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.

Check out the video (there’s another here):

It’s put together from mostly off-the-shelf parts (Arduino-powered, naturally), though it’s far from simple. The process uses vector graphics and turns it into a tone map, and given a known starting point for the pen, it “prints” by moving the pen along rows and adding jitter to darken the “pixels” to whatever degree is necessary. It looks like it has about four discrete tones it can make — not the greatest range, but in aggregate it works quite well.

You can read how it was put together at the creator Alex Weber’s blog, and he has also put the source, documentation, and so on up on Github.

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.

The system uses two ultrasonic sensors that can detect the distance of objects between 2cm and 3m away. Mounted facing off to the right and left, they can be swept across a room and will be able to sense most common obstacles and dangerous objects. They send their signal through an Arduino Mini controller, which governs a pair of servos. These servos each press a loop of foam down on the wrist: the closer the object, the harder they press. The whole thing is powered by a 9V battery and straps onto either hand.

Designs like this are the reason we have a patent system. And while tech companies are filing thousands of patents for trivial UI items and software methods, the inventor, Steve Hoefer, has opted instead to give away his invention for free under a Creative Commons license. As is increasingly common with interesting hacked inventions like this, he has published the parts list, detailed instructions, a circuit diagram, and the source code for the Arduino controller.

Hoefer says the system has a learning curve of “seconds,” and I can’t see why that shouldn’t be the case. Nothing is naturally intuitive; everything is learned, even vision and our concepts of space and navigation. Hand-based tactile feedback is something many blind people have grown up with, and the addition of this extra information, while at first foreign, will likely be welcomed as highly beneficial. They have also proven themselves very capable of synthesizing this kind of information into a cohesive mental map — sometimes incredibly so.

There are some other haptic vision projects, like the HALO system — but this seems more practical to me. The sweeping of the hand mimics the path of the eye, and unlike a head-mounted system, this one can be used to, say, locate a pen on a table. With such a low cost, it could be easily manufactured and made a common aid item, unlike fascinating but costly and impractical (at the moment) ideas like vision substitution.

It’s always heartening to see real inventors inventing real things, and for no other reason than a problem needed solving.

[via Hack A Day]

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.

The best thing is that the product actually works quite well, muting the TV as soon as Kim Kardashian is mentioned, even in passing. It may make for an excellent election-year project for folks who may or may not be sick of certain politicians.

Project Page

via BB

I find myself playing the air drums rather regularly, 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.

With a MIDI device and a little help from Arduino, Migdal has built a set of real-life air drums. Migdal cut the rake part off of a few garden rakes for the drum sticks, and added accelerometers and USB ports to each. The left stick takes care of the hi-hat, while the right stick has two separate modules that cover the snare and crash cymbals.

From there, he went on to fix up some sandal-esque foot pedals. Actually, they are more like foot pedal-esque sandals. Well, either way he stuck a pair of sensors into his flip-flops — the left, an accelerometer to pick up the bass drum, and the right, a light sensor to pull in the hi-hat pedal.
Voila! Next-gen air drums are born.

Clearly, Mr. Migdal has a knack for creating invisible instruments. If he can figure out a music-playing air guitar, he may just give Rock Band a run for its money. Check out the video from Hack A Day after the break.

It’s powered by Arduino/Seeduino hardware: you put together the graphics on a laptop, the signal gets sent to the separately-driven LED stick, and it displays it at whatever rate is necessary to make the image appear correctly during, say, a 10-foot walk and 8-second exposure.

Pretty cool little project. Instructions to create it and links to where you can buy the pieces can be found at the Mechatronics Guy’s site, and more pictures are in this Flickr set.

[via Hack a Day]

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.

Project Page

No soldering is required, for one thing. I like solder in theory, but in practice it always freaks me out. What if I get molten metal on me. So that’s one barrier removed. It also has a sweet graphical feedback system for understanding your inputs, outputs, modules, and so on, making the language of hacking a little more accessible.

It’s kind of like the Duplo to Arduino’s Lego. The same principles are in action, but in larger, more coarse form, and you can’t choke on them. And of course it’s all open source, so you can modify or remix as you please.

Lots more info on this cool system at Teague Labs. If I had space in my apartment for a workbench, I’d totally check out one of these kits.

[via Hacker News]

If you enjoy tinkering with gadgetry, or if you join Royer in having a healthy distrust of the powers that be, then check out Royer’s blog, Fabien’s Bit Bucket, to learn how to do it yourself.

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.

If you and your kids have always wanted to play with Arduino devices, this might be a great way to learn. Barring that, it looks quite cool.

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.

The microcontroller constantly evaluates the wearer’s current heading and the location of magnetic North, or the relative location of a user-defined waypoint (such as home). The microcontroller informs the wearer of compass information through the vibration motors, basically allowing you to read a compass with your body.

Regardless, I would totally build this thing if I weren’t afraid I’d mess it up and have it lead me into the East River.

Project Page via Make

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.

Check out this Lego Like light; yes, the Facebook Lego Like 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.

[via nowhereelse.fr]

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.

It’s an animated 3x3x3 cube made up of 27 single-color LEDs. The kit includes all the parts so that you can make it yourself. Once you build up the kit, you can use a web-based too to program your own animation patterns, then you can upload the code over a serial connection.

The kit costs only $25 and you can grab it here.

[via makezine]

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.

You can also DIY and grab the plans here and the board sits on top of the Arduino microcontroller. The Kickstarter version will cost $53 if it gets funded so head over there and pick one up and help support open computing.

Product Page

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.

DOTKLOK only uses 2 watts of power and if the electricity goes out, there’s a backup battery that will keep the time. It comes as a kit with hardware plans, schematics, source code and instructions so you can make whatever adjustments you want. LED colors come in red or green.

The only down side is the price (starts at $150). But if you gotta have one, you can buy them here.

Hands off videos

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.

The inspiration for DOTKLOK was to combine in one clock a variety of ways to show time — such as with words, graphics, or retro game displays — while providing a platform on which others can further develop unique timepieces.

DOTKLOK is Arduino compatible, making it easily customized and updated by owners*. A dedicated real-time clock (RTC) chip tracks the time and date even in the absence of power thanks to a small back-up battery. Also, because of the open source nature of the project, DOTKLOK can be re-purposed for other uses altogether, such as a low-fi video game platform.

The kit includes multiple clock faces and it can cycle through faces once a day. It has a 24×16 screen and is fully hackable.

via Make

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 Reese’s Cup, if you will.

The LED clock is brilliantly simple, it simply just tells the time on top of a pong game. The game is not playable by users, instead one must simply watch in amazement that a computer is doing a fine job pretending to be human. Next to making this a DIY project, this is one of the easiest way to have a different kind of clock. Check out the video below.

[via hackaday]

The kit uses an Arduino board and a single switch to select the dice size. It’s not amazingly complex, obviously, but it’s a noble effort and looks very electropunk.

The same DIYer made a 6 sided version complete with mercury switch to add a frisson of realism to the proceedings.

via Hackaday

The Amazing Technicolor LED Fur Coat from Arren Parker on Vimeo.

The pimp person who made the jacket was kind enough to put up instructions on how to make your own technicolor LED coat, if you are so inclined.

[Sk3tch] took an Arduino, added a Bluetooth module, and wired an old NES controller in. He then programmed the Arduino to send the input from the controller through the bluetooth to his Android phone. [Sk3tch] calls this a work in progress, and I look forward to seeing it once it’s done and all in one neat case.

[via Hackaday]