Arduino Hacks

3039 Articles

Multi-Volume Knob Gives All Your Programs A Turn

July 6, 2020 by 19 Comments

We’ve all been there. You’re manning the battle station, deep in the sim-racing or some other n00b-pwning zone and suddenly some loudmouth blows out your eardrums over Discord. It’s insulting to have to stop what you’re doing to find the right Windows volume slider. So why do that? Build [T3knomanzer]’s simple yet elegant multi-volume knob and stay zen in the zone.

It’s easy, just turn the knob to cycle through your programs until Discord comes up on the little screen, and then push down to change it into a volume knob. If you need to change another volume, just click it again. Since there’s no Alt+Tabbing out to the desktop, no checkered flags should ever slip through your fingers.

Inside the well-designed case you’ll find the usual suspects — Arduino Nano, rotary encoder, an OLED display, and an LED ring, each with their own place carved out.

This completely open-source knob looks great, and we love that it’s been made incredibly easy to replicate by standing up a site with foolproof, well-depicted, step-by-step instructions. Watch them take it for a spin after the break.

Want more than volume at your fingertips? Here’s a DIY USB knob that does shortcuts, too.

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Custom Packet Sniffer Is A Great Way To Learn CAN

July 2, 2020 by 18 Comments

Whilst swapping out the stereo in his car for a more modern Android based solution, [Aaron] noticed that it only utilised a single CAN differential pair to communicate with the car as opposed to a whole bundle of wires employing analogue signalling. This is no surprise, as modern cars invariably use the CAN bus to establish communication between various peripherals and sensors.

In a series of videos, [Aaron] details how he used this opportunity to explore some of the nitty-gritty of CAN communication. In Part 1 he designs a cheap, custom CAN bus sniffer using an Arduino, a MCP2515 CAN controller and a CAN bus driver IC, demonstrating how this relatively simple hardware arrangement could be used along with open source software to decode some real CAN bus traffic. Part 2 of his series revolves around duping his Android stereo into various operational modes by sending the correct CAN packets.

These videos are a great way to learn some of the basic considerations associated with the various abstraction layers typically attributed to CAN. Once you’ve covered these, you can do some pretty interesting stuff, such as these dubious devices pulling a man-in-the-middle attack on your odometer! In the meantime, we would love to see a Part 3 on CAN hardware message filtering and masks [Aaron]!

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Mini Library For Kids Gets Blinky Lights And Solar Upgrade

June 28, 2020 by 1 Comment

Reading is big in Québec, and [pepelepoisson]’s young children have access to a free mini library nook that had seen better days and was in dire need of maintenance and refurbishing. In the process of repairing and repainting the little outdoor book nook, he took the opportunity to install a few experimental upgrades (link in French, English translation here.)

The mini library pods are called Croque-Livres, part of a program of free little book nooks for children across Québec (the name is a bit tricky to translate into English, but think of it as “snack shack, but for books” because books are things to be happily devoured.)

After sanding and repairs and a few coats of new paint, the Croque-Livres was enhanced with a strip of WS2812B LEDs, rechargeable battery with solar panel, magnet and reed switch as door sensor, and a 3.3 V Arduino to drive it all. [pepelepoisson]’s GitHub repository for the project contains the code and CAD files for the 3D printed pieces.

The WS2812B LED strip technically requires 5 V, but as [pepelepoisson] found in his earlier project Stecchino, the LED strip works fine when driven directly from a 3.7 V lithium-polymer cell. It’s not until around 3 V that it starts to get unreliable, so a single 3.7 V cell powers everything nicely.

When the door is opened, the LED strip lights up with a brief animation, then displays the battery voltage as a bar graph. After that, the number of times the door as been opened is shown on the LED strip in binary. It’s highly visual, interactive, and there’s even a small cheat sheet explaining how binary works for anyone interested in translating the light pattern into a number. How well does it all hold up? So far so good, but it’s an experiment that doesn’t interfere at all with the operation of the little box, so it’s all good fun.

