Game Glove Learns Your Weakness

March 10, 2010 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Steve Hoefer] pulled together a great hack for the friendless. This glove will play a heated game of rock-paper-scissors against you. [Steve] realized that the middle and fourth fingers are all that need to be monitored to decide which of the three signs you are making. He used flex sensors on the back of these fingers as an input. There is also an accelerometer to judge the three shakes that lead up to the shoot.

The small screen you see displays what the glove chose and is a hack in itself. This idea adapts from an Evil Mad Scientist project, using three sheets of acrylic etched with the different icons and edge-lit with LEDs. All of this, along with a speaker and scoreboard, connect to an Arduino. The icing on the cake? [Steve] coded an adaptive learning algorithm that observes your playing style to gain an advantage.

See this in action after the break. Once you’ve mastered rock-paper-scissors you should consider building other glove-based peripherals.

Continue reading “Game Glove Learns Your Weakness” →

Cardboard Androids

March 8, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 26 Comments

Who needs expensive acrylic based, microcontrolled robots with only a few sensors available when cardboard and an Android cellphone will work much better for much less in cost! The team over at Cellbots have done just that. While they did cheat a little by using a laser cut cardboard for exact measurements and including an Arduino to control the servos, they certainly attained their goal of “cheap” (assuming the already had the cellphone). We’re just wondering why it took them 4 weeks for a little CAD and code.

Regardless, one idea that immediately comes to mind is thousands hundreds a few little cardboard swarm bots ravaging homes everywhere, just don’t step on them.

[Thanks Mashable]

Don’t Worry Occifer, There Is No Blood In My Alcohol!

March 7, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 28 Comments

[Daniel] wrote up a quick tutorial on interfacing with the MQ-3, or better known Breathalyzer from SparkFun with Arduino. While we would have used perhaps an op-amp/comparator based system and kept it in a much smaller package, the idea was so quick and simple and enjoyable we hoped an article might keep some hackers from drinking and driving.

[Thanks CletustheYokel for pointing out our silly category mistake.]

Shiftbrite Coffee Table

February 25, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 22 Comments

Here’s a project we’ve been wanting to do for a while. Over at macetech.com they’ve posted an LED coffee table that uses a 9×9 RGB LED grid. For the LEDs, they used the shiftbrite modules we’ve seen before. The table is capable of displaying pre written patterns as well as accepting patterns from a computer via bluetooth. They’ve set it up to connect to a twitter feed and display to a live cam on their site. Though we would love to reproduce this, we need a little more justification than “ooooh, shiny” for the funds involved. Anyone want to donate 100 shiftbrights?

Ultimate Flame Bait: Liquid Cooled Arduino

February 16, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 156 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U-cc_Qcf-w]

We do so many things around here just because “we can”. Though this guy cites this as his reason, we somehow can’t help but wonder if he’s doing it just to troll the Arduino hating crowd. He has decided to overclock his Arduino by replacing the crystal and dropping it in some non conductive liquid coolant. Can you guess what sketch he’s running? That’s right, he’s blinking an LED.

Normally we would point out that we have no preference when it comes to Arduino. We simply post what is submitted. Though we are often accused of being Arduino lovers, it is simply just another tool to us. We sometimes delete obnoxious comments that get off topic, threatening, or vulgar because that’s just good house keeping. That being said, we know what to expect here. Go ahead, bash the Arduino. Get it out of your systems. Just keep it non offensive or it will be moderated.

[thanks jfreak09]

Arduino Helps You Ski Copper

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 8 Comments

[Dwight’s] been working on a long-term project to add a status board for the ski runs at Copper Mountain ski resort. The board will feature an 8×8 LED module for each run that displays a green O for open trails, a green G for groomed trails, and a red X for closed trails. He’s also got a status board with LEDs embedded in a trail map.

The system relies on SPI for each LED module. An Arduino Mega uses a Xbee module to pull down XML data wirelessly and display it on this board. Since the trail report is already available online it’s just a matter of parsing the data in a useful way.

He’s not quite done with the whole thing yet, but keep an eye out for it if you are planning to ski Copper Mountain.

[via Tom’s Guide]

The Day After Arduino

February 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 60 Comments

There will come a day in every budding hacker’s life that they realize that plopping an entire arduino in their project and leaving it there is a bit of a waste. [Domiflichi] realized this, and has shared his next steps with us. He takes us through the process of removing the ATMega chip and breadboarding it for final use.

For many of you, this is an obvious chain of events. However, there are also many who just haven’t ventured forward and taken this one step that will forever change how their projects are seen by the hacking world. For the anti-arduino crowd, realize that this is an opportunity not to bash a useful tool but to help nurture and lead people to the next step.