Game Of Chance Built As A Red Bull Creation Entry

July 3, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Tom Bourke] wrote in to show off the game of chance which was built for this year’s Red Bull Creation contest. The project was completed with the help of the Wausau Collaboration Center, a Hackerspace in Wausau, Wisconsin.

He does a great job of showing off the game in the clip after the break. Near the bottom of the device is a hard drive platter which each player can spin to test his or her luck. [Tom] used a max485 chip to turn the leads for the hard drive motor into a quadrature encoder. This input is monitored by the Bullduino board, which puts on a light and sound show during the spin. The LEDs that surround the display are individually addressable (probably the same LED strings as this wall display) and cycle trough different colors based on the rotational speed of the patters. The large seven segment display provides a readout for the random number that is generated. Roll a ten and you win! We guess you need to make the rest of the game up yourself, but this could easily be used as a 16-sided die (or less).

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Better Driving With A Bullduino

June 25, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 7 Comments

Despite what you may have heard from the kids hanging out in the parking lot of Taco Bell, there’s a lot to be said about driving conservatively. Not peeling out after ever red light and stop sign does wonders for the life of your engine, and not slamming on the brakes 50 feet away from an intersection will keep your brake pads going a long time. [aromaoftacoma] wanted a dashboard gauge telling him how good of a driver he is, so when he got a bullduino he knew what he had to do.

[aromaoftacoma]’s project for the Redbull creation contest uses the very cool Arduino shield/Redbull logo known as a bullduino with an accelerometer to track how conservatively he’s driving. Quick stops and starts are murder on an automobile – it’s the same reason your grandmother has had the same car for 20 years – so [aromaoftacoma] made a wonderful display using red and blue LEDs behind each charging bull.

Because simply blinking a LED in response to data pulled from an accelerometer is a little boring, [aromaoftacoma] added a servo to change the orientation of the charging bulls. When he’s driving well, the blue bull is tilted up, and when he stops short the red bull becomes the focus of attention. Not a bad build at all.

You can check out [aromaoftacoma]’s build video after the break.

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Red Bull Creation Hardware (Bullduino) Arrives

June 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 28 Comments

The Bullduino’s are starting to arrive. When [Arclight] received his in the mail the first thing he did was to share the hardware details. Of course this is the hardware that participants in the Red Bull Creation contest will be receiving ahead of this year’s contest.

The board is an ATmega328 Arduino clone. Instead of an FTDI chip for USB this one is sporting an ATmega8u2. That’s not too much of a surprise as it should translate to a cost savings. [Arclight] reports that the stock firmware flashes a message in Morse code. It seems the Harford HackerSpace got their Bullduino several days ago and already decoded the message. It reads:

“Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?”

The guys that did the decoding speculate that this could be a type as ‘l’ and ‘y’ are inversions of each other in Morse code; or it could be some kind of clue. At any rate, if you want to do some disassembly and see if there’s anything lurking in the firmware, [Arclight] posted FLASH and EEPROM dumps from both ATmega chips along with his article.