Veteran Robot Features Eight Legs And BeagleBoard

February 11, 2010 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

This spider-bot was built by [Zhanx] during his deployment in Iraq. He didn’t have prior hardware building experience and started out on this project when he received an Arduino to play with in September. Must be a fast learner! The parts are laser-cut from ABS plastic and connected to 24 servos. He sourced an SSC-32 serial servo control board to take care of the motor connections.

[Zhanx] has since migrated from the Arduino to a BeagleBoard which you can see perched atop the body in the video after the break. This should give him plenty of speed and power to improve the movement routines. There’s some nice work here but adding rubber feet, like on yesterday’s hexapod, wouldn’t hurt.

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The Day After Arduino

February 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 60 Comments

There will come a day in every budding hacker’s life that they realize that plopping an entire arduino in their project and leaving it there is a bit of a waste. [Domiflichi] realized this, and has shared his next steps with us. He takes us through the process of removing the ATMega chip and breadboarding it for final use.

For many of you, this is an obvious chain of events. However, there are also many who just haven’t ventured forward and taken this one step that will forever change how their projects are seen by the hacking world. For the anti-arduino crowd, realize that this is an opportunity not to bash a useful tool but to help nurture and lead people to the next step.

CueCat, Meet Arduino

February 10, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUO3vn-ivqo]

Have you ever felt like you needed a portable barcode scanner around the house? No? Well, [Mkanoap] did, so he made one. He has hooked his CueCat up to his Arduino to capture barcode data and store it on an SD card. He is using it as an inventory tool for his personal library. Where before he had to carry a laptop around to do his scanning, or lug the books to his desk, he now just scans wherever he pleases.

You may notice some silly sounds dubbed over the video. Take note, these are the actual sounds it plays. The camera didn’t pick them up well enough, so he dubbed them in. You wouldn’t want to miss out on the entire experience would you?

Ez430 Home Automation

February 8, 2010 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

[Oliver] has been doing some work to use his TI ez430 Chronos wristwatch for some home automation. He’s working with a RF controllable lightbulb adapter which operates in the 433 MHz band. A dirt-cheap breadboard-friendly transmitter is available from Seeed Studios and he uses this in conjunction with a computer and an Arduino. Before the trolls get to their thing, YES, this is incredible overkill. But remember that he’s prototyping. We hope that if he intends to actually use this setup he’ll migrate to something like an ATtiny2313 running V-USB. Better yet, you should be able to tap into the watch’s companion receiver and cut the computer out completely.

If you’re easily amused you’ll appreciate the video of a light turning on and off after the break. If you’re a little harder to please then take a look at Oliver’s methods of using Python processing for the watch’s data.

Ok, now we’ve seen this watch turning on lights and unlocking doors. What else ‘ya got?

Arduino To Nintendo DS Interface

February 5, 2010 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

[Hounjini] was poking around at the Game Boy Advanced bus of his Nintendo DS lite and figured out how to use it to connect an Arduino to the DS. For testing he’s soldered an IDC plug to the cartridge cover pin interface but this only requires four connections. The Arduino can both send and receive data from the DS lite as shown in the example videos after the break. The data access is made possible by making the Arduino look like a controller that the DS is happy to talk to.

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Game Controllers Using USB Host Shield

February 1, 2010 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

[I-Bot] has put together some libraries that make it easy to use gaming controllers with an Arduino. They interface through the USB host shield. This means that PS3 controllers connect via USB through a cable or a dongle. With the Wii remote things get a little more interesting. A Bluetooth dongle is used to make the connection wirelessly. What we have here is a cheap and easy way to add Bluetooth connectivity to your projects either through the USB Host shield, or by building your own hardware with the schematics and code that are available from Circuits@Home. There are several pages that walk you through the protocols using as well as a demonstration video you can see after the break. Continue reading “Game Controllers Using USB Host Shield” →

Hybrid Analog/binary Clock, The MK2

January 30, 2010 by Jakob Griffith 15 Comments

[Kieran] let us know about his hybrid analog/binary clock. The circuitry behind the clock is nothing too new. An Arduino combined with a Chronodot to produce an accurate clock. What we really enjoyed however was the creative implementation of an old British Telecom Linesman’s Multimeter as the case. The analog meter acts as the seconds hand, while a another display made of LEDs diffused with stripboard is the binary clock. The end product is nothing short of ingenuitive.