arduino

2943 Articles

Interactive LED Block Wall

August 20, 2009 by 12 Comments

led_pixel_wall

[Dave Vondle] from IDEO Labs sent in the large LED pixel wall he built using BlinkM modules, an Arduino, and Flash to control it. The overall result is a blindingly bright, large, public display for people to interact with. The best part about the project is that [Dave Vondle] documents everything; from hardware to schematics to source code. Unfortunately, he was forced to remove the wall due to construction, but since every part of the project is open source, it lends itself to be easily recreated. I’m sure we’d all like to see a wireless controller hookup to play pong on the streets of Chicago.

Sleepy Arduino Saves Batteries

August 13, 2009 by 23 Comments

06_11 (Custom)

Battery life is often overlooked when building projects, especially for beginners. This tutorial takes you through the setup of power saving modes for the Arduino. Utilizing the watchdog and sleep functions, they put the chip into a hibernation mode between cycles. An optimum configuration could take your battery life from 4 days to about 3 years.  For a lot of you, this is old news. But for the rest, this is really good stuff. You can download a sample application from the site that mimics the singing of a nightingale when the sun goes down.

Droplet

August 7, 2009 by 16 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/5989780]

[Andrew Rapp] sent in this project called Droplet. He’s been doing work with Xbees and Arduinos together and built this little toy. He describes it as “sort of like a Chumby”. It has built in services for Twitter, Google Calendar, News, Gmail, etc.  You can download the full source code and plans on his site. His next planned revisions include possibly running it from a sheevaplug, making a nice case for it, and utilizing the unused pins of the arduino.

Little Walker

August 4, 2009 by 35 Comments

lilwalker

This little walking robot caught our eye. We’ve seen tons of 4 legged bots, but the design on this probably took more effort than the electronics. The design is radially symmetrical, it can walk in any direction, turn in place, and even walk upside down. The electronics weren’t forgotten though. This little bugger manages to pull a half our of use out of each battery charging. It communicates wirelessly with a custom dual Wiimote Nunchuck setup via XBEE modules. You can find much more technical details in the captions of the pictures. We’re not positive what processing power is hidden in the bot itself, but we know there’s an Arduino in one of the nunchucks. This might be the brains of the operation leaving the hardware on the bot simply to control the servos. We really like the arc-reactor-esque power display.

Greenhouse Guard

July 24, 2009 by 15 Comments

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[Seth King] sent in his latest hack where he used an Arduino to regulate various aspects of a greenhouse. He has sensors for soil and air temperature as well as light and moisture. He built a custom circuit that uses relays to power fans, lights, and heaters. Using timers and the sensor data, the devices can be triggered to create the perfect environment for sprouts. He hopes to make the whole thing wireless by integrating XBees, but for now he ran a USB cord to his computer.

Related: Automatic grow light

Touchpad + Arduino

July 23, 2009 by 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qt_VmJljmKU]

[Jani] directed us to his tutorial on making a laptop touchpad work with an Arduino. After seeing the recent post on touch pad and VFD hacking, he couldn’t resist finding one of these to play with. He shows us how to connect it all up and offers two methods of using the data from it. The first method is to determine the direction of finger travel and the second, shown above, is to use it more like the volume control on an iPod. Source code for both is available on his site.

Ceiling Fan POV

July 22, 2009 by 30 Comments

FDG3AFAFXETSIYM.MEDIUM (Custom)

We know some of you are getting sick of POV projects, but this one was just so cool, we couldn’t resist. [UncleBone] thought POVs were pretty cool, and wondered if he could use one on his ceiling fan.  It would have been a breeze  just to toss something like the RGBike POV on there and call it finished, but he designed his own.  Opting to blow away the norm of using a single row of LEDs, he chose to do 5 different rows of LEDs, one for each blade. The whole thing is controlled by an Arduino,  with a spreadsheet for image manipulating. Unfortunately, we don’t see any source files for the project available. Maybe he’ll put them on there if we ask really nicely. If he could get it playing animations, we would just chill and watch it for hours.