Arduino UNO And Mega 2560

September 27, 2010 by Devlin Thyne 29 Comments

The Arduino Team presented some new products at Maker Faire this weekend. It’s a significant update. The Arduino UNO and Arduino Mega 2560 update the Duemilanove and Mega respectively. They now use an ATMega8U2 instead of an FTDI USB to serial converter chip. Allowing an Arduino to become nearly any kind of USB device. A fourth mounting hole has been added to the UNO for more stable mounting. The booloader is now the Optiboot bootloader. The boards can run firmata out of the box. We are not sure about existing Arduino boards, but the last six bytes of EEPROM have a unique serial number. At this point, the Mega 2560 has some kind of issue with gcc on certain platforms and unable to use the full memory available until there is an update to the IDE.

The team also gave a preview of some works in progress. Arduino Ethernet POE can be power over ethernet and loaded with TFTP. Available October 18, TinkerKit will be released. Geared toward designers, the kit has PCB modules that include a joystick, soft pots, transistor, relay, power MOSFET, push button, LEDs and motor driver. That same day will be the launch of the multi-lingual Arduino Store.

These developments will be a nice addition to the toolset out there that you can use and we look forward to new projects using these tools.

Update: [PT] sent us a link to an ever-growing FAQ about this hardware.

WiiMote Accessibility Modifications

September 19, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

[Catea] has put some considerable effort into making a wiimote more accessible to people with physical disabilities. He started by extending the buttons out to much larger versions mounted on a lap tray. This makes playing games much easier for those that are lacking the fine motor skills to hit the buttons on the wiimote. This alone is a pretty substantial improvement, but [Catea] wanted to do more.

Taking the whole idea further, [Catea] published a second instructible where he outlines the process of adding two Arduinos and Xbee modulse to make the external buttons wireless.

5 Tones, 1 Arduino

September 14, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 28 Comments

Because the Arduino is in such high demand for producing multiple musical tones at the same time; [Jeremy Blum] has successfully figured out the math and other necessaries that will take your once previously single tone producing MCU and turn it into a 5 tone producing machine. unsurprisingly its really just some creative use of PWM control but it all works out in the end anyway and helps prevent you from purchasing additional sound generating chips. This truly does open up some new doors, as [Jeremy] shows with his still in production thingamakit like project: ReacXion.

Auxiliary Scoreboard Reads Status Directly From Memory

September 13, 2010 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

[StaticChanger] built a scoreboard to display his kill statistics from Halo for the PC. Yes, we’ve seen kill counters before, but we like the way that he gathers the data. This project is reading the score directly from an address in memory.

Using a program called Cheat Engine, the memory used by a program can be sniffed. After a few passes, the program will help you find a static memory address for your desired data. Once you have that it’s just a matter of using a pointer to that address in your desired programming language. In this case, a C# program polls the value and instructs an Arduino to display the value on a couple of 7-segment displays. Voila, the number appears next to your screen as you see in the image above.

WiFi Controlled Arduino-bot

August 23, 2010 by Mike Szczys 9 Comments

This little robot was built very quickly thanks to the rapid prototyping capabilities of the Arduino. It uses a WiShield 1.0 from AsyncLabs to connect to a wireless network for control via a TCP connection. The body and wheels are wood, with a servo for each motor and a third used to scan a range finder from side to side. We’ve embedded a triad of demo videos after the break that take you through the various feature development of this platform. You’ll see control via a hacked Zipit, as well as joystick control. There’s also a couple of stages of autonomous movement where the distance information comes into play.

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Todays Arduino Moment

August 19, 2010 by James Munns 21 Comments

We have gotten a number of Arduino tips in the last couple days, and we thought we would combine them for your convenience. The first tip we received was for some hints provided by [Bill] on some digitalWrite() alternatives. Similar to some previous research we covered, this tip also includes some tips on how to make the direct register writing a little easier by using #define to simplify things. Obviously this wont be as idiot-proof as digitalWrite() is, but we think you can handle it.

Our second tip is for a set of OLED displays from 4dsystems sold as Arduino Shields. They have a couple of different sizes from .96″ to 1.7″, depending on your needs and budget. There is no official display library for them yet, but 4dsystems have been kind enough to provide a few resources to work from. Hopefully we’ll see a few great applications from this, maybe a much bigger pixel Mario? A much smaller Game of Life? Feel free to send us your projects, or leave your ideas in the comments!

RGB Lamp Bulb Replacement

August 9, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 14 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwZBMJS1teg]

Wanting to make some unique and interesting gifts for his nieces as well as improve his PCB skills and expand beyond Arduino, [Jay] has made these color changing Ikea lamps. He’s using an ATTiny2313 for the brains, a handful of RGB LEDs plus 3 warm white LEDs to keep the wife happy. you can download the schematic and PCB files if you want to reproduce this one yourself. You can see his PCB making skills have improved since the nursery room temperature monitor. We think his nieces will be pleased with their gifts.

[via HackedGadgets]