arduino

2928 Articles

Electronic Connect Four Has No Pieces To Lose

June 15, 2020 by 6 Comments

Recreating classic games in software is a great way to get better at coding or learn to code in the first place. If you do it in hardware though, you’ll gain a lot more than coding skills. Just ask [Kelly] and [Jack] did, when they built this Arduino-based electronic Connect Four for a school project.

We love that their interpretation manages to simplify game play and make it more fun than the original version. All the players have to do is turn it on and start pushing the arcade buttons along the bottom to choose the column where they want to make a play. The LEDs animate from top to bottom to imitate the plastic disc dropping down through the board. If a win is detected — four in a row of the same color going any direction — the board fills up with the winning color and the game starts over.

The state machine doesn’t currently do anything about tie situations, so there’s a reset button hidden on the side. As [Kelly] and [Jack] explain in their walk-through video after the break, that is something they would like to address in the future, along with making it possible to choose whatever battle color you want. We think a reset animation that mimics the look of the discs spilling out the bottom would be cool, too.

If you’ve never implemented a game on hardware before, something like this might be a bit daunting. May we suggest a game of 4×4 Tic Tac Toe instead?

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No Need For Speed With This Arduino-Based Inkjet Printer

June 13, 2020 by 17 Comments

When it comes to computers, it seems like the only thing that matters is speed. The more the better, in general, and the same applies to peripherals. We want the fastest network adapters, the fastest video card, and the fastest printer. So why in the world would anyone intentionally build a really slow inkjet printer? For art, of course.

At least that’s the story [HomoFaciens] tells us in the video below. His efforts are in support of a friend’s art project, which seeks to print slowly but continuously on a roll of paper. [HomoFaciens]’s printer is based on an H-P C6602 inkjet cartridge, one of those high-priced consumables that make buying a new printer more attractive than replacing them once depleted. After figuring out how to drive the printhead — 5 to 6 μs pulses of 18 volts through a ULN2803 Darlington array driver chip seemed to do the trick — he mounted everything to the gantry of an old 3D printer. It’s interesting to watch the images slowly being built up — something that printers usually hide from prying eyes — and to see how the DPI count of the printer can be increased by interlacing each printed line.

Near the end of the video, we get a glimpse of his “tattoo gun printer”, which reminded us of all the other cool things he’s done over the years. From a CNC machine made from paperclips and cardboard to an encoder made from a wheel of resistors, [HomoFaciens] has some interesting designs that you really should check out.

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Control A Motor With A Touchpad

June 10, 2020 by 11 Comments

There are a surprising wealth of parts inside of old laptops that can be easily scavenged, but often these proprietary tidbits of electronics will need a substantial amount of work to make them useful again. Obviously things such as hard drives and memory can easily be used again, but it’s also possible to get things like screens or batteries to work with other devices with some effort. Now, there’s also a way to reuse the trackpad as well.

This build uses a PS/2 touchpad with a Synaptics chip in it, which integrates pretty smoothly with an Arduino after a few pins on the touchpad are soldered to. Most of the work is done on the touchpad’s built in chip, so once the Arduino receives the input from the touchpad it’s free to do virtually anything with it. In this case, [Kushagra] used it to operate a stepper motor in a few different implementations.

If you have this type of touchpad lying around, all of the code and schematics to make it useful again are available on the project page. An old laptop in the parts bin is sure to have a lot of uses even after you take the screen off, but don’t forget that your old beige PS/2 mouse from 1995 is sure to have some uses like this as well.

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Light Up The Night With A Tetrahedral LED Hat

June 10, 2020 by 7 Comments

People get into electronics for all kinds of reasons, but we would guess that the ability to blink the blinkenlights is probably pretty high on the survey results. [Kuchbert] has been going to Deichkind shows for the last decade and has wanted to build one of the German techno-rap band’s signature tetrahedral LED hats for about as long.

Up inside the hat is an Arduino Nano driving WS2812B LEDs and a portable battery to power everything. Thanks to an HC-05 Bluetooth module, the show can be controlled with an Android app. The many, many holes in the acrylic panels were milled out, but they could just as easily be laser-cut, or if you have infinite patience, drilled by hand. The code is coming once it has been cleaned up a bit. Everything else you’d need is already there waiting. This helmet even has its own lil’ music video, which we’ve carefully beat-matched in after the break.

