Shockingly Fun Quiz Game

February 15, 2011 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

Gather your friends round the living room for a head-to-head quiz game. This one’s not quite as nice as you might think. Get an answer wrong and you’re going to get the Venkman treatment thanks to the stored electricity in a disposable camera flash circuit. [Israel] runs the game questions from a Windows machine, and uses a set of four USB joystick buzzers that let each contestant ring in. They all wear a cuff that houses electrodes for negative-reinforcement upon an incorrect answer. Since every contestant answers each question it won’t be long before you hear the uncomfortable yelp of failure from your guests. This seems a little bit more fair than shocking people for not calming their minds, but the video from that hack is still one of our all-time favorites.

Valentine’s Day Love Song Machine

February 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 13 Comments

tellart_bell_ensemble

Just in time for Valentine’s day, [Adam Meyer] and the folks over at tellart.com have put together a little project they call the “Love Song Machine“. Using a web-based form, anyone can submit a song, which will then be played on a system of bells that they have set up in their office. You can choose from several pre-defined love songs, or you can create your own unique arrangement with which to serenade them. Once you are ready to go, your song will be queued up, and you can watch a video of your creation as it is being played.

The system is comprised of 8 solenoid-actuated bells which are all controlled by the Arduino they have hooked up to their web server. It’s a pretty fun idea, and there are sure to be plenty of people submitting songs, so get yours in before things get too busy!

Keep reading to see a video preview of their system in action.

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Radio-controlled LED Light Show

February 14, 2011 by Mike Nathan 15 Comments

HL1606_radio_controlled_light_show

[Alan] was commissioned to make some wearable, radio-controlled LED strips for the Travelling Light Circus. It has taken some time, but he has recently finished some prototypes, and thought it was a good time to do a writeup on the project. The system is managed by a single controller unit, which communicates with any number of LED driver units, each controlling 4 HL1606 LED strips. The light displays are synchronized across all of the LED driver units via a 2.4 GHz radio, with each driver falling into synch almost immediately after being powered on. While some might be turned off to the fact that he uses Arduino Pro Minis to control the LEDs, this is far from a simple project.

[Alan’s] blog contains several posts about this project, with everything documented in detail. He spends quite a bit of time talking about the project’s software, as well as hardware issues he ran into along the way.

His blog is a must read, but even more so, it is a must see. The lighting effects are mesmerizing, as there are a ton of different light patterns these units can generate, so be sure to check out the following video of the lights in action.

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Arduino Based PC Ambient Lighting

February 14, 2011 by Kevin Dady 20 Comments

[royboy] from the Arduino forum has recently made a post showing off his Arduino / PC ambient light system. The system is simple to wire up and easy to use, as long as your video is being sent from a PC, which for many of us that use “home theater pc” systems is very convenient. Using a sparkfun red/green/blue (non addressable) led strip, an ULN2003A, an Arduino, and a short sketch written for processing the project is easy to toss together and very effective too.

The processing sketch continuously takes screen captures and then takes the resulting pictures and averages all the colors together. That average color is fed down to the Arduino over its stock serial connection, where it is output to 3 of the pwm capable outputs. Those outputs are connected to the 2003 Darlington transistor array to switch the 12 volt led strip.

It may seem like it would be slow, as processing is an interpreted Java based language, plus serial communication, plus Arduino overhead, but its actually very responsive and completes its task with little or no lag. Join us after the break for a quick video to see for yourself.

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Range Finder Musical Toy

February 13, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

parallax_arduino_ping_organ

Instructables user [sketchsk3tch] was looking to make a fun toy for his kids using things he had around the house and came up with the Ping Organ. The organ is played by standing in front of the Parallax Ping range sensor, and moving around any which way you please. He interfaced the range sensor with an Arduino, scavenging a small speaker from an old toy for audio output.

The code for the project is fairly straightforward, borrowing most of it from the demo software that shipped with the Ping and the Arduino. He made a few small tweaks in order to get the organ to play frequencies of actual notes, as well as to allow for some flexibility when calculating the specific note to play.

While not the most complex project we have ever featured, [sketchsk3tch] reports that his kids love to spend time flailing around wildly in front of the organ, which is exactly what he intended.
Video of the organ being tested after the break.

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How The Arduino Won? This Is How We Can Kill It.

February 11, 2011 by Caleb Kraft 146 Comments

[Phillip Torrone], has written a piece over at Make entitled “Why the Arduino won, and why it’s here to stay“. While boasting that the Arduino “won” at roughly 100k units in the wild sounds decently impressive at first, lets just ponder for a moment how many bare AVR chips there are out there in home-made projects. Kind of makes 100k sound small doesn’t it. However, if you look at their definition of the Arduino, targeting fresh and new people to microcontroller projects, that changes things a little bit. That number suddenly starts to seem a little more important if you re-word it as 100,000 new beginner hackers. Sure, they’re only tweeting toilet flushes and blinking lights, but they’re excited and they’ve tasted blood.

[Phil] goes on to talk to manufacturers on how to “beat” the Arduino. He lists features that would help push someone onto a new platform instead of the Arduino. This, is where I think we come in. We can kill the Arduino.

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NESBot Video Game Automation

February 11, 2011 by Mike Nathan 17 Comments

nesbot

If you happen to enjoy video games, but don’t actually like playing them, boy do we have the hack for you! [pjgat09] shows us how, armed with an Arduino, you can force a Nintendo to play games by itself, not unlike an old-time player piano. The hack involves programming an Arduino to accept commands mapped out in “movies”, which are actually scripted sets of button presses that one would perform while playing a game. These sorts of scripts are available from TASVideo, a community specializing in “tool assisted” speed runs of video games. These movies are typically used with emulators, so there are some adjustments that need to be made in order to make them work with a console, since the button presses are mapped to each frame that is drawn on the screen. While we are not sure quite how useful this hack is, it is a pretty novel concept. You can see video of the 5-minute SMB speed run after the jump.

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