Hackaday Prize Entry: A Bracelet For The Blind

August 15, 2017 by Kristina Panos 9 Comments

The World Health Organization estimates that around 90% of the 285 million or so visually impaired people worldwide live in low-income situations with little or no access to assistive technology. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [Tiendo] has created a simple and easily reproducible way-finding device for people with reduced vision: a bracelet that detects nearby objects and alerts the wearer to them.

It does its job using an ultrasonic distance sensor and an Arduino Pro Mini. The bracelet has two feedback modes: audio and haptic. In audio mode, the bracelet will begin to beep when an object is within 2.5 meters. And it behaves the way you’d expect—get closer to the object and the beeping increases; back away and it decreases. Haptic mode involves two tiny vibrating disk motors attached to small PVC cuffs that fit on the thumb and pinky. These motors will buzz differently based on the person’s proximity to a given object. If an object is 1 to 2.5 meters away, the pinky motor will vibrate. Closer than that, and it switches over to the thumb motor.

To add to the thriftiness of this project, [Tiendo] re-used other objects where he could. The base of the bracelet is a cuff made from PVC. The nylon chin strap and plastic buckle from a broken bike helmet make it adjustable to fit any wrist. To keep the PVC cuff from chafing, he slipped small pieces from an old pair of socks on to the sides.

It’s easy to see why this project is a finalist in our Best Product contest. It’s a simple, low-cost assistive device made from readily available and recycled materials, and it can be built by anyone who knows a little bit about electronics. Add in the fact that it’s lightweight and frees up both hands, and you have a great product that can help a lot of people. Watch it beep and buzz after the break. Continue reading “Hackaday Prize Entry: A Bracelet For The Blind” →

Building A Self-Balancing Robot Made Easy

June 3, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 14 Comments

Not only has [Joop Brokking] built an easy to make balancing robot but he’s produced an excellent set of plans and software for anyone else who wants to make one too. Self-balancers are a milestone in your robot building life. They stand on two-wheels, using a PID control loop to actuate the two motors using data from some type of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). It sounds simple, but when starting from scratch there’s a lot of choices to be made and a lot of traps to fall into. [Joop’s] video explains the basic principles and covers the reasons he’s done things the way he has — all the advice you’d be looking for when building one of your own.

He chose steppers over cheaper DC motors because this delivers precision and avoids issues when the battery voltage drops. His software includes a program for getting a calibration value for the IMU. He also shows how to set the drive current for the stepper controllers. And he does all this clearly, and at a pace that’s neither too fast, nor too slow. His video is definitely worth checking out below.

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Ceiling Tiles Give It Up For Christmas LED Ornaments

December 25, 2016 by Rich Hawkes No comments

The great thing about holidays is that they always seem to require some shiny things. The modern version of shiny things seems to be LEDs and advances in technology being what they are, we now have amazing programmable LEDs. And programmable LEDs mean animated shiny things! Years ago, [wpqrek] made an LED ornament using discrete components. This year he revisited his ornament and decided to make a new, animated, RGB ornament.

[Wpqrek]’s build is based around five WS2812b strips connected to an Arduino Pro Mini. The ornament itself is a thick styrofoam ceiling tile cut into a star shape with a red-painted wooden frame. Decorated with baubles and stars, the LED strips start in the center and end up at each point in the star. With each strip connected in parallel to the Pro Mini, [wpqrek] used the Arduino Light Animation library to handle the animations.

[Wpqrek] says the result is too big for his tree, so he uses it as a stand-alone ornament. Perhaps using lighter materials would help — or getting a bigger tree! Check out the Arduino lighting controller or the Trompe-l’oeil Menorah for more holiday hacks.

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Red Dwarf’s Talkie Toaster Tests Tolerance

November 21, 2016 by Steven Dufresne 10 Comments

In the Red Dwarf TV series, Talkie Toaster wants to know if you want toast, and if not toast, then maybe a muffin or waffle, and it will pester you incessantly until you smash it with a 14lb lump hammer and throw it in a waste disposal. Now [slider2732] has actually gone and made one of the infernal machines!

He’s hidden a PIR sensor in the toaster handle to tell an Arduino Pro Mini when someone is unfortunate enough to be passing by. The Arduino then reads sound files from an SD card reader and plays them through a 3 watt amplifier out to a speaker. For that he uses the TMRpcm library available on github.

[slider2732] cleverly mounted the speaker to the side of the toaster along with some appropriately shaped bits and pieces, and some LEDs to make it appear and work much like the circular panel that lights up on the real Talkie Toaster. We dare you to watch the video after the break, unless you really are looking for toast. As a consolation, the video also walks through making it.

