accelerometer

181 Articles

Create An Inclinometer Using A Raspberry Pi

December 16, 2014 by 11 Comments

The latest gizmo that you can make using the cheap and easy Raspberry Pi is here courtesy of [Mark Williams]. He has hooked up an inertial measurement unit (IMU) to the Pi and built an inclinometer to use to measure the various angles of an off-road vehicle.

This particular guide goes through the setup of SDL to control the video output to a small screen. Then, a function is created to rotate the images based on input from the IMU so that the vehicle position can be shown graphically on the screen. Now, when your truck is about to roll over on a hill, you’ll get advance warning!

Of course, this whole project is predicated on installing the IMU and getting it up and running on the Raspberry Pi in the first place. [Mark] has you covered on a guide for setting that up as well. This delves into setting up the IMU over I2C to get it talking to the Raspberry Pi, and then converting the raw data from the IMU into data that is more usable. Be sure to check out [Mark]’s page for all of the code and details!

Introducing The F*Watch, A Fully Open Electronic Watch

October 17, 2014 by 24 Comments

As one of their colleagues was retiring, several CERN engineers got together after hours during 4 months to develop his gift: a fully open electronic watch. It is called the F*Watch and is packed with sensors: GPS, barometer, compass, accelerometer and light sensor. The microcontroller used is a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M3 SiLabs Giant Gecko which contains 128KB of RAM and 1MB of Flash. In the above picture you’ll notice a 1.28″ 128×128 pixels Sharp Memory LCD but the main board also contains a micro-USB connector for battery charging and connectivity, a micro-SD card slot, a buzzer and a vibration motor.

The watch is powered by a 500mA LiPo battery. All the tools that were used to build it are open source (FreeCAD, KiCad, GCC, openOCD, GDB) and our readers may make one by downloading all the source files located in their repository. After the break is embedded a video showing their adventure.

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Gesture Controlled Quadcopter

Controlling A Quadcopter With Gestures

October 16, 2014 by 16 Comments

[grassjelly] has been hard at work building a wearable device that uses gestures to control quadcopter motion. The goal of the project is to design a controller that allows the user to intuitively control the motion of a quadcopter. Based on the demonstration video below, we’d say they hit the nail on the head. The controller runs off an Arduino Pro Mini-5v powered by two small coin cell batteries. It contains an accelerometer and an ultrasonic distance sensor.

The controller allows the quadcopter to mimic the orientation of the user’s hand. The user holds their hand out in front of them, parallel to the floor. When the hand is tilted in any direction, the quadcopter copies the motion and will tilt the same way. The amount of pitch and roll is limited by software, likely preventing the user from over-correcting and crashing the machine. The user can also raise or lower their hand to control the altitude of the copter.

[grassjelly] has made all of the code and schematics available via github.

Auto Bike Light: On When Moving Off When Not

October 2, 2014 by 72 Comments

If you’re plagued by perpetually dead bike light batteries you’ll like this one. It’ll also fix the problem of remembering to turn the lights on in the first place. This hack uses an accelerometer to switch the light when the bike is in motion.

In this case the bike light was chosen for its ability to fit the control board inside the case. But with this proof-of-concept you can easily spin a tiny board with uC and accelerometer to replicate the functionality (the Bluetooth module shown above is going unused in this application). Many accelerometer chips have low-power mode that can be used to was a uC so we could easily see this having very little impact on the normally battery life of your light. The one caveat being the need to regulate the voltage as many of these lights take a 12V cell.

The other alternative is to make sure your battery is always charging during the day. This solar setup is one way, but then you won’t want to leave the thing unattended.

 

Nerds Helping Sea Turtles

August 7, 2014 by 25 Comments

Sea Turtle Nest Monitoring Device

Life as a sea turtle can be rough. Not only are turtles trying to survive predators, destruction of habitat, fishing nets, and pollution, but only about 1% of hatchlings survive to face those challenges in the first place. Enter [Samuel Wantman] and a new volunteer hacker group called Nerds Without Borders, with their first order of business of creating an egg-shaped monitoring device for sea turtle nests.

Sea turtles are protected under the Endangered Species Act, which goes to great lengths to protect certain species from human activity. The ultimate goal of the project is to help people and sea turtles better coexist under this law by more accurately predicting hatching times. A suite of sensors and a cell network antenna are placed in a plastic “egg” that can be buried in a nest after a sea turtle lays the real eggs. The sensors detect vibrations within the eggs as the embryos grow, which is an indication that the tiny turtles are about to break free of their eggs and head for the open ocean!

Click past the break for more on this project.

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Hypno-Jellyfish Is Great For Kids (and Kids At Heart)

August 2, 2014 by 9 Comments

hjf3_blue

LED’s are fun. They are easily seen, not to hard to hook up, and produce a nice glow that can be gazed at for hours. Kids love them, so when [Jens] daughter was born, he knew that he wanted to create a device that would alternate colors depending on the object’s movement.

He utilized a mpu6050 accelerometer to detect changes in position, and wired together an Arduino Nano, a 9V battery, and a 12 LED neopixel ring from adafruit. Design requirements were jotted down beforehand ensuring that any child playing with the Hypno-Jellyfish would not be injured in any way. For example, anything that fits in a child’s mouth, will go in that child’s mouth; meaning that any materials used must be non-toxic, big enough not to be swallowed, and drool proof/water proof. The kids will pull, and throw, and drop the toy as well, so everything has to be of sturdy quality too. Epilepsy is also a concern when dealing with LED’s. But, [Jens] project hit the mark, making something that is kid-friendly while at the same time enjoyable for anyone else who likes color-changing lights.

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DIY OLED Smart Watch

July 7, 2014 by 48 Comments

OLED DIY Smart Watch

What is better than making your own smart watch? Making one with an OLED display. This is exactly what [Jared] set out to do with his DIY OLED smart watch, which combines an impressive build with some pretty cool hardware.

When building a DIY smart watch, getting the hardware right is arguably the hardest part. After a few iterations, [Jared’s] OLED smart watch is all packaged up and looks great! The firmware for his watch can communicate with the PC via USB HID (requiring no drivers), contains a “watch face” for telling time, includes an integrated calendar, and support for an accelerometer. His post also includes all of the firmware and goes into some build details. With the recent popularity of smart watches and wearable electronics, we really love seeing functional DIY versions. This is just the beginning. In the future, [Jared] plans on adding Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a magnetometer, a smart sleep based alarm clock, and more! So be sure to look at his two older posts and keep an eye on this project as it unfolds. It is a very promising smart watch!

With Android L including support for smart watches (in the near future), it would be amazing to see DIY watches (such as this one) modified to run the new mobile OS. How great would it be to have an open hardware platform running such a powerful (open source-ish) OS? the possibilities are endless!