Finally, An ARM-powered Arduino

October 3, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 70 Comments

Far removed from the legions of 3D printers featured at this year’s Maker Faire in New York was a much smaller, but far more impressive announcement: The ARM-powered Arduino DUE is going to be released later this month.

Instead of the 8-bit AVR microcontrollers usually found in Arduinos, the DUE is powered by an ATSAM3X8E microcontroller, itself based on the ARM Cortex-M3 platform. There are a few very neat features in the DUE, namely a USB On The Go port to allow makers and tinkerers to connect keyboards, mice, smartphones (hey, someone should port IOIO firmware to this thing), and maybe even standard desktop inkjet or laser printers.

The board looks strikingly similar to the already common Arduino Mega. That’s no mistake; the DUE is compatible with existing shields, so connecting a RAMPS board for your 3D printer should be a snap.

Here’s a PDF the Arduino and Atmel guys were handing out at their booth. A few DUE boards have already made it into the hands of important people in the Arduino community, including 3D printer guru [Josef Prusa]. Sadly, the folks at Arduino didn’t think media personalities needed a DUE before its release, so you’ll have to wait until we get our hands on one later this month for a review.

Controlling Your Webcam With An Old Guitar Hero Pedal

October 3, 2012 by Mike Nathan 1 Comment

Hackaday reader [Tom Price] often uses Skype to communicate with family near and far, but he was getting tired of adjusting his webcam each time his kids moved out of frame. While the solution he came up with isn’t fully automated, it is hands-free, which is good enough for his purposes.

[Tom] was looking around for an electronic foot pedal of some sort when he came across a wireless 3rd party Guitar Hero peripheral that happened to fit the bill. Using an Arduino library created by [Bill Porter], he was quickly able to get the toy to communicate with an Arduino-flashed Atmega8, but things kind of fell flat when it came time to relay signals back to his computer. Using another Atmega8 along with the PS2X library, he was able to emulate the Guitar Hero controller that his foot pedal was looking for.

With the pedal portion of his project wrapped up, he focused on his webcam. [Tom] mounted the camera on a small servo, which he then wired up to the receiving end of his foot pedal rig. As you can see in the video below, he can now pan his camera across the room with a tap of his foot, rather than leaning in and manually adjusting it.

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Dry Erase Marker Opens All Hotel Room Doors

October 2, 2012 by Mike Szczys 50 Comments

If you’re carrying around an exposed circuit board and a bunch of wires people are going to notice you. But a dry erase marker won’t turn any heads. And this one holds its own little secret. It acts as a master key for hotel room door locks.

This is really more of a repackaging hack. The exploit is already quite well-known. The Onity brand of key card locks most commonly used in hotels have a power jack on the bottom that doubles as a 1-wire communications port. The first published proof of concept used an Arduino board and a simple adapter to unlock any door in under one second. Now that hardware has been reduced in size so that it fits in the hollow shell of a dry erase marker. Even better, the felt tip has been replaced with the appropriately sized barrel jack. Check out the ultra-fast and inconspicuous use of it after the break. We think using this is no more obvious than actually having the key card.

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Fantastic Programming Makes This Arduino Gaming Device Something Special

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

The hardware that went into this Arduino gaming console is just fine. But the coding that produced this game called Twisted SNAKE is beyond compare. [Rodot] has programmed several games for the hardware, which uses an Arduino, 160×168 TFT screen, a 3 axis accelerometer, and two input buttons. If you’re interested, there is a forum thread in which he talks a bit more about the hardware design. But you’re not going to want to pass up either of the two videos embedded after the break.

The first clip shows off a bouncing-ball platforming game. The accelerometer moves the ball back and forth, and the top scrolling level brings more ledges into play. This in itself is a great game. But the Twisted SNAKE game shown off in the second video makes our own ARM-based Snake game look like a 3-year-old programmed it. [Rodot] filled up all of the program memory of the ATmega328 chip to make this happen. There’s a menu system which allows for color themes and difficulty selection. The game play itself lets the snake travel anywhere it wishes with the tail following behind in graceful curves. Wow!

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Traffic Lights Tell You When Your Xbox Live Friends Are Gaming

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

It sounds like [Andrew] is trying to build a Pavlovian response into his behavior when it comes to online gaming. He wants to make sure he doesn’t miss out when all his friends are online, so he built this traffic signal to monitor Xbox Live activity. It will illuminate the lights, and drive the meters differently based on which of his friends are currently online. When the light’s green, he drops everything a grabs a controller.

The base of the light is a black project box. Inside you’ll find the Arduino compatible chip which drives the device mounted on a piece of protoboard. A WIZnet W5100 adds network connectivity at the low price of around $25. There is one problem with the setup. The API which [Andrew] found doesn’t use any authentication. This means that he can only see the public status of his friends; anyone who has set their online status set to private will always register as ‘online’. If you know of an existing Xbox Live API that would solve this issue we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Build A POV Death Star, You Will

October 1, 2012 by Mike Szczys 26 Comments

Building a Persistence of Vision globe is pretty awesome, but overlaying a Death Star pattern on the display takes it to the next level of geekery. Like us, [Jason] has wanted to build one of these for a long time. His success pushes us one step closer to taking the plunge and we hope it will inspire you to give it a shot too.

As he mentions in the beginning of his write up, the mechanical bits of these displays are really where the problems lie. Specifically, you need to find a way to transfer power to the spinning display. In this case use went with some DC motor brushes. These are replacement parts through which he drilled a hole to accept the metal axles on top and bottom. We hadn’t seen this technique before, but since motor brush replacements are easy to find and only cost a few bucks we’d say it’s a great idea.

The 24 blue LEDs that make up the display are all on one side of the PCB. They’re driven by an ATmega328 running the Arduino bootloader. [Jason] uses an FTDI adapter to program the chip. Don’t miss the video embedded after the break.

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Janus: The Gatekeeper

September 29, 2012 by Jeremy Cook 10 Comments

[Piet] wrote in to tell us about his hack that allows for his front gate to be opened without a key. Unlike this hack that we featured in August, you don’t need a subway pass, just a good memory. As explained in his article (and the video after the break) if the proper sequence of doorbell rings is input, the gate unlocks itself.

For hardware a [mehduino] is used to take the doorbell input and decide whether or not the “secret knock” has been achieved. The door can be unlocked remotely via a button on the processor. Reprogramming the code is achieved by simply holding the program button while the code is entered on the “remote ringer” button.

Be sure to check out the video after the break to see this lock in action. The housing application may not be exactly what you expect. Also of interest, is that in true hacker fashion, the bare processor is hanging by a hook on his wall! Continue reading “Janus: The Gatekeeper” →