Naturally, this makes us think of all the Daft Punk helms that have blinked by on this blog over the years. This hand-soldered one might be the most meticulously made.

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Rotary Controller Dials In PC Volume

June 4, 2020 by 9 Comments

As wonderful as mechanical keyboards are, most of the pre-fab and group buy models out there have zero media controls. If you want rotary encoders and OLED screens to show what function layer you’re working in, you’ll probably have to build your own keyboard from the ground up.

Hackaday alum [Cameron Coward] got around this problem by building an electromechanical buddy for his keyboard that works as a volume control. Now that we don’t rely on them to make phone calls, rotary dials are a fun throwback to a time that seems simpler based on its robust and rudimentary technology. This one is from a lovely burnt orange Bell Trimline phone, which was peak rotary dial and one of the idea’s last gasps before tone dialing took over completely.

Operationally speaking, [Cameron] is reading in the dial’s pulses with an Arduino Nano and using a Python script to monitor the serial connection and translate the pulses to volume control. We like that this is isn’t a volume knob in the traditional sense — it’s a game of percentages. Dialing ‘2’ gives 20% volume across all programs, and ‘8’ raises it to 80% of maximum. Need to mute? Just dial ‘0’, and you’ll begin to understand why people wanted to move on from rotary dialing. It won’t take that long, but it’s not instant. Check out the demo after the break.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rotary dial used to control volume, but that’s one of the minor selling points of this rotary cell phone.

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RC Lawn Mower Keeps The Grass Greener On Your Side Of The Fence

June 1, 2020 by 23 Comments

For some people, mowing the lawn is a dreaded chore that leads to thoughts of pouring a concrete slab over the yard and painting it green. Others see it as the perfect occasion to spend a sunny afternoon outside. And then there are those without the luxury of having a preference on the subject in the first place. [elliotmade] for example has a friend who’s sitting in a wheelchair, and would normally have to rely on others to maintain his lawn and form an opinion on the enjoyability of the task. So to retain his friend’s independence, he decided to build him a remote-controlled lawn mower.

After putting together an initial proof of concept that’s been successfully in use for a few years now, [elliotmade] saw some room for improvement and thought it was time for an upgrade. Liberating the drive section of an electric wheelchair, he welded a frame around it to house the battery and the mower itself, and added an alternator to charge the battery directly from the mower’s engine. An RC receiver that connects to the motor driver is controlled by an Arduino, as well as a pair of relays to switch both the ignition and an electric starter that eliminates the need for cord pulling. Topping it off with a camera, the garden chores are now comfortably tackled from a distance, without any issues of depth perception.

Remote-controlling a sharp-bladed machine most certainly requires a few additional safety considerations, and it seems that [elliotmade] thought this out pretty well, so failure on any of the involved parts won’t have fatal consequences. However, judging from the demo video embedded after break, the garden in question might not be the best environment to turn this into a GPS-assisted, autonomous mower in the future. But then again, RC vehicles are fun as they are, regardless of their shape or size.

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Tarot Machine Flips Through Fate’s Rolodex

May 29, 2020 by 8 Comments

Were tarot card readers deemed non-essential in your part of the world (and do you think they saw it coming?) More than ever, we all need diversions that are for entertainment purposes only. And what better basis for entertainment than a mystical fortune-telling robot that can read your tarot cards?

This fantastic-looking ‘bot stands on the shoulders of [Scott Bezak]’s trailblazing method for easy DIY split-flap displays. Push the rather inviting-looking button on the top, and the flaps start flipping around to find your fortune. Once the fates have aligned, a thermal printer on the front spits out an image of your card along with an interpretation.

It’s obvious that [i_mozy] put quite a lot of effort into this slick machine, and we think the stickers look especially great. All the details of physical tarot card readings are accounted for, including a random number to decide the card’s position, and LEDs to represent the card’s element. Suspend your disbelief and check out the demo/promo video after the break.

Split-flap displays are a great choice no matter what you want to show. We’ve seen them used to display everything from the weather to the current Spotify track.

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