Arduino Now Controlling – The Crop Harvest?

December 23, 2009 by Jake W 17 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDzHwy28kng]

We’ve seen the Arduino board in charge of some pretty unique tasks in the past. Harvesting locally grown soybeans was not one of them.

[Lance] rigged this beast up in order to automate the monotonous task of driving up and down the vast soybean fields of Iowa. The 15 ton farm combine’s hydraulic steering pump is at the mercy of a team of gadgets, including a GPS, Windows 7 PC, and the omnipresent Duemilanove (which acts as the output card, connecting the PC to the pump). So far, it is reported to be doing a great job, straying only about an inch and a half from its desired, GPS-programmed, path. Even if the Arduino decides to go totally berserk and drive the combine off course, speeding around at 5mph makes it pretty avoidable. A supervisor is also in the cabin at all times, looking out for errors. [Lance] eventually hopes to offload all steering-related calculations to the ATmega328P onboard.

Commenters are welcome to share heavier-duty uses for the Arduino (if they exist).

Temperature And Electricity Monitoring

December 23, 2009 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

[Willem] has been using an Arduino to monitor temperatures and electricity usage. For the temperature monitoring he picked up some 1-wire temperature sensors similar to those we’ve featured in the past. To pick up on electricity usage he’s not using an amp sensors, but because he’s in the UK he does have a flashing LED on his power meter. There’s a known trick to pick up these flashes with a photo cell to calculate energy usage based on meter readings. Finally, the data from the three sensors (indoor temp, outdoor temp, and energy usage) is piped over the Internet via an Ethernet shield so that it can be collected and graphed.

[Willem] has had the system running for a year. If you’re nosy you can look at the temperature graph generated from his collected data.

Fake Snow From An Arduino

December 21, 2009 by Jake W 13 Comments

The team at [Sosolimited] was contracted to create an interesting holiday window dispay for the HBO retail store in NYC. The Times Square display encorporates a board of LEDs and a machine for blowing the artificial snow particles around the enclosure.

The code for controlling the LED array was written on top of the open source C++ toolkit, openFrameworks and the entire setup is interfaced through an Arduino Duelmilanove. Multiple Sharp IR sensors were hooked up to the Arduino in order to detect the movement of observers, which in turn triggers fans to blow the ‘snow’ around. A National Control Devices relay board connects the heavy duty fans to the Arduino. This video demo shows just how attractive the project is in motion.

A Random USB… Hourglass

December 21, 2009 by Jake W 20 Comments

[Peter] thought of a creative, way to generate random entropy for under $100.

The USB Hourglass combines a sand timer with a rotating mechanism and an optical beam through the center of the timer to observe the falling sand. The amount of light reaching a detector is digitized at frequent intervals and processed by a microcontroller to determine when to rotate the hourglass. The digitized light levels are also sent by USB to a host PC where they can be used as a source of random entropy. Power is supplied over the USB cable.

With the USB Hourglass, the user can look at the sand falling through the center of the hourglass and monitor the randomness in the USB output data. And one can read the code line-by-line, compile it, and upload it to the microcontroller using only open-source and widely supported tools.

Peggy2 X2, With Video

December 19, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 10 Comments

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

Being avid fanatics of flashing lights, we always love to see the peggy2 in action. The video above shows another improvement, which is two peggy2 units working together as one. [iservice2000] chained the two together and wrote new code for the display. Using an Arduino to drive it all, he has gotten them to act as one. While video on the peggy2 isn’t new, this is the first time we’ve seen two of them chained together. The end result is going to be a scrolling sign that can be updated via the web, or that can display tweets. We did notice a bit of tearing, is that from the camera or the software?

[via littlebirdceo]

Capturing That (light Field) Moment

December 19, 2009 by Jakob Griffith 20 Comments

Yes, your eyes do not lie, that is 12 cameras rigged to take a picture at the exact same moment. The idea is a single camera loses data (namely depth) when it takes a 3D image and transposes it onto a 2D medium. FuturePicture somewhat circumvents this loss by taking several pictures with different focus distances. In short, the camera array allows you to focus on multiple items within a scene. The project’s hardware and software have yet to be released (we do know it’s at least Arduino), but they plan to make it entirely open source so everyone can experiment. Of course, we’ll keep you up to date.
[via Make]

Cheap Toy Yields Good Parts

December 19, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

We’ve spent some serious time building robot chassis and motor controllers. [Whamodyne] does the smart thing and scavenges what he needs form cheap sources. He picked up an RC car from the local pharmacy for just $10, tore the body off and behold, a bounty of robot-friendly parts.

We’re not talking precision parts here, but we don’t scoff at two geared motors, four wheels, a driver board, and steering. There’s no great way to attach your own stuff but that’s half the fun of hacking. [Whamodyne] used the 9v battery that came with the toy to power his boarduino and quickly patched in to produce a miracle of automated locomotion.