[Carlos] sent us his project that uses an Arduino as a pH meter. In order to sense the acidity or alkalinity of a solution, a glass electrode is connected to the ADC of the Arduino through a fairly complicated calibration, amplification, and filtering circuit. Admittedly, it may not be cheaper or as accurate as some commercial models, but it is an open project and can be interfaced with a computer via USB.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCa8F8fbHLQ]
We saw this nifty little toy today and thought you guys might get a kick out of it. Its called the Hangmanduino, and as you can probably tell from the name, it plays hang man. This was an exercise in simplicity, you’ll notice there is only a single control for the entire game. We thought that the design was pretty cool, especially the single control. We weren’t surprised to see that this is actually the very same control we featured previously. You can download the code yourself from his website, if you want to make one of your own.
[via Flickr]
[edwindertien] sent us his project to connect a Furby to the internet. The original Furby controller was replaced with an Arduino which in turn was given ethernet connectivity via a LANTRONIX XPort serial ethernet module. This assigns the Furby an IP address which can then be accessed through a script or via a web interface. Now we want to see someone combine this idea with the arduino that sings “Daisy Bell” to make the ultimate in creepy new email notifiers.
Everybody loves microcontrollers, including the Arduino, allowing you to create whatever you imagine. That is unless you want to hack together something wireless. Originally you had to rely on the expensive XBee protocol or other wireless options, but no longer. Hobby Robotics found an extremely cheap transmitter and receiver and wrote a quick guide for wiring them up to an Arduino. Now your wireless projects can come to life, as long as you are within 500 feet and don’t mind 2400bps; minor trade offs compared to the gains of wireless freedom. Final note: You aren’t limited to Arduino, we would love to see someone modify this to work with a PIC or other microcontroller.
[Alex] continues to delight us with his projects. His third-generation tiny Braitenberg vehicle, a light seeking robot, is a big improvement over its predecessor, the mini Braitenberg vehicle. He’s moved from an Arduino based design to using the AVR ATtiny25v, replaced the breadboard with a PCB, and reduced the parts count. We think it was a great idea to use shrink tubing to shield the back of the photo-resistors from ambient light. Don’t miss the video of these little guys chasing a flashlight beam after the break. Continue reading “Tiny Light-seeking Robots”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxr8oaRUq6k]
In this video you can see the marriage of Arduino data collecting units and Augmented reality systems. Set up by the people at pachube.com, a site for sharing sensor information from your location, this is an interesting idea. We can see that each unit has its own pattern, so it can have the data it is collecting superimposed on it in 3d. While this is really cool looking, we’re still trying to figure out what the use of this is? Who is going to be wandering around their office with a camera hooked to a computer? Maybe this is meant more for phones, so you can get quick readings off of the units without having to go access their logs. Since we know how much you guys absolutely love the Arduino, we though you might also be interested in this larger than life portrait we saw floating around.
[via littlebirdceo]
Generation 2.0 of RepRap, the self replicating 3d printer, is approaching realization. Code named “Mendel”, the new design will be wedge shaped rather than a box which offers a few benefits. The overall design is smaller than the original RepRap but the printable area is larger. This means more functionality with less building material. With each new generation of this project the assembly gets easier and total parts price drops making the RepRap available to a much wider audience.
The RepRap blog has put forth some design specs, a picture of the assembled prototype, and has links for general assembly information (ZIP). We won’t see a finished version of this released for a few months but so far it looks like a big leap forward.
