less than six weeks.

18 servos are mounted to a framework designed in SketchUp and laser-cut by Ponoko. The low-level servo PWM control is handled by the Dev Kit (essentially a rebadged Arduino Mega, as we’ve seen), while an Android OS phone provides a slick GUI and handles all the inverse kinematics calculations required as the robot takes each step. The coolest bit is that it’s all up for grabs. At this moment you’ll have to scrounge around the ’net a bit to find the plans and code, but some time post-Faire they plan to bring everything together at the SKPR Bot site.

BAMF2011: ChipKIT Is Arduino To The Power Of 32

May 21, 2011 by Phil Burgess 25 Comments

If you’ve been hungry for more power for your microcontroller projects, but reluctant to dump your investment in Arduino shields or the libraries and community knowledge that go with them all, Digilent has you covered. Their new chipKIT boards are built around the Microchip PIC32 MCU…a powerful 32-bit chip that until recently was left out of the cross-platform scene. A majority of code and quite a number of Arduino shields will work “out of the box” with the chipKIT, and the familiar development tools are available for all three major operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux.

We first mentioned these a couple weeks ago, but the software was unavailable at the time. Seeing the development tools in action was quite unexpected…

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Xoscillo Turns Arduino In An Oscilloscope

May 21, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

If you don’t have an oscilloscope you’d be surprised how many times you find yourself needing one. But if you have an Arduino on hand, the next time you might be able to get by with this software suite that can use a development board as oscilloscope inputs. The project is called xoscillo, and it allows an Arduino, or a Parallax USB Oscilloscope, to probe the signals while a computer does the heavy lifting.

The Arduino can be used for up to four input channels at 7 kHz. It’s possible to probe seven signals at 4 kHz as well. But the main feature that caught our eye is the ability to use several Arduino boards at one time in increase the number of channels available to you.

Granted, this is pretty slow for many digital electronic troubleshooting needs. But at least it’s something you can pull out when you just don’t have any other ideas about what is going wrong with your prototype circuit. We’re sure that sooner or later you’ll break down and buy a proper hackable oscilloscope. After all, your Arduino is probably already occupied as an I2C sniffer.

[Thanks Adam]

Arduino I2C Sniffer

May 21, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[Johngineer] found himself in need of an I2C sniffer, but didn’t have one available. Necessity is the mother of invention, so he put together this I2C sniffer sketch for Arduino. The arduino will record what is going on for a set time interval, then dump the data via serial as a .csv. You then have to plot it to see what is going on. [Johngineer] recommends Livegraph, since it is portable and easy. As you can see in the code, the time interval is adjustable, but you have the physical limitations of the RAM on the board to consider. This seems like a pretty handy piece of code stored around, effectively giving you a passable I2C sniffer in a pinch.

Arduino Arcade Rom Dumper

May 18, 2011 by Kevin Dady 12 Comments

[Vincenzo] wanted to read some 82S129 bipolar proms, and why not, they were very common in the 1980’s arcade scene. The problem is that its kind of an odd ball part now, and typically only (even) more expensive EPROM programmers can read them. An Arduino, breadboard and some quick scripting quickly takes care of that problem with this Arcade Rom Reader.

You stick the prom in your breadboard, and wire it up to the appropriate ports and pins of the Arduino, which bit bangs the prom and returns the results though the serial connection of the Arduino. Using a terminal program on the pc side you capture the text and use a script to convert the ascii values into a binary nibble format and save as hex.

This makes it much easier for us to dump roms from old arcade boards, because you never know when you might run across an old Polybius arcade board on your next outing to the salvage or scrap yard.

Join us after the break for all the details and as always comments!

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