Heat-seeking Firebot Drowns Out The Flames

November 10, 2012 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

This robot can find and extinguish fires automatically. It is the culmination of an Embedded Design class project from last school year. [Dan] and his classmates developed a turret that holds both a spray nozzle and heat sensor which would be a fantastic building block for a real-life tower defense game.

The jewel of the sensor array is a TPA81 thermopile array. Note the use of the term ‘array’ in the name. This is more like eight temperature sensors aligned with each other. By monitoring them all, the direction from which the most heat is coming can be determined. Once it’s zeroed in on the fire getting water to the right place can be a difficult task. That’s where the other sensors come into play. An accelerometer allows the bot to determine the angle of the spray nozzle (a weed sprayer was used in this case). An ultrasonic range finder and few algorithms let the Arduino which drives it all make sure that the arc of the water lands on the hot spot. This is all shown quite clearly in the clip below the jump.

Continue reading “Heat-seeking Firebot Drowns Out The Flames” →

Joystick Operated Security Cam Will Overlook The Moat

July 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

What good is a moat if nobody is guarding it? We suppose that depends on what beasties lurk beneath the surface of the water, but that’s neither here nor there. The members of LVL1 continue their quest to outdo each other in augmenting the building’s automated features. The latest offering is this security camera which is operated with an analog thumb stick.

These are the people who are building a moat (which the city things is a reflecting pool) in front of their main entrance. Now they will be able to see and sense if anyone is trying to get across the watery hazard. The hack marries an ultrasonic rangefinder and camera module with a pair of servo motors. The brackets for the motors allow a full range of motion, and the signal is translated by an Arduino and Video Experimenter shield to put out a composite video signal. That’s not going to make streaming all that easy, but we’re sure that is just one more hack away.

Cat Trainer Will Keep Them Off The Counters

July 12, 2012 by Mike Szczys 18 Comments

Our cats are not allowed on the kitchen counters, and [Iron Jungle] has the same rule. But he spotted some foot prints on the hood above his range and the addition of a security camera caught this picture of [Kelso] breaking the rules. Since he’s not always around to make the fur-ball behave he built an electronic cat trainer to do it for him.

The functionality needed isn’t very intricate. You need to monitor when the cat is where it shouldn’t be and then chase it away. For the latter he grabbed an infrared range finder. When the cat passes in front of the sensor it will trigger the second part of the system: a high-pitched buzzer that’s extremely loud. Any microcontroller will have no trouble driving the system. In this case it’s a PICAXE 28X1.

You can see the trainer in action after the break. It definitely works, because just playing the video chased our own sleeping kitty out of the room.

Continue reading “Cat Trainer Will Keep Them Off The Counters” →

Arduino Rover Doubles Up On Obstacle Avoidance

June 6, 2012 by Mike Szczys 6 Comments

[Eduard Ros] wrote in show off his first attempt at building an autonomous rover (translated). As with many of these projects, he started with the base of a remote control toy truck. This solves so many mechanical issues, like steering, locomotion, and power source.

He just needed a way to control the vehicle. The recent LayerOne badge hacks either did this through the wireless controller protocol or by adding an Arduino directly to the vehicle. [Eduard] chose the latter, and also included obstacle avoidance sensors in the process. We’ve seen quite a few that use these ultrasonic rangefinders. He decided to go a different route by adding two of them rather than scanning by mounting one on a servo motor.

The video after the break shows the vehicle successfully navigating through a tight space. This makes us wonder how much data can be processed from the stationary sensors? We’re not familiar with how wide the horizontal sensitivity is on the devices. If you have some insight, please share you knowledge in the comments section.

Continue reading “Arduino Rover Doubles Up On Obstacle Avoidance” →

LayerOne Badge Hacking Twofer

May 31, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Here’s a pair of LayerOne Badge hacks that actually included the RC as intended by the badge designers.

First up, we have the autonomous RC car built by [Arko]. He calls it Stanley Jr. as an homage to the Stanford DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. It uses an Arduino shield to add a servo with an ultrasonic rangefinder on it. The lets the vehicle drive a bit, stop and scan the horizon, then drive some more. The hope is the rangefinder will keep it from running into anything. There’s a quick test run embedded after the break.

On the right is the badge hack which [Zjpahle] finished up after the contest was already over. He also chose to go with an Arduino shield, this time it’s an IMU board. But he added a standalone Arduino board to the vehicle which drives some EL wire (ground effects) and adds IR sensors to the front of the car. The IR sensors are for obstacle avoidance, and the IMU lets him tilt his badge for direction control.

We looked at the winner of the badge hacking competition on Wednesday. That hack didn’t involve the car, but used the badge as a Morse Code beacon.

Continue reading “LayerOne Badge Hacking Twofer” →

Make Your Own Mindstorm Sensors

August 6, 2010 by Mike Szczys 16 Comments

[Stewart Allen] acquired a Mindstorm kit about a month ago and he’s already building his own sensors for it. He wanted a more accurate range finder with a narrower measurement field than the stock sensor. Mindstorm has the option to communicate with sensors via an I2C bus. [Stewart] set up an ATtiny45 to act as a the slave on the bus, facilitating the analog measurement of the distance voltage by using and lookup table, and handling the data transfer with the NXT brick. His testing setup is pictured above, with an AVR Dragon for programming the tiny45 and a Bus Pirate for sniffing the I2C data during the development process. The sensor, looking great on a professionally made PCB he ordered, requires a simple driver that [Stewart] hammered out for use with leJOS, the alternative Mindstorm firmware we’ve seen before.