HDSPs And Playstation 2 Controllers On Arduinos

June 2, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 5 Comments

There were a couple short Arduino tips in the mailbox this morning. We’ve combined them in this post since both are fairly short and sweet.

Over at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, they’ve posted a quick breakdown of how to interface those neat little HDSP LED displays with an Arduino. This specific instance is for Mr. Stabby. Source code and schematic are included.

For those who would like a nice familiar input device for their Arduino, how about a Playstation2 controller? [Bill Porter] has written up the code and shown how to wire it up. This even includes the ability to read the analog stick correctly. Source code and schematic are available on the project page.

[via Littlebird electronics]

The Story Of Mr. Stabby

May 26, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 24 Comments

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

Mr. Stabby was once a broken down bum, sitting on the curb, waiting for an eternity in the city dump. Luckily, someone found him and brought him to the NYC Resistor hacker group. They promptly performed some modifications and brought him back to life.

He’s now a happy go lucky stab-bot with a twinkle in his eye and a skip in his step. His repitoir includes gouging, slashing, and of course stabbing. He can be controlled via a cell phone and has a nifty voice interface.

The video above is from when Mr. Stabby was runner up at the tech crunch hackday.

Kaossilator On The Cheap

May 15, 2010 by James Munns 23 Comments

We recently stumbled on a way to turn a regular laptop into a poor man’s Kaossilator. Using the touchpad of your laptop, some PureData software, Touchpad2MIDI and a couple custom patches, [zenpho] has set everyone up to create that crazy electronic music that kids listen to these days.

But what was that? You cant afford a whole laptop, and need to make this happen on an even tighter budget? Oh, we’ve got your back. Using just the trackpad and an Arduino, [Bastiaan] has created a basic PS2 to Arduino to USB link which can be parsed by your favorite language of choice into a working MIDI interface. Good news for all the lazy hackers out there, he’s planning on swapping out the Arduino for a Teensy, and making a real USB to MIDI interface.

Twilio Adds Touch Tone Telephone Control For Arduino

May 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

An Arduino with an Ethernet shield, nothing new right? Not quite, [Chris] is showing us how to use Twilio to control an Arduino via a touch tone telephone. We saw Twilio used before in a cellphone video game but this time around an audio menu system comes into play. You can make your own menus whose options will be read by the WOPR (see the demo after the break) when you call the Twilio number. This application just turns an LED on and off but once you’ve got access to the Arduino the sky’s the limit. Most immediately this is an easy implementation for all those cellphone door lock systems we’ve seen. We also envision some classic home automation such as feed the cats or turn on the lights.

Continue reading “Twilio Adds Touch Tone Telephone Control For Arduino” →

XKCD Takes A Swipe At The Arduino

May 8, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 97 Comments

This XKCD comic takes a playful swipe and almost everything, including the Arduino. We’ve heard people claim that we have some sort of favoritism toward Arduino, and we don’t. People just submit a LOT of projects with them. But there is one point that we’ve seen a few times that should be addressed. In our categories we have an “Arduino hacks” section. That will not be going away, again, because we get so many submitted. However, shouldn’t we also add some categories for other stuff? Should there be a “pic hacks” category, or maybe just “microcontroller hacks” category?

Let’s not making this an Arduino bashing thread. Instead, give us some good ideas on other categories you would like to see for sorting.

[via littlebirdceo]

Automated Chicken Coop Door

May 3, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 42 Comments

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

Here’s a pretty cool implementation of an automated door, built for a chicken coop. The electronics are fairly standard, an Arduino and a used cordless drill. The end product will be not only wireless, but automated based off of ambient light as well. We also found the locking mechanism quite elegant. He also supplied a link to another automated chicken coop door which has a decent writeup with schematics and such. Next, he’ll have to automate their feeding as well.

[Thanks Jeri]

Adding Reset To An FTDI Cable

April 30, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Hackaday alum [Adam Harris] hacked an FTDI cable to use for programming his Arduino. After cracking open the plastic case he found the FTDI chip used is the same as the one in the SparkFun programmer. The only real difference was that his cable wasn’t resetting the Arduino, he had to do that manually. The solution was to reroute the RTS wire so that it connected up to the DTR pin. This proved difficult because of the tiny footprint of the chip, but after many tries he managed to get a piece of wire wrap soldered in place.