My latest project is controlling a pedestrian sign with an Arduino, so it will automatically step through the states of walk, flashing don't walk, and solid don't walk. In addition, I added infrared remote control support so I can use a remote control to turn the sign on and off, set it to a particular state, or start the cycle.

In the Maker Shed:


The Maker Shed has everything you need to get started with Arduino

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:

Flickr user numist had a typerwriter that he wasn't using anymore, so he converted it into a teleprinter. What's that? It turns out that teleprinters are basically a printer and a keyboard put together in a single device, but not directly connected. Instead, both are connected to a remote computer using a serial connection. When you type on the keyboard, it gets interpreted by the computer, which then prints a response on the printer. They probably don't make much sense anymore, but before electronic displays were readily available, these were one of the main ways of programming mainframe computers.

To make his version, numist took an old electronic typewriter, and added some electronics between the keyboard and printer board. He used an Arduino microcontroller to read in each key press and relay it back over a serial port to his PC. When it receives characters back from the PC, the microcontroller emulates the keyboard to feed them into the original typewriter circuitry, causing the typewriter to print. Now, I'm not entirely sure what one could do with such a modernized typewriter, but I'll bet there are lots of potential projects there. Got any ideas?

Tom Igoe got his hands on a Peppermill circuit board, and took it out for a spin:

Nicolas Villar sent me a sample of the PepperMill, a new sensor board he and Steve Hodges designed at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. It's a nifty little board. You attach a DC motor and the board can an output voltage when the motor is turned, and analog signals telling you the direction and speed of the motor. It turns a DC motor into a rotary encoder, of sorts.

Wiring is very simple. The motor connects to the two spring connectors at the top of the board. Direction and Speed pins connect to two analog inputs on your microcontroller. Ground connects to your microcontroller's ground. The motor generates voltage when you spin it.

Check out Tom's article for circuit diagrams, source code, and information on obtaining a Peppermill board to experiment with. Using PepperMill to turn a motor into a sensor

(Tom is a member of the Arduino team and the author of Making Things Talk).

Making Things Talk
Our Price: $29.99
Programming microcontrollers used to require an expensive development environment costing thousands of dollars and requiring professional electrical engineering expertise. Open-source physical computing platforms with simple i/o boards and development environments have led to new options for hobbyists, hackers, and makers. This book contains a series of projects that teach you what you need to know to get your creations talking to each other, connecting to the web, and forming networks of smart devices.

The Open Heart kit V2.0 is a matrix of individually addressable LEDs that allow you to create customizable animations when connected to your favorite micro controller. Attach it temporarily to fabrics with headers that you simply push through, or sew it into a project with conductive fabric for a more permanent setup.

Matt Cottam, founder of Tellart, presented Wooden Logic: In Search of Heirloom Electronics at interaction10 yesterday. Here are my running notes on his discussions of sketching with tangible objects, physical interfaces to the iPhone, and heirloom technology.

interaction10 got underway today in Savannah, Georgia, and among the first workshops of the day was Arduino project co-founder Massimo Banzi's Tangible Interface Prototyping (Massimo, left, is pictured above with fellow Arduino team member Tom Igoe). Massimo's workshop featured the soon-to-be-released TinkerKit, a collection of pluggable sensor modules designed to work with the Arduino electronic prototyping platform.

Spotted in the MAKE Flickr pool:

When we last covered recotana's Open Sound Controller (OSC) library for Arduino (ardOSC), he had an Arduino talking to an iPhone using the OSC protocol. The project worked quite well, however you had to manually connect the two together by specifying their IP address. Now, by adding an implementation of Bonjour, the Arduino can link up to the iPhone automagically, allowing one to easily get on with their mixing.

There are loads of reasons for why you could want to trigger your camera remotely - to avoid camera shake, for example, or to be able to take a photograph of yourself without having to rely on a timer. If you want to build more ambitious projects, however, you may have to consider getting more exotic.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

Mechanical watch enthusiast Jake Bordens wrote in to share his latest project, the Arduino Watch Winder. Wanting to keep his watches on display, he needed a solution that could automatically wind them so their time would be accurate. The (expensive) commercial device that he had worked well when he only had one watch, however it couldn't support winding two watches at different rates. Instead of purchasing a more complicated model, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and used an Arduino, Ardumoto motor driver shield, and RTC module to run the winding motors independently. It's a bit of an obscure problem, but a nice hack, and it could come in handy if you have a task that needs to be repeated each day at a specific time. Full source code and explanation is available at his site.

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

Enjoy programming microcontrollers, but frustrated about how difficult it can be to get them to do more than one thing at a time? Well, then you might be interested in Concurrency, an open source programming language and environment specifically designed with multithreading in mind. That means you can write programs that do multiple things at the same time, without interfering with each other. Of course, you could achieve the same things using a stock Arduino with some crafty coding or timer interrupts, however using a purpose-built language such as this could be a great way to get your feet wet in threaded computing. Check out their website for source code and Creative Commons-licensed tutorials!

