This looks like a handy library for mobile-enabling your next Arduino project:
This library implements the Software serial Arduino library to establish a serial connection to a Mobile phone. The methods methods hides the AT+ commands from the user allowing messages to be sent by passing the method on a phone number or email and the message.
The specific AT commands were made to work with the Motorolla C168i, but you can tweak a header file to adjust things for the specific device you are using. It makes sending an email or SMS almost as easy as a single function call:
Example code:
#define rxPin 2
#define txPin 3
// set up a new serial port
SSerial2Mobile phone = SSerial2Mobile(rxPin, txPin);
//send a text message
phone.sendTxt("+15555550125","Lib SMS Test1");
//send an email
phone.sendEmail("sserial2mobile@example.com", "Lib email test1");
The reason the author chose to use the C168i is that you can get the phone on the cheap, without contract, and prepay for SMS service. It’s also simple to make a serial cable which connects to a 3/32″ stereo plug on the phone. In all, it looks like a pretty simple and cheap task to get this all working.
Note that it’s the last day to use code 2009OX during checkout in the Maker Shed for a 10% discount. If you need an Arduino for this, go get one now!
Tufts University has a really good book available online about the physics of music and musical instruments. It’s a nice balance between theory, examples, and hands-on projects.
The Physics of Music and Musical Instruments covers the physics of waves, sound, music, and musical instruments at a level designed for high school physics. However, it is also a resource for those teaching or learning waves and sound from the middle school through college, at the mathematical or conceptual level.
Here’s another Make: Books PDF excerpt. This one comes from the Best of Instructables, which is a compilation of some of the most amazing projects from Instructables, the world’s biggest show and tell. This excerpt is kind of special to us. In it, former Make intern Jacob McKenzie riffs on a project by Gareth Branwyn, Lead Editor for this book:
Gareth Branwyn’s “Mousey the Junkbot,” from MAKE Volume 02, is a fun introduction to robotics. So fun, that I’ve created this expanded documentation of a Mousey build from start to finish, with a few extra tips and tricks you won’t find in the magazine project. This how-to is best understood after reading the original article, found on page 100 of Volume 02 (or in The Best of MAKE collection), however it is probably not required.
Mousey is a simple bot that uses two “eyes” to sense light and then turns towards the light it detects. A single large “whisker” is mounted on the front to detect collisions. A collision with a wall will cause the bot to reverse and turn, then take off in another direction. This project is pretty cheap if you have a mouse to use, the other parts can be obtained for less than ten dollars.
Mousey requires several parts that we can conveniently borrow from a donor mouse, its eyes and its whisker. Open up the mouse and locate the components that we’ll be harvesting, the momentary switch and the infrared emitters. The emitters are the components in the clear package (Figure C)…
Buy Best of Instructables in the Maker Shed today! (Use code 2009OX on checkout for a 10% discount for the week of January 26, 2009.)
Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, editors of MAKE: Magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of technology how-to’s from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photographs, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won’t find anywhere else!
I blog about Mikey and Wendy’s projects very frequently because they’re doing so many cool things. One of the most impressive is their papercrete dome, which is now documented in this Instructable:
When my girlfriend (Wendy Tremayne) and I arrived in southern New Mexico one of the first things we did was look around for a local building material. Clay would need to be excavated and hauled in, straw bale was already expensive and not local, manufactured building materials like rastra were a little too off the shelf for us. We ended up settling on what we had locally available and that was/is paper. It is common for small remote towns to not have much in the way of recycling. Our town was collecting paper, but more often than not would just dump it in the landfill after collection. They were happy to help us load our truck up with their newspaper which was mostly a nuisance to them. We later found a source of rebar being made from old cars within a 100 miles of our place.
Since we would have a lot of batteries and solar PV equipment that needed a good home we decided to do our first structure as a battery room for our solar equipment. Domes are inherently strong and energy efficient structures. This is how we started building a battery dome from paper.
The upcoming revision of the Android operating system, code named cupcake, has generated a lot of excitement among users of the first Android-based phone, the T-Mobile G1. Because Google’s Android operating system is Open Source, it’s possible, but a little difficult, to test cupcake out on a real phone.
Among the many improvements in cupcake is a much faster web browser, due in no small part to the adoption of the SquirrelFish JavaScript engine. The picture above shows the results of running the V8 JavaScript Benchmark Suite on a G1 running the most recent shipping version of Android (top) and an Android Dev Phone 1 (bottom) running the latest build from the Android source code repository. The top one didn’t even complete all the benchmarks, and only scored 1.08 and 1.54 on the ones it did complete (vs. 9.36 and 3.09) for the phone running the latest release.
