Light Sensitive MIDI Glove

The latest offering in glove-based noisemakers forsakes commonly used flex sensors in favor or photoresistors. [Bruno Ratnieks] is responsible for this musical glove and his methods will be very easy to recreate. He used an Arduino to interface with it while providing a USB connection to your audio software. The sensors themselves couldn’t be easier to throw together, with each photoresistor creating a voltage divider when combined with a fixed-value resistor. That’s all the hardware you need, and with some creative coding you can making it do much more than the effects heard in the video after the break.

Some will say that [Bruno] simply didn’t used enough duct tape with his project design. Be we liked how he wove the wiring into the mesh of these knit gloves to keep it firmly in place.

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Interfacing An Arduino With A TFT LCD

tft_lcd

Seven-segment displays and monochrome LCDs are fine for most projects, but some things simply look better in color. [John] over at the Little Bird Electronics blog recently wrote up a tutorial demonstrating the use of a TFT LCD panel with an Arduino. The specific panel he chose was a 4D Systems 1.44” TFT LCD that happened to feature a dedicated graphics processor, which should allow for some fantastic visuals when used to its fullest potential.

The LCD takes its commands over a serial interface, making it a simple five-wire display solution for your projects. The display can be programmed manually by sending hex commands over the serial interface, but there are also some user-developed libraries available that will allow you to use the majority of the most popular functions without the learning curve. One thing to note is that the LCD must be flashed with a particular flavor of firmware before it can communicate over the serial interface, a process for which [John] provides a walk through.

The LCD panel can be used with any Arduino-compatible board, so it can be useful in a whole host of projects.

Stick around to see a simple demo of the board in use.

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Ultrasmall Arduino

[Fabio Varesano’s] new Arduino compatible board packs a full power punch in a ultra compact layout, measuring at 20.7×15.2 mm, the Femtoduino is probably the smallest 328 based Arduino compatible board around. Most of the staples are present, an QFN atmega328, an MIC5205 low dropout regulator good for a couple hundred milli amps, 16MHz ceramic resonator, reset, power indicator and pin 13 LEDs, but you will need to provide your own serial connection (FTDI, MAX232 etc) and another AVR programmer to get the Arduino boot loader onto the chip.

Since the board is small (smaller than a pro mini) it is not directly breadboard friendly. Even though the hole spacing is 0.05 inch, the size is large enough for “normal” wire to fit into fine, if you wish to use 0.1 inch spacing there is a handy break out board you can make where the Femtoduino just snaps in.

Everything needed to make one of your own is provided on the website, schematics, kicad files, bill of materials, Gerbers for both the board and the breakout board, though we would like to see this as a pre-made board soon, join us after the break for a video and see why.

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The Wandering Arduinobot

You almost have to love this Arduino based robot just because of the wheels and third leg support. Look closely, do you recognize them? Yep, they’re Capsela parts! That’s a blast from the past and we wonder why we don’t see the strange building toys of yore used in more hacks?

But we digress, this little bugger guy uses continuous rotation servos for locomotion. Perched atop the body is a third servo which scans an IR range finder back and forth to look out for obstacles in its path. The body itself is a Black and Decker rechargeable battery pack called Pocket Power which includes a USB port for a regulated 5V supply. One thing’s for sure, this little guy is fantastic at avoiding pizza and beer… you’ll just have to see for yourself after the break.

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Ski Pole Persistence Of Vision

[Powder4u] wanted to make a persistence of vision display for his bicycle but with 50 cm of snow on the ground it’s hard to get out and ride right now. Instead he made this persistence of vision ski-pole accessory. We asked him to share some details and he obliged. It’s made using an Arduino compatible ATmega168, LEDs with resistors, and installed on some protoboard. The enclosure is a clear pencil case, which isn’t water tight but he’s tried to bolster that with some creative scotch tape placement. There’s no sensor to detect which direction the board is moving in so displaying alpha-numeric messages will have some issues, but as you can see he managed to display image data without issue.

We’re used to night skiing with floodlights along the slopes. This would be a fun little thing to have along with you on those dark lift rides.

Nimbus, The Wall-following Robot

nimbus_wall_following_robot

[Johannes] sent in the latest iteration of an ongoing project – Nimbus, the wall-follwing robot. Originally operating on a cardboard frame, the robot has undergone several revisions as you can see by reading through his blog. Nimbus started out as a simple, Arduino-powered robot, but the project has progressed nicely over time. The last revision simply avoided walls, using a Sharp IR proximity sensor to detect, then avoid obstacles. The most recent model sports a nice polycarbonate frame as well as two additional IR proximity sensors, allowing Nimbus to navigate quite well, following walls and avoiding obstacles with ease. It does get caught up from time to time on carpets and wires, but overall Nimbus is a great little robot. [Johannes] even added a small RGB status LED for the bottom of the bot, communicating its navigation status to the operator at all times. This is done by flashing various colors when objects have been discovered or have moved out of sight – it’s a really novel addition.

Keep reading for a video of Nimbus navigating his way around, and don’t forget to check out the Nimbus photo stream.

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What Development Board To Use? (Part Two)

We asked for responses to our last Development Board post, and you all followed through. We got comments, forum posts, and emails filled with your opinions. Like last time, there is no way we could cover every board, so here are a few more that seemed to be popular crowd choices. Feel free to keep sending us your favorite boards, we may end up featuring them at a later date!

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