This instructable will show you how to connect your Arduino to your Android G1 mobile over serial. The project assumes you've rooted your G1 and are comfortable using a terminal. [via hackaday]

This tutorial is intended to get you up and running to the point of being able to turn an LED on and off over wi-fi without needing an Arduino wi-fi or BlueTooth shield. The purpose of using the phone is to give your project wireless capabilities, a camera, mic, screen, speaker, and all of the other capabilities in your $400 cell phone. Connecting the G1 to an Arduino helps the phone connect with the outside world with locomotion and other inputs.


Together, the G1 and Arduino allow you to use inexpensive electronics such as simple servos and sensors, to build powerful devices such as robots, remote telepresence, or fun toys for kids.

HYSICAL COMPUTERS AS populist devices may be the most momentous tech trend of the past five years that practically no one has heard about. Typically a small circuit board housed in a customized case, a physical computer is an easily programmable device that is aware of its surroundings. It is designed to interface with sensors that measure things around it—say, how fast an object is going, how close something is to it, the temperature around it. Based on that input, the computer takes action by moving switches and levers, displaying information, or otherwise controlling the environment.

For humans, connecting to computers via a mouse and keyboard has long been cheap and easy. For sensors, not so much. Now an inexpensive physical computer called the Arduino is changing all that. When the Arduino burst onto the do-it-yourself (“DIY” to devotees) scene in 2005, all manner of tinkerers seized on it as a device that could easily and cheaply run interactive projects.

Using an Arduino is fairly straightforward: buy a board (ranging from about $19 to $65) and attach it to a personal computer via a cable. Then load instructions into the Arduino’s processor via the personal computer. Once programmed, the Arduino makes decisions based on the information transmitted by whatever sensors you’ve hooked up, and does something corporeal, such as turn on or off the motors, displays, valves, and lights attached to it. For a few dollars, creative and motivated individuals—rather than just corporations or institutions—can make highly intelligent tools, perfectly customized for a particular need.

Alicia Gibb, NYC Resistor member, hacker, crafter and maker, just finished her art history master's thesis on Arduino. It's called "New Media Art, Design, and the Arduino Microcontroller: A Malleable Tool," and features a lot of familiar names and projects!

Above photo by Anthony Mattox.

This project demonstrates using an Arduino, a LM386N opamp circuit and multiple BlinkM LED units to create an audio visualization device. The audio is not pass-through so it requires a dedicated mono input. In the video demo, the Arduino enclosure is connected to the tape-out of a DX052 mixer and powered by USB by my previous DX052 power hack.

The Maker Shed has Arduino's and BlinkM's!

Osamu Iwasaki used a Lilypad Arduino + servo motor to create the Kinetic Quilt - an unusually lively bedspread. Hmmm … didn't this little guy make an appearance in one of the Harry Potter flicks? … or maybe Poltergeist?

Lucas Fragomeni built a puzzle box that can only be opened if a specific morse code sequence is entered. His starting point was a Reverse Geocache Puzzle he'd read about on Hack a Day, where a person has to bring a box to specific coordinates to release the catch.

I was amazed by it, so I immediately decided to make one for a good friend as a birthday gift. As I thought it through an idea of doing a hangman-like-puzzle using Morse Code popped into my head, and that's what came out:

It's called "Buzzle". It's a locked box with a button on the front, a couple of LEDs on the top and a power plug on the back. When the button is pushed, it emits a 'beep'. The longer you hold the button longer the box beeps.

A random word is picked up by the box and the challenger's goal is to find it out, by telegraphing the right letters sequentially until the word is complete.

[via Hack a Day]

More:

• Cool maze-box on Thingiverse
• Islamic Pattern Lasercut Box
• Building a mystery box

It's beyond me why anyone would want to start a car before they got into it, but if you're looking for an interesting aftermarket mod for the next car show, this prepaid wireless remote car starter is just the thing. [via engadget]

George wrote up an Arduino sketch that can detect and program other Arduinos connected through serial. He demonstrates the functionality above by writing a sort of serial-synchronized version of the well-known "Blink" sketch -

It is an implementation of the STK500 protocol within an Arduino sketch. STK500 is used by avrdude and the Arduino IDE to write sketches to AVR chips. A normal sketch ('BlinkSync' is used in the video) is first compiled and then converted from the Intel Hex format to a series of bytes written in C (by a Python script), which can be inserted into the Copier sketch as the data to be written to the destination Arduinos. Afterwards, the Copier sketch and the BlinkSync sketch are stuck together, resulting in a sketch that performs both the original task and the copying of that task to other boards.

A kind of digital update to the mysterious Aeolian harp instrument, the Winduino is played by the wind itself -

The Winduino II is a wireless, digital version of an Aeolian harp that can be listened to on its own or used as accompaniment for other instruments. Still based around the Adruino BT Bluetooth board, the Winduino II has several improvements over the last version which has vastly improved the performance of this unique sound generating device. The Winduino II also has a custom stand, so the device can be used inside or hung from a hook or tree branch outdoors.