To try this yourself, you’ll need an Android Dev Phone 1, a Mac OS X or Linux computer, and a few hours of time. This wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the folks (links below) who documented what you need to do. Here are the steps I took along with some notes you may find helpful:
Google has posted instructions for obtaining the Android source code, which also includes information on setting up your computer so that you can compile this source code into an image that you can load on your phone. Don’t follow the instructions all the way; stop before you type “make”.
There are two development toolchains for Android: the one from the previous step is what you need to compile the Android operating system; the second (the Android SDK) is what you need to create applications that run on Android. You don’t need the SDK to compile Android, but you do need one of the utilities included with it, adb, in order to manipulate the files on the phone.
Back in the first step, you did everything you needed to run Android on an emulator, but that’s not as much fun as doing it on the real thing. In this step, you’ll modify the Android source code so it’s (almost) ready to compile on the HTC Dream, which is the same device that’s been rebranded as the T-Mobile G1 and Android Dev Phone 1.
Jean-Baptiste Queru, a Google Engineer, has posted detailed instructions on what you need to do to before you type “gmake” (Mac OS X) or “make” (Linux). These directions are subject to change, so keep an eye on the discussions at the Android-Platform Google Group.
If you’re not sure what to do about changes 7699 and 7345, go to their code review pages: Change 7345/Change 7699 and run the “repo” command listed in the “Download” section. This will pull each change into your Android source tree click the “Side-by-Side” or “Unified” link for each file in the patch set. This will show you the changes that you need to manually apply to each file. As an alternative to Change 7345, you can run the following command from inside your mydroid directory to copy over the list of cellular data access points: adb pull /system/etc/apns-conf.xml development/data/etc/apns-conf_sdk.xml
Anton Melser has written up a great guide (which covers most of the above points as well) that explains how you can back up the Android software that shipped with your Dev Phone, and also how you can install the new images that you compiled. There is a shortcut you can use to replace all the fastboot commands: to install all the freshly compiled images at once, and to reboot afterwards, run this from your mydroid directory: export ANDROID_PRODUCT_OUT=./out/target/product/dream
./out/host/darwin-x86/bin/fastboot -w flashall
(Note that I’m using “darwin-x86″ instead of the “linux-x86″ shown in Anton’s instructions. Like me, Mac OS X users will use “darwin-x86″)
And that’s it. When your phone finishes rebooting, it will be automatically provisioned on the network; you won’t need to go through the out-of-box initial setup. You’ll find that most of the interesting applications aren’t there (no Maps, no Market, no Gmail), but the Browser and many other core apps are working fine.
It’s a complicated procedure to go through, but if you read everything twice before doing it, you should have no problems. And if something doesn’t work as you expected, check out (or jump into) the discussion over at the Android-Platform Google Group.
Update: There is a Terminal Emulator application that is installed by default, however it does not appear in the launcher. To make it appear in the launcher, edit the file development/apps/Term/AndroidManifest.xml and add this line in the <intent-filter> section, then (re)compile your images: <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
Give a community the motivation of a $20,000 grand prize, and they can produce a lot of great tutorials. That’s just what Instructables and Craftsman did, and they selected one winner and ten finalists whose Instructables are all worth a good read. Several have been featured on MAKE, but not the one on extracting honey! The grand prize winner was how to convert your honda accord to run on trash. Check out the rest of the winners.
Amazing shape-shifter robotic system being developed at University of Pennsylvania that can locate its subsystem clusters and reassemble itself after being kicked or otherwise disrupted.
From the makers of Exploded Phone comes the iSteam Phone, a t-shirt depicting an exploded view illustration that asks the musical question: What would the iPhone have looked like if Leonardo had invented it in the 15th century?
Illuminated pushbuttons can be costly, cool-looking, and really quite helpful especially when panel space is in short dupply. Well here’s details on making your own with tactile switches, go ‘head get blinky/flashy – Alternative buttons [via Hack A Day]
2009 has only just begun and we have already featured 5 builds from the Maker Shed. It’s been a lot of fun, but now we need your help. Is there anything from the Maker Shed that you would like to see us build? Maybe there is a kit that you just aren’t sure how it works, or what it sounds like? Let us know, we would love some input from our readers. Leave your suggestions in the comments below. I can’t promise I can build them all, but I’ll try. Thanks!
All this week get 10% off you order in the Maker Shed, use code “2009OX” at the time of checkout – Happy Chinese New Year!
I haven’t tried this, so I hope I’m not being hoodwinked. This article on DIYPhotography shows how to cut out a sort of lens gobo to shape high contrast parts of an out-of-focus photograph.
Bonus points for the first person to build a “MAKE:” bokeh one letter at a time and post the results on the MAKE Flickr pool!
Speaking of which, this example came from the MAKE Flickr pool:
