Arduino Home Statistics

May 5, 2011 by Kevin Dady 15 Comments

[Mike] is doing a little series that is about DIY smart homes. While these wont turn your house into a Hal 9000 (and hopefully wont try and kill you), they are fun and fairly easy to carry out. Parts 1 and 2 focus on the bathroom, part 3+ is in the works. Lets go ahead and look at what is done already.

DIY smart home part 1 covers the kings throne. Through the use of an Arduino, ultrasonic rangefinder, Ethernet shield, and twitter account, whenever the toilet is used a counter goes up. Calculate that against your gallons per flush and you now have reasonable water tracker.

Diy smart home part 2 hits the shower with much of the same hardware and goals. Adding on to the Arduino software there is now a PIR sensor and another twitter account. Basing knowledge from a Lady Ada tutorial on PIR sensors, the additional Arduino code slides into place and some loose ends from part one are cleaned up.

We cant wait to see what is in store for the future and wish [Mike] the best of luck.

Automate Repetitive PC Actions With A Foot Pedal

May 5, 2011 by Mike Nathan 41 Comments

foot_pedal

Instructables user [bkovac] was sick of clicking the terminal icon on his desktop whenever he wanted to launch a terminal window. Keyboard shortcuts aside, he figured the easiest way to take the tedium out of the process would be to launch terminal windows with a foot pedal.

He grabbed a pedal that he had sitting around in his workshop and took it apart to ensure the switch contacts were configured for his particular use. The wires were run to an Arduino which talks to the computer over serial using a Python script.

While the setup works just fine, it’s definitely not the most efficient or simplest way of getting the job done. In fact, we have seen other methods that are quite a bit simpler, though they lack the potential versatility of this particular modification.

Rather than simply loading a terminal window on his computer, we would love to see this pedal enhanced to perform multiple functions – at which point the Arduino would be a pretty decent choice. We would probably start out by swapping out the full-sized Arduino for a Teensy, mounting it inside the pedal. Multiple foot presses could be used to trigger different events, based upon the number of presses that occur within a given time period. It could be made even more useful by using it to trigger gesture-based events, similar to those seen in plug-ins for Chrome and Firefox.

How would you enhance [bkovac’s] pedal interface? Let us know in the comments.

Cutting Paper Scrolls With Frickin’ Lasers

May 4, 2011 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

This circuit illustration adds a scrolling paper feeder to the bed of a laser cutter. In the video after the break you can see that the actual assembly is put on the bed of the laser cutter. After the laser has cut out the specified pattern, the scroll is wound to move an un-cut portion into place. It uses a servo motor to drive one of the spools.

An Arduino Uno with a servo shield is being used for this application. It has one button which winds one spool for a pre-programmed period of time. There’s a few issues with this setup, namely that it’s not tied into the CNC program that runs the laser. There’s also a lack of precision when using a continuously rotating servo like this. If it were upgraded to use a stepper motor and patched into the CNC hardware this would make cutting new scrolls for your player piano a breeze.

Here’s a project that does the opposite, it takes old player piano rolls and digitizes them.

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Real-time Robotic Arm Control With Blender

May 4, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

robotic_arm

Last year, [Justin Dailey] was coming down the home stretch of his senior year as a Computer Engineering student and needed to build a final design project. He always wanted to construct a robotic arm, and figured that there was no better way to legitimize such a project, than to claim that it was “homework”.

While he originally wanted to control the arm with a joystick, he had been messing with Blender quite a bit leading up to his final project, and thought it would be pretty cool to let Blender do the work. He started out by testing his ability to control a single servo with Blender, then slowly increased the complexity of the project. He prototyped the arm using cardboard, and satisfied with his progress thus far, began constructing the arm out of aluminum.

Once he had all six of his servos attached to the arm’s joints and wired to his Roboduino, he got busy constructing a 3D model in Blender. Using a few Python scripts, the movements inside Blender are translated to serial data in real-time, which is relayed to the Roboduino in order to control the arm.

Check out his site if you get a chance – there’s plenty of code to be had, as well as several videos of the arm in various stages of construction and testing.

Large Remote-controlled Game Of Life Display

May 3, 2011 by Mike Nathan 5 Comments

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Sometimes it’s just plain fun to over-engineer. [Stephanie] gets a warm fuzzy feeling when she successfully adds way more electronics components to a project than she really needs – just because she can. We can’t really argue with her if that is the intended goal, nor can we find fault with the sweet Game of Life display she put together.

She started off with six Game of Life kits from Adafruit, but she quickly caught the LED bug and her collection grew until she had 20 kits (that’s 320 LEDs for those of you keeping count). After piecing them all together, they were mounted in a wooden frame and placed behind a dark piece of acrylic. It looked great and worked just fine, but it wasn’t overdone enough for her tastes.

In the end, she added a small Arduino and Xbee module to the Game of Life display, which enables it to be controlled by her network-enabled thermostat we featured a few weeks back. The thermostat was fitted with an Xbee unit as well, which allows it to turn the Game of Life on and off at whatever times [Stephanie] specifies.

We’ll take two please.

[via Adafruit Blog]

Racing Wheel Guided R/C Car With Video Feed

May 1, 2011 by Mike Nathan 12 Comments

Instructables user [Kaeru no Ojisan] enjoys constructing R/C kit cars and wanted to build one that could be driven using a PC racing wheel he had on hand. Not satisfied with simply guiding it with the racing wheel, he added a web cam to the car so that he can monitor its location from the comfort of his desk chair.

The car is loaded down with all sorts of electronics to get the job done, requiring four separate battery packs to keep them online. An Arduino controls the motor and the steering servos, receiving its commands wirelessly via a Bluetooth add-on. The camera connects to a USB to Ethernet converter, which enables the car’s video feed to be transmitted via the onboard wireless router.

The racing wheel interface seems to work just fine, though we don’t doubt that the whole setup can be easily simplified, reducing both weight and battery count. While [Kaeru no Ojisan] says that the car is in its concept stages and there are a few bugs to work out, we think it’s a good start.

Stick around to see a quick video of the car in testing.

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Real-time Digital Puppetry

April 29, 2011 by Mike Nathan 4 Comments

digital_puppet_show

If it sometimes seems that there is only a finite amount of things you can do with your kids, have you ever considered making movies? We don’t mean taking home videos – we’re talking about making actual movies where your kids can orchestrate the action and be the indirect stars of the show.

Maker [Friedrich Kirchner] has been working on an application called MovieSandbox, which is an open-source realtime animation tool. A couple of years in the making, the project is cross-platform compatible on both Windows and Apple computers (with Linux in the works), making it accessible to just about everyone.

His most recent example of the software’s power is a simple digital puppet show, which is sure to please young and old alike. Using sock puppets fitted with special flex sensors, he is able to control his on-screen cartoon characters by simply moving his puppets’ “mouths”. An Arduino is used to pass the sensor data to his software, while also allowing him to dynamically switch camera angles with a series of buttons.

Obviously something like this requires a bit of configuration in advance, but given a bit of time we imagine it would be pretty easy to set up a digital puppet stage that will keep your kids happily occupied for hours on end.

Continue reading to see a quick video of his sock puppet theater in action.

[via Make]

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