Foam Board Servo Driven Arm

[Lucky Larry] posted some pictures to the Hack a Day flickr pool that caught our eye. He made a quick and cheap servo driven arm. Constructed from foam board and some hobby servos, he’s using an Arduino for the brains. You can download the pattern for the arm pieces as well as the code on his site.

He ultimately finds that he has positioning issues that he blames on the cheap servos. You can see in the video on his site that the circles it is drawing are drifting one direction.

Arduino Space Program

With the recently proposed cuts to NASA, our friends across the pond (in Northampton UK) decided to take action with a space program of their own… at least at a miniature scale. NortHACKton, a hackerspace in Northampton decided to host a rocketry day consisting of rockets powered by chemical reactions, pressurized water bottles, and even one that employed an Arduino controlled launch system, akin to a few we have seen in the past. It essentially consists of a countdown and automated ignition system. Schematics and source code are available for those adventurous enough to embark on missions of their own.

Stepping Beyond The Ethernet Shield

We’ve said it time and again, the Arduino is a prototyping platform. In that spirit, [Doug Jackson] shows you how to conserve the expensive Arduino board and Ethernet shield by building your own Arduino Ethernet module. You may remember the ENC28j60 as a NIC for your microcontrollers. [Doug’s] board makes use of that chip and adds an ATmega168 with a crystal, power regulator, breakout pins, and even a few DIP switches which can come in quite handy.

Wireless Face Tracking Camera

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8luy8jP1UNs]

A student team at University of Massachusetts  have built this wireless face tracking camera system. Using a small 2-axis motorized camera meant to be mounted on model airplanes, an arduino, and some custom software, they can track faces and keep them in frame in real-time. This is pretty cool, but maybe not quite as groundbreaking as they make it sound. We think it is pretty awesome though. You can download the software and schematics on their site.

[via MakeZine]

Arduino Webserver

The Arduino platform should be perfect for throwing together a lightweight webserver because of the availability of quality shields that take care of the hardware for you. As [Ovidiu Predescu] found, there are a few hiccups along the way and he’s put together a guide that covers the workarounds. Specifically, using an Ethernet shield and data logging shield at the same time produces a bus conflict which he sidesteps by cutting the CS pin trace on the data logging board and moving it to a different pin. There is also a bug with one of the chips on the Ethernet shield that is fixed using a similar method. So if you’re not just going to etch your own webserver hardware maybe this is the next best thing.

FPC Arduino

Seeed Studios has a new version of the Arduino that they’re calling the Seeeduino Film. Instead of the traditional fiberglass substrate they’ve used a resin material to produce a Flexible Printed Circuit (FPC). In addition to its flexibility their aim with this prototype was to keep it modular. From what we can see each of the four squares is a different component in the Arduino system. The photo above has the USB interface on the nearest node, then the power regulator, the microprocessor, and finally the remaining peripheral connections. This material can easily be cut with a pair of scissors so the programming section can be removed once the firmware is burned to the chip. It will be interesting to see final pricing and package options. We wouldn’t mind having an FPC ATmega168 breakout board around, but specifially this would fit nicely in a watch band if you were building your own wristwatch.

[Thanks Juan]

Touchscreen Scooter Computer

[Kurt’s] scooter computer started off as a way to use a couple of LEDs to show the battery charge on his hog. It was based on a Arduino and used a voltage divider to judge how much juice was left. But then he ran across a touch-screen OLED shield for the Arduino and the project started to take off. Now he’s got battery, temperature, real-time clock, and GPS running through the slick-looking display. It may not be a full-blown motorcycle but it gives the computer interfaces we’ve seen for other bikes a run for their money.

[Thanks Mowcius]