Calcuino Is An Arduino Calculator

June 28, 2020 by 4 Comments

All by itself, a calculator based on an Arduino isn’t necessarily very novel. However, [Danko Bertović] of Volos Projects has a nice board that, of course, looks like a calculator. There are 16 keys and an LED display. But it seems to us the real value would be using this as a base for other projects.

As an inexpensive development board, it’s handy to have a simple processor with a keyboard and a display. There’s some extra I/O pins and the first example in the video below shows using the setup as a simple organ, for example. We’d love to see an option to replace the LED with an LCD and maybe even some different CPU options, as well.

The board is essentially an Arduino with a standard USB to serial chip and a MAX7219 display driver. Of course, you could breadboard up all of these things, but it wouldn’t be as neat looking. One unusual thing about the keyboard is that it is not multiplexed. Each button has a label that indicates what Arduino pin it connects with. So key 6 connects to pin 6 and pin A2 connects to the key marked =/A2.

With the availability of inexpensive PC boards, we’re seeing many nice designs out there that would be easy to repurpose for other things. For example, we thought this board would easily run the Kim Uno, with some modifications to the I/O routines. Might even be able to work out a clone of an even older computer to fit on the board.

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DIY TV-B-Gone Is A-OK

June 25, 2020 by 49 Comments

Where won’t they put a TV these days? We’ve even seen one creeping behind semi-transparent mirror film in the ladies’ room of a sports bar, though that one didn’t last long. Up until that moment, we had never wished so hard for a TV-B-Gone, especially one as small and powerful as this DIY version by [Shane].

The best thing about [Shane]’s DIY TV-B-Gone is the strength of signal, though the size is nothing to sneeze at. That’s a 10-watt array or IR LEDs out of a security camera, and you can see how much brighter it is than a single IR LED in the video after the break.

Packed inside this minty enclosure is an Arduino Nano, which holds all the TV power-off codes known to hackers and fires them off in quick succession. [Shane] salvaged a MOSFET from an electronic speed controller to drive that LED array, and there’s a voltage booster board to raise the 3.7V lithium battery to 5V. [Shane] hasn’t really had the chance to test this out in public what with the global pandemic and all, but was able to verify a working distance of 40 feet inside the house.

Don’t care for such a raw look? Hide your zapper inside a toy, like this sonic screwdriver version.

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Tracked Robot Makes Sand Drawings

June 24, 2020 by 6 Comments

[Ivan] seems to enjoy making 3D printed vehicles with tracks. His latest one uses 50 servo motors to draw patterns in the sand at the beach. You can see it work in the video below. Well, more accurately you can see it not work and then work as the first iteration didn’t go exactly as planned.

An Arduino Mega 2560 provides the brains and the whole unit weighs in at almost 31 pounds, including the batteries. We didn’t see Ivan’s design files, although it wouldn’t be hard to do your own take on the robot.

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Score Big Against Boredom With Tabletop Bowling

June 21, 2020 by 18 Comments

Bowling has been around since ancient Egypt and continues to entertain people of all ages, especially once they roll out the fog machine and hit the blacklights. But why pay all that money to don used shoes and drink watered-down beer? Just build a tabletop bowling alley in your spare time and you can bowl barefoot if you want.

Those glowing pins aren’t just for looks — the LEDs underneath them are part of the scoring system. Whenever a pin is knocked out of its countersunk hole, the LED underneath is exposed and shines its light on a corresponding light-dependent resistor positioned overhead. An Arduino Uno keeps track of of the frame, ball number, and score, and displays it on an LCD.

The lane is nearly six feet long, so this is more like medium-format bowling or maybe even skee-bowling. There are probably a number of things one could use for balls, but [lainealison] is using large ball bearings. Roll past the break to see it in action, but don’t go over the line!

Can’t keep your balls out of the gutter? Build a magic ball and make all wishful leaning more meaningful as you steer it down the lane with your body.

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