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Wake Up With A NeoPixel Sunrise Alarm Clock

August 11, 2016 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

Like many of us, [Lee] wakes up every morning grumpy and tired. Once he decided to try to do something about it, he settled on making a sunrise alarm clock using NeoPixels. Over the course of thirty minutes the clock illuminates 60 NeoPixels one by one in blue mode to simulate a sunrise.

The clock has three modes: 30-minute sunrise, analog time display, and a seconds counter that uses the full RGB range of the LEDs to light up one for each passing second. It runs on an Arduino Pro Mini knockoff and an RTC module for the sake of simplicity. [Lee] chained NeoPixel strips together in five rows of eight, which allowed him to use a 3×5 font to display the time. The only other electronics are passives to protect the LEDs.

NeoPixels are great, but powering them becomes an issue pretty quickly. [Lee] did the math and figured that he would need 3.4 A to drive everything. He found a 3-outlet USB power adapter that delivers 3.4 A total while shopping at IKEA for an enclosure. [Lee] took his first Instructable from beginner to intermediate level by cracking the adapter open and using two of the USB ports wired in parallel to provide 5 V at 3.4 A. [Lee] has the code available along with detailed instructions for replicating this build. Be sure to check out the demo after the break.

We love a good clock build around here, especially when they involve Blinkenlights. For those less interested in building an alarm clock, here’s a word clock that pulls time and weather data with an ESP8266.

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Kansas City Maker Faire: Lawn Da Vinci Is The Droid You’re Looking For

July 17, 2016 by Kristina Panos 49 Comments

Summer is now in full swing, which means that mowing the lawn once a week is starting to get old. So why not build a robot do it for you? That’s what [Blake Hodgson] did, and he’s never been happier. It only took him a couple of weeks of quality time at one of the local makerspaces.

[Blake] was showing off Lawn da Vinci at this year’s Kansas City Maker Faire. He had his own booth around the corner from Hammerspace, the shop where it all came together. [Blake] started with a standard push mower from a garage sale and designed a frame around it using OnShape. The frame is made from angle iron, so it’s strong enough that he can ride on the thing. To each his own, we say. The wheels and motors came from a mobility scooter and match the beefiness of the frame. These are powered by two 12v car batteries wired in series. He drives it around his yard with an R/C airplane controller.

Lawn da Vinci’s brainpower comes from two Arduino Pro Minis and a Raspberry Pi. One Arduino controls the motors and the R/C signal from the remote. The other runs some extra kill switches that keep the Lawn da Vinci out of trouble.

So what’s the Raspi for? Right now, it’s for streaming video from the webcam attached to a mast on the frame back to his phone. [Blake] says he has had some latency issues with the webcam, so there could be a pair of drone racing goggles in his future. He also plans to add a GPS logger and to automate part of the mowing.

Now, about those kill switches: there are several of them. You probably can’t have too many of these on a remote control spinning suburban death machine. Lawn da Vinci will stop grazing if it goes out of range of the remote or if the remote is turned off. [Blake] also wired up a dedicated kill switch to a button on the remote and a fourth one on a separate key fob.

The Lawn da Vinci is one of many example projects that [Blake] uses to showcase the possibilities of KC Proto, a company he started to help local businesses realize their ideas by offering design solutions and assistance with prototyping. Between mowings, [Blake] puts the batteries on a trickle charger. If you make your own robot lawn mower, you might consider building a gas and solar hybrid.

Mindless Toddler Toy Becomes Teaching Tool

March 1, 2016 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

If you want to sell a toy for the toddler crowd, it ought to be pretty close to indestructible. A lot of toys out there are just plain nonsense game-wise and therefore waste their beefy potential. [2dom]’s wife was close to throwing out such a toy—a Little Tikes Goofy Ball. The thing literally does nothing but let you push its big buttons in. After some time passes, it pops them back out again and giggles. Game over. [2dom] rescued it from the trash and turned it into a toy that plays math games.

[2dom] removed the existing board and replaced it with an Arduino Pro Mini and a Darlington array that drives the motor that pops the buttons back out, the speaker, and a Nokia 5110 screen. Upon startup, the user chooses between addition, subtraction, and multiplication questions using the appropriate button. Questions appear in the middle of the screen and multiple choice answers in the corners.

Choose the right answer and the ball cheers and shows one of a few faces. Choose the wrong answer and it makes a buzzing sound and shows an X. There is an adaptive level system for the questions that [2dom] doesn’t show in the demonstration video after the break. For every five correct answers, you level up. His 3- and 5-year-olds love it. For more advanced teachable moments, there’s this toy-turned-enigma-machine.

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