Short And Squat Balancing Bot Is Extremely Stable

March 7, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

[Lauszus] really put together an impressive self balancing robot platform. It is virtually motionless when balancing in place, and that stability is never lost even when motoring across the room.

Part of the success behind this build is the use of quality components. He’s got a really nice set of motors with built-in encoders which give feedback to the balancing system. They work in conjunction with a gyroscopic sensor and PID code to keep the two-wheeled platform upright. An mbed board running 96 MHz provides plenty of computing power for the balancing system. But an Arduino can also be found on board. This was included to facilitate Bluetooth connectivity with the remote control as [Lauszus] didn’t want to port the code he had already written.

The fourteen minute video after the break shares the details behind how the PID controller is tuned and how [Lauszus] implements target angle and a few other factors. Of course he talks about the hardware choices, and demonstrates functionality by driving the bot around using a wireless PS3 controller.

The construction method which uses masonite strips and threaded rod does a good job of protecting the hardware mounted on it. We’re always a bit worried about these bots falling over and some of the projects we see offer little or no protection. Once thing that helps protect against a spill is a piezo buzzer which sounds when the battery is getting low.

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Your Theme Song Greets You At The Front Door

March 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

One thing you can look forward to when arriving at home after a long, arduous day at the office is some peppy theme music when you walk in the door. [Sebastian Sommer] built the system, and shows it off in the video after the break by dancing to James Brown’s I feel good.

The setup uses an Arduino as a microcontroller. It monitors a hall effect sensor on the jamb which detects a passing magnet on the door. We guess this means the system doesn’t know if you’re coming or going but perhaps a future upgrade would add an infrared beam to detect your legs as head out the door. The music itself is played by an SparkFun MP3 shield which has a decoder chip, microSD slot, and audio jack for the powered speakers. [Sebastian] grabbed a copy of [Bill Porter’s] mp3 shield library to get the project up and running quickly.

This is a pretty cool addition if you’re already using an Arduino for a door lock or vice versa. Or maybe you’re not home enough to make this hack worth it, in which case you simply must take this music playing Tesla coil hat along on your commute.

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Antique Phone Provides A Soundtrack Perfect For Restoring Old Cars

March 5, 2012 by Mike Nathan 8 Comments

crank-phone-music

[Simon] is in the middle of restoring/building himself an Austin 7 Special out in his garage, and like most tinkerers, found that music helps to move the process along. He happened to have an old Bakelite generator phone out in the garage as well, and figured that he might as well have it do something other than simply hang on the wall.

Playing music from the 1930 seemed like a fitting enough task, so he picked up an Adafruit Waveshield and spent some time wiring it up to the old telephone. His new radio works simply enough, piping .wav files through the handset, provided someone has cranked the phone’s generator recently.

While cranking the generator is required to play music, the Arduino is actually powered off a pair of AA batteries. The cranking is all cosmetic, but he did program the Arduino to slow the music down every once in awhile, requiring that the generator be turned to get things back up to speed.

It really is a neat way to repurpose the old phone, and we like the fact that [Simon] did not gut it to put this project together.

Continue reading to see a short video of his new music player in action.

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Minestation – An External Weather Display For Your Minecraft World

March 1, 2012 by Mike Nathan 7 Comments

minestation

If you’re a big Minecraft fan, the folks at [radikaldesign] have something that might be of interest to you. (Translation) Inspired by some of their Minecraft-loving friends, they have developed Minestation – a weather station for your Minecraft game.

The concept is simple. Here in the real world we have the ability to look out the window and see what it is like outside, but many of us turn to digital weather stations, the Weather Channel, or the local news to get the real scoop. They decided that the world of Minecraft should be no different, so they constructed an Arduino shield that allows players to see weather conditions as they play.

The shield contains a Nokia 6100 LCD screen which displays all sorts of useful information. It features a clock and calendar that reflect in-game time, making it easy to know when night is going to fall. It also continually displays the player’s coordinates as well as what the weather looks like in that region. Having this information at hand when you’ve been slogging away in the mines (losing track of time and weather) seems like it could be pretty useful at times.

You can buy one of the devices at Minestation.me, but the design is completely open, so you can easily construct one of your own without too much hassle.

Continue reading to see a video of the Minestation in action.

[Via HackedGadgets]

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Rolling Digit Clock Is A Wonderful Piece Of Engineering

March 1, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 16 Comments

A long time ago and on a scrounging trip he barely remembers, [Victor] bought a quartet of digits from an old Dutch Railways clock. These antique displays used a strip of plastic coated cloth that rolls around itself with the help of a motor to display the digits 0 through 9. It’s been many years, but [Victor] finally got around to building a clock out of these single digit displays and we’re loving the results.

Because these displays were manufactured in a time when mechanical devices were king, [Victor] had to slightly modify each digit so they could display numbers with the help of a continuous rotation servo. The four servos are controlled by an Arduino – each digit changing one at a time to reduce current consumption – and a magnet and reed switch was added to each digit so the numbers could be repeatedly displayed.

Before [Victor] replaced the plastic servo gears with metal cogs, the clock was quite noisy. He’s since put each digit underneath a bell jar (actually a vase turned upside down), and we’ve got to say that [Victor] has a nice clock on his hands. Check out the videos of the clock changing digits to display the time after the break.

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Semaphore Signal Replica Perfect For The Train Buff In Your Life

February 29, 2012 by Mike Nathan 6 Comments

semaphore-signal

[John Philip’s] brother has a sizable room set aside for his model railroad setup, and he was looking for something interesting to add to his brother’s collection. Rather than construct something for the railroad itself, he decided that an early 1900’s-style semaphore railroad signal would make a great novelty item for the room.

The project started with [John] scouring the Internet for colored signal lenses. Once he found a set that worked for him, he crunched some numbers to ensure that the rest of the semaphore box stayed true to original scale. Inside the signal’s case you will find a small regulator board for his light source, an Arduino, and a motor controller board to actuate the arm.

To ensure that the signal arm is always perfectly positioned, he installed a pair of reed switches on either side of the case, enabling the Arduino to auto-calibrate the signal’s position each time it is powered on. At first, this control scheme might strike you as a bit over the top, but we really like the fact that the signal can always configure itself to function perfectly, even if someone tinkers with/bumps into/moves the arm at any point.

Be sure to stick around to see a short video of the semaphore signal in action.

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Display Twitter On An Arduino

February 27, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 14 Comments

If you ever wanted your name out on the Internet, now is your time to shine. [Chris] hooked up an Arduino to the Internet and is streaming the results of combing through Twitter live to the entire world.

The SocialBot9000, as [Chris] calls his build, is an Arduino Uno connected to an Ethernet shield and an LCD character display. The firmware uses the Twitter API to search for recent posts containing the phrase, ‘socialbot9000.’ A PHP script on the Arduino does all the heavy lifting and with the great Bildr tutorial on getting the Ethernet shield up and running, [Chris] was off to the races.

Because it’s extremely doubtful that everyone on the Internet could manage typing a message into Twitter that would be correctly parsed by the SocialBot9000, [Chris] put a small form up on the build log that will correctly generate the message and take you to your Twitter account for posting. After all that was done, [Chris] decided to have some fun and set up a live feed from a camera in front of the LCD display for the world to watch.