[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7Pft-GPQWU]
After getting some fun new toys for Christmas, [IceColdFreezie] set up this kill counter for Team Fortress 2. At first glance, we weren’t that impressed. It’s an Arduino and a few LEDs. Then we saw that it was counting the kills in binary. We’re not sure if it gets much geekier than that. You can download the source code and try it out yourself. Just don’t make more than 31 kills.
[via littlebirdceo]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1a5ig_M94]
[Lee] wanted an electric Melodeon to use with his band. A Melodeon is a chromatic accordion and there are people who already make electric versions but they are a little too expensive for him. Instead, he bought a toy accordion and added electronics to it.
After being thwarted by forgotten PIC skills of yore, he went with an Arduino as the controller. Two pressure sensors are used to detect the squeezing and pulling of the instrument’s bellows. His did some solid work. The video above uses 8-bit sounds like we’re used to from video games and the one after the break sources more traditional accordion sounds.
If you didn’t get the geeky watch you wanted for Christmas you should consider building yourself a MakerBotWatch. The watch is an Arduino, using an ATmega328 microcontroller running the bootloader. The watch has two concentric circles of LEDs for minutes and hours. A vertical row of four LEDs adds in the additional resolution needed to get 60 minutes on the watch face.
The schematic and board layout are available from an SVN repository so you can make your own board. The device will go into production as a kit but currently the laser-cut bezel will not be part of it.
[via Adafruit]
Christmas may be over, but we still have a couple of cool holiday related hacks for you. One being [Alpay’s] Twitter based interactive Christmas tree ornaments.
We tried to dig up some more information, but it thus far appears a laptop running Processing searches Twitter for specific Christmas related words (like 1337, that’s Christmas-y), sends a buffer to one of three Arduinos which in turn light up a specific ornament. You can check out a live stream here.
For those wanting a bit more information on Arduino and controlling holiday lights, check out [Alpay’s] GE health care version of Twitter lights, or our previous post on controlling Christmas trees, or you might even try [Michael’s] $10 Walmart light controller.
We honestly thought [Jason’s] VFD clock was some form of new terrorist attack when we came across the RSS. Thank goodness our relations with Russia aren’t as MAD as they used to be.
The main components are an IV-18 VFD with a MAX6921 driver, which to an untrained ear do sound surprisingly threatening. However an Arduino settles our hearts down and assures us this only has as much potential as blinking a VFD. While the main code, schematics, and CAD aren’t available (open source coming to a theater near you soon) at the moment – you can check out [Jason’s] inspiration, the Ice Tube Clock, which runs many of the same components.
Enjoy a video of it in action after the break. We love the ‘countdown’ feature the most.
[Michael] got his hands on a refrigerator that he intended to store beer in but found that it ran constantly. Instead of buying a new thermostat he and his friend [Doug] set out to build an Arduino-based controller for the fridge.
The finished project will switch 240v so they’ve used a transformer to power the logic circuitry and a solid state relay to handle the load switching, with a Dallas 1820 for temperature data. Because the Arduino offers more capabilities than the average thermostat hack they also decided to tap into its potential by adding an Ethernet shield. We see the Arduino as a prototyping device and so do these folks. Once the bugs in their first PCB prototype are worked out the circuit will use the ATmega328 and do away with the Arduino.
[via @littlebirdceo]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAt6A98lXQw]
[mrpackethead], created this monster of a tree. As shown in the video, it’s capable of showing animations, patterns, and potentially video. The 6m tall creation is studded with 2000 waterproof RGB LED modules. Software for the tree was written in Apple’s own Quartz Composer and integrated into Madrix, a piece of software designed with the purpose of controlling LEDs. The 600W system is 100% Arduino-free and costs less than the equivalent of 0.04USD per hour to run in New Zealand.
[Geoist] opted for the Arduino way to rig up his own smaller RGB Christmas tree. Finding a slightly kitschy fiber-optic model in his local department store, [Geoist] was eager to harness its colour-changing powers. Upon opening it up, it was discovered that it was controlled by nothing more than a light bulb and a spinning disk of coloured light filters. [Geoist] gutted the setup in favour of a breadboard with 3 RGB lights hooked up to an Arduino. The sketch for it is available on his site.
