If you’re attending Google I/O this week, you will be a part of an experiment from the Google Cloud Platform Developer Relations team. On its blog today, the team outlined its plan to gather a bunch of environmental information happening around you as you meander around the Moscone Center. → Read More
When I used to work in Fairfax, Virginia as a computer consultant during the dot-com boom (actually I was a documentation specialist) we’d all go down to Pizza Hut for their lunch buffet. They had pizzas all laid out – three or four flavors, plus dessert pizza. A salad bar. I’d go with a bunch of people whose names I forget now (I didn’t make a lot of friends when I worked in Fairfax. I’d go for… → Read More
In the underground world of robotic tentacle makers, there are two rules: 1) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making and 2) don’t talk about underground tentacle-making. Both of those rules have been shattered by Matthew Borgatti, a robotics designer who has created a life-like, 3D-printed tentacle that flails around quite disturbingly using Arduino boards and a set of mini air compressors. → Read More
While I don’t often hold stock in random pronouncements by magazines, I’m shocked and thrilled that Entrepreneur Magazine named Limor Fried, founder of Adafruit Industries, as their 2012 Entrepreneur of the Year. Limor runs a $4.5 million company with 25 employees and she produces some of the coolest electronic gadgets around. → Read More
Arduino unveiled a new preassembled board today, one that includes a variety of sensors and controls already assembled, allowing aspiring game programmers to quickly and easily get up and running with functional hardware out of the box, without having to break out the soldering iron. It includes light and temperature sensors, an accelerometer, four push buttons, a joystick and a slider, as well as… → Read More
Sega Rally at the arcade was a blast when I was growing up. But Portuguese hardware hacker Luis Sobral and robotics company Artica made it even better by introducing remote controlled cars into the mix, along with cameras and an Arduino receiver to grab transmitted acceleration, braking and turning commands relayed from the arcade cabinet. → Read More
For your perusal: a Geiger counter made in the style of HR Giger. Why? Because this is the Internet and people do stuff for attention, that’s why.
The creator, Steve D of Mad Art Lab, bought a real Geiger counter from Adafruit Industries and wrapped it up in plastic bones from a skeleton model. A coat of black paint and some creepy pipes and he had a complete Giger counter that looked like a… → Read More
Some folks we met in Charlotte had a mission: they wanted to win a contest (sponsored by Red Bull) for the coolest Arduino project in the land. I think they may have nailed it. The project, built by engineers and designers for Edison Nation, turns an ordinary desk into a booze-infused party zone when the clock hits five (or when you slap the Swingline stapler.) → Read More
So here’s something you may have seen floating around on Hacker News or elsewhere, but we thought it was cool enough to share in case you’re looking for something to do with your weekend. After all, there are few of us who don’t love stories that end with robots. Especially robots controlled by phones.
Robots have indeed fascinated many of us since childhood, and thanks to modern technology… → Read More
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… → 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. → Read More
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… → Read More
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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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… → 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 … → 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. → 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
At the CrunchGear offices, after all our tireless work, we sit around and talk time; watches, clocks, and 2012 occupy our general water cooler discussions. But, when we aren’t talking time, video games is usually next on the list. So combining 1 and 2 would be like the sweet combination of peanut butter to our chocolate. That combination can now be had in a clock called the Wise Clock: our … → Read More
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