Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the screen of your iPhone. I’m going for the derisive laughter. This DIY Arduino project involves a simple circuit, a webcam, and a few API calls to PushingBox to enable a truly enjoyable derisive experience. The system works by pushing images grabbed by the webcam through PushingBox to an app like Prowl or Pushme.to. When the doorbell is pressed, it sends a serial signal to the Arduino board which in turn notifies the various services. The webcam picture then gets sent over to you so you can decide whether to let whoever is outside in. It’s probably a little more complex than it needs to be, but if you’re totally into watching the world pass you by it’s a great solution and a fun weekend project. Project Page → Read More
If you’ve always wanted to try to build an Arduino project, this may be a great way to start. Matt Williamson built a tiny, Arduino-based motion sensor that will SMS you when something moves by your desk or into a room. It’s completely open source and the notifications system runs on your PC thanks to a simple Python script.
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This video from Waterloo Labs shows a bunch of young, excited interns building what amounts to a computer-controlled Etch-A-Sketch. The project uses an Xbox Kinect sensor to find the nearest point in space and then transmits that motion to an Arduino board which in turn controls stepper motors to turn the Etch-A-Sketch knobs. Sure you could just turn the knobs yourself, but where would the fun be in that?
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This complete project kit made by Adafruit allows you to print out things from the Internet. Want to print all your Tweets onto receipt paper? You got it. Want to print out your Facebook wall? Why the heck not! The kit uses an Arduino board and thermal printer and offers the opportunity for weekend hackers to pop together a cool little printer thinger and learn Arduino and Twitter programming. → Read More
An automatic scribbling machine sounds less than useful, admittedly, but it’s really just the style of line created by this motorized drawing machine. It’s reminiscent of ASCII art, in which heavier characters are used to create darker tones; in this case, the more jiggle added to the drawing platform, the more ink is put on the drawing surface. It’s kind of mesmerizing. → Read More
Every once in a while you see an invention that seems a long time coming. The Tacit, a hand-mounted system that pings surroundings and transmits distance information to the user, is one of those. While the reliable white cane and occasional accommodations for the blind and vision impaired ameliorate the difficulty of navigating the world sans sight, technological advances that are both useful and ready for deployment are few and far between.
We’ve seen a lot of research into artificial vision systems, and there are often hacked-together projects by people personally concerned with issues like vision or mobility — we’ve seen a Kinect-powered navigation system, the Eyewriter, and Ken Yankelvitz’s paraplegic-accessible controllers. This project is an amazing example of what one guy can do with a soldering iron, some off-the-shelf parts, and an inventive mind.
Did I mention it’s open source, and only costs around $100 to make? → Read More
Matt Richardson created a wild Arduino system that mutes a TV whenever a name or other keyword is broadcast on TV. It uses the closed caption track and an IR blaster to grab what’s currently playing and then mute the TV for 30 seconds – or more – depending on the current topic.
The project uses the Video Experimenter Shield, Lady Ada’s IR tutorial, and some basic code to scan the captions for keywords. → Read More
I find myself playing the air drums rather regularly when boppin’ along to some tunes, and the drum set on Rock Band is by far my favorite instrument, but neither of those hold a candle to what Maayan Migdal has up his sleeve. My air drums don’t make real music. My Rock Band drums do, but they also take up a hunk of space in my room.
