I made another little demo of an XPort Direct webserver tonight. This time, you can send me a short message and it will be photographed and put up on flickr.
Basically, an Arduino + XPort shield + XPort + LCD + some code = minitwitter. I’ll put up deets on how to DIY later tomorrow.
But you can try it out now!
Edit: I added a servo that moves when a message is sent, so that the (motion-sensitive) camera will take a picture after each update. whew!
This robot claw freaks me out a little. When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about sticking my hand in the lobster tank at the store. Must be a New Englander thing…
Made by the miraculous Hijinx Comics
For a soon-to-be-released project I needed to have a character LCD display. I’ve got a box with a few of those $10 parallel LCDs that are so popular.
There’s even a few libraries at the Arduino playground for easy use. Dave Fowler from uCHobby even started out with a great tutorial. However, I didn’t see any good tutorials on how to do the actual -connecting- part. So I took pix while I wired up one to a protoshield and tested it.
Read all about it at my LCD tutorial page!
(Or if you just want an LCD that’s ready to plug in, you can check out this cool blue LCD shield from nuelectronics.com)
Phil Warner’s PanoBot is going thru multiple revisions, it seems. Latest one uses a Boarduino for ultracompactness, check it out!
Fancy yourself a chiptune-freak? Caitsith2’s Arduino shield is designed just for you…it allows easy interfacing with an SNES APU. just plug it on top and you’re ready to play some 16-bit wunderjingles
This is a totally awesome laser harp project, make by Stephen Hobley using a Boarduino!
Ask nicely and maybe he’ll post up details on how he did it!
So I got my new boarduino design in (with built-in USB!) and I have to test it so why not put it thru its paces with a BlinkM? Why not indeed!
Wiring it up to a boarduino is not as easy as simply plug&play as with an Arduino, so you’ll need a few wires. Still its very straightforward!
when you power it up it will immediately start doing its thing which is fading thru some nice colors
But the real fun is programming it…upload the Arduino Communicator sketch and then run the blink Sequencer on your computer. Connect and then select which colors to display
2 years ago when I worked on Duel Nature, I made a table of data that approximates a heartbeat. I couldnt quite duplicate it directly because the loop time is 3 seconds not 1 second, but I didn’t do too bad. Here it is in ‘autoplay’ mode with the heartbeat script. Sadly it doesnt seem like you can save the script to share it.
Add a coin cell, and you’ve got a ValenThrowieM (Valentine LED Throwie M)!
Next I wanted to experiment with talking to the BlinkM over i2c. I decided to make a little temperature display. When its cold, the LED turns blue, when its hot it turns red. For the sensor I simply used a LM34 which is super simple: just give it 5V and ground and the middle pin will be at +10mV/degF. So 68 degrees is 680mV.
I used a little heatshrink to protect the wires:
Then wrote a sketch to tell the LED to change color, here it is at room temperature (65deg, its cold in here)
Squeezing the sensor brings up the temp a bit, to maybe 85 degrees, a little pinker
Then some icey water (its in a plastic bag to protect both the sensor and my drink!)
and some hot tea
The final analysis?
The BlinkM worked well and is a nifty little thing, the Sequencer software could be improved (can’t save scripts, cant adjust loopspeed, clicking on a ‘frame’ doesnt display the RGB value…) but its impressive that theres any software at all. It seems like the real control comes from sending it direct i2c commands, so one would have to write a custom Arduino sketch to make it do what you want. (Or, probably better yet, a python script that talks to the Arduino communicator since at least then you’re not uploading sketches) While its not the right thing for people who want to make 100-LED blinky projects (since its ~$12 each), its probably a good accessory for someone with an Arduino who just needs a few lights for a standalone project. I could see them being popular as integrated into wearables/fashion technology. They’re hella bright too!
ps. I’d like to see someone show how to control them directly using a motherboard i2c port such as the ones that have temp (and sometimes IR) sensors.
Awesome-pants Joe Grand designed the Parallax RFID reader, an easy way to add RFID reading to any electronics project. Maybe you want to plug it into a project with your Boarduino? Well, Johannes Otto did, and it works great!
Check out his flickr photoset and then download the code from Erik Sjodin’s site. Now get spime’ing!
Fabien Royer has a strange project up his sleeve…
“What’s got 6 eyes, 6 fingers, 6 brains and plays Guitar Hero III? If you answered ‘The Beast’, you’re close. It’s actually the Guitar Hero ‘bot’ that I’ve been building around 6 Arduino cores (Boarduinos actually). It uses 6 photodiodes mounted on a LEGO rig to ’see’ the notes on the screen and drives a wireless XBOX 360 controller through a series of 6 Reed relays in real time. So how does it perform? Right now, with some quick and dirty code to decode and play the notes, it’s tuned to play Medium-difficulty songs with a hit ratio between 80% and 90%. The bot also controls ‘Star Power’ by itself when it’s charged enough. I have high hopes that with some more work, it will be able to handle Expert-level songs with good results. I’ll post a demo video of the bot playing GH 3 later this week. ”
ASquare bought an Arduino starter pack before christmas and has wasted no time becoming a hardware-hacking geek.
Not only is his new blog totally awesome but he’s also got an impressive initial project!
RGB button pad demo from JMG on Vimeo.
The monome is a gorgeous, minimalist, open-source light-and-button pad used primarily by musicians as a controller. The folks over at SparkFun Electronics, inspired by the monome, released their own button pads and circuit boards, only they designed theirs to be able to hold RGB LEDs. They made this nifty Tetris game with their parts. Looking at it, though, I noticed something: they only seemed to use a limited palette, in particular, they only appeared to have red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, and white, corresponding to channels being fully on or fully off. I wanted to see if I could get colour mixing, wherein channels were on partially in order to blend colours smoothly.
not sure you’re up to all this? you can always buy Monome kits direct from the ethereal source!