His make real music and are invisible. → Read More
You’ve probably seen a few little gadgets and apps where you can wave it around and it spells something out on a long exposure, or draws a little picture. Pretty cool, but they’ve all been somewhat small — mainly good for painting stripes or single lines of text. The Mechatronics Guy’s “Light Scythe” is a two-meter bar covered in LEDs, and can be used to make man-sized graphics by moving it around in a long exposure. → Read More
You can stick anything into a can. Peaches. Corn. (Very small) Apples. Or an Arduino board and potentiometer. The latter of those items allows you to create a playable pong TV pong game in a container the size of one of the old Pong paddles from the 1970s. While you won’t be able to eat the contents of the Cansole, you can make one yourself and play the age-old game of table tennis right on your TV. → Read More
With Google’s Open Accessory Toolkit rolling up Android and Arduino together, there’s a lot of attention being given to to the popular hacking engine. But unsurprisingly, such a powerful tool isn’t really able to be just picked up and played with. Teagueduino is a modification of the Arduino system that makes the platform a bit more accessible to newbies. → Read More
Combining a Netduino Plus and a Geiger counter kit, a technical program manager at Microsoft named Fabien Royer created a tweeting radiation level monitor. Royer claims that his experience in France during the 1986 Chernobyl disaster has made him a bit tense when it comes to matters of radiation poisoning and government transparency. According to Royer, the French government downplayed the disaster, and after the Fukushima Nuclear disaster earlier this year, Royer feared that the U.S. government may try to distribute the same kind of misinformation. → Read More
Minibloq is a programming language for Arduino motherboards designed to make it fun and easy for kids to make their own microprocessor projects.
How does it work? Well, it’s a bit convoluted but you basically plug in a board and program it using either graphical objects or text source code. It’s completely portable and runs on multiple platforms including the OLPC. The product will be technically free but the creator has built a Kickstarter page to help with expenses and he’ll send you an alpha version for a pledge of $39. → Read More
Every few weeks I pop up out of the New York subway and forget where I am. I’ll start heading east when I wanted to west and north when I wanted to go south. East and west are the worst because it’s a long block before I usually realize I’m going the wrong way and, regardless of all of the potentially cues around me (street numbers, landmarks) I will invariably have to turn around a few times. Well this bag, really a DIY project, aims to assist us in our travels. The device is sewn into a messenger bag and uses an Arduino board, a GPS chipset, and eight tiny motors. You set a direction or a waypoint and start moving. As you traverse the streetscape, the motors vibrate to tell you where you’re headed, like a sensory compass. After a few days, the creator, Josh, found it became second nature to depend on the vibrations to sense his position in the city. → Read More
This 8x8x8 LED cube with 512 LEDs takes the old 3x3x3 light cube made up of 27 LEDs to the nth degree. This, certainly more time consuming project, actually involves a simpler design. By using a STP16CP LED sink driver, Nick (the creator), was able to reduce the component count. The LED sink driver can control 16 LEDs at once, as opposed to single LED control from the 3x3x3.
Programming came by way of MATLAB, which explains many of the shapes I learned in Calc 3 and diffy-q. I suggest taking a few minutes to check out the video of this amazing project…after the break. → Read More
Check out this Lego Like light; yes, the Facebook Like Lego Light. Using Aduino, redpepper was able light up their Lego Light anytime someone liked their Facebook page. It was all made possible when Facebook opened up their Graph API, allowing developers to grab Like data. Just a few simple scripts and a few wires, and the Like Light came alive.
Video after the break. → Read More
I just love the stuff from Makezine — tinkering and programming bring back such good memories. If you like tinkering with little electronic devices and programming patterns, it’s definitely worth checking out the site. And, they just released their new LED Cube kit, inspired by the 3D Borg cube from Das-Labor, so it’s a good time to buy. → Read More
Arduino seems like a great way to create interactive devices but historically it hasn’t been too hot for creating the ultimate in interactivity, computer gaming. That changed with the release of the Gameduino, a version of the open-source Arduino board pre-loaded with games, sprites, and inputs for various game controllers.
The Gameduino is an open source project and the creator has build a Kickstarter page to fund the actual production of the device. → Read More
Sick of telling time the old way? Spice up your time-telling time with the open-source, hackable and Arduino-based DOTKLOK. Basically, you can get a bunch of different ways to tell time. Different customizable animations will make you proud to show off your hard work the next time someone asks for the time. Speaking of time, it passes in a unique way with numbers and abstract/geometric patterns. It also has classic video games like Pong, Tetris and Pacman, that pretty much makes it sweet in our book. → Read More
DOTKLOK: Game Time from The Latest Artists on Vimeo. Like the Pong Clock, the DOTKLOK uses an LED array to display the time – and more. Available at Etsy for $150 ($200 assembled), the kit uses and Arduino board to display the time and includes a sexy case. → Read More
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