Check out the launch of the 3rd annual Libelium Arduino contest!

For the third consecutive year, Libelium organizes the Arduino Open Hardware Contest in order to award the best ideas and projects made with Arduino. After the previous editions, this year we have decided to create just one category: "Amazing Arduino". We are looking for the most spectacular and unusual projects developed with Arduino.

Make a video to enter; the deadline is May 15th! The prize is 300 Euros worth of your choice of cool gear from their shop.

More:

• Libelium Arduino contest winners
• Arduino Contest II: hacking life

In the Maker Shed:

Make: Arduino

The Transistor is a community of tinkerers, gamers, programmers, and general DIYers, based in Provo, UT. They have a new space they wanted us to tell you about, as well as free, weekly Arduino/Electronics Nights.

The Transistor

Download Servo Tools for Maya

Installation tutorials

Instructables user mrigsby writes:

The Flock Clock uses male and female drinking birds to display time. Binary addition of the female birds (left to right) yields the hour. Binary addition of the male birds (multiplied by five) yields the minute--within five minutes. An Arduino processor provides the signals needed to drive Peltier cells which heat the fluid in the birds and causes the bobbing motion.

Spotted in the Make: Forums:

Drew Crawford made this excellent-sounding piezo speaker sound library for the Arduino. A demonstration of the library in action starts at 3 minutes into the above video, and the library can be downloaded from his code repository.

More:

• Arduino music player
• Patchable digital synth with Arduino
• Arduino noise box synth
• Temporary Music Machine powered by an Arduino
• Arduino synth: Cheap, Fat & Open

Adam Wolf, hardware hacker and member of Twin Cities Maker, has created an Arduino-based viewer for Mandelbrot sets. Adam's website provides full schematics and code for the project.

The Anywhere Organ is a amazing musical instrument project that desperately needs your help. By voting right now for The Anywhere Organ you help increase it's chance of receiving a $25,000 grant from The Fun Theory. The Anywhere Organ is the brainchild of über-maker Matthew Borgatti. You might remember some of Matthew's work on MST3shades, Printable Handcuffs, Bokode, the Best of Instructables, and Fairytale Fashion. Act now! (if you like it) The voting ends Friday.

Pipe organs are incredible, awesome instruments. One incredible aspect that contributes to their awesomeness is their ability to play a space. Each space an organ resides in reacts differently, creating different tones, and essentially allowing room for an infinite variety of instruments. Unfortunately nearly every pipe organ in existence is bolted irrevocably into a wall staring longingly at fornications all day. This is why I'm creating the Anywhere Organ.

I've designed a system where each note, each pipe of a pipe organ is attached to a central air supply through a hose. The air to each organ pipe is controlled by a solenoid valve articulated through Arduino. I'm writing modules to take MIDI keyboard information and translate it to the valves. Each hose is independent making for an octopus like instrument where each separate pipe can be installed with care and consideration relative to the space. This means the instrument can be installed anywhere; a park, a fire escape, an abandoned warehouse, a secret underwater cave. The pipes can be distributed to take advantage each location's specific character and personality. It also means that anyone can participate in the project and take a turn. I'd like to get people playing with the Anywhere Organ so they can see the effect space has on music and sound, so they have a public venue to fool around with music, and to have an opportunity to collaborate with other musical artists to create new sounds with it.

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

How I designed Makey, Part III: The Ping sonar rangefinder and maiden voyage

As we return to our robot design saga, making Makey the Robot for MAKE, Volume 19 ...

The actual robot is still just a prototype with 2 wheels and motors and no sensors, electronics, or brains inside. The better body exists only in the computer. Maker Faire is looming. I've been tapped to give two "Make Your Own Robot" workshops, and I reckon that having a working robot would be a very good idea.

I'm trying to get the Arduino into the robot body. Suddenly I learn a profound lesson regarding computer-aided design. In real life, circuit boards cannot morph through walls into their desired resting place. In the computer, it happens all the time. With a simple motion of the mouse, the Arduino circuit board has glided into place, right through the aluminum robot body ... but in real life, it won't fit. There is no possible angle or tilt that will get the Arduino into the robot. Out come the Vise-Grips and hacksaw. I saw, bend, and twist off the offending aluminum tabs. This is reality-aided design.

The battery pack doesn't fit because it hits the nuts and bolts that hold the motors in. It fit just fine in the computer model, since I didn't bother including the nuts and bolts. I'm ready to toss the computer out the window.

I show up at the Make: Labs with my fail robot. Our crew has been working like demons for weeks getting ready for Maker Faire -- preparing demos, packing everything under the sun, buying materials -- the lab is a madhouse. Eric, myself, and Steven are practically tripping over each other. I'm frantic to get the Arduino into the body and get the sonar sensor mounted somehow. Eric suggests double-stick tape. I refuse. Tape and glue, I assert, are for people who don't know about bolts and rivets. Eric manages to cram the Arduino in sideways. It barely fits, actually, it doesn't quite fit, it sticks up a little. When I drill a mounting hole, 1/3 of the hole isn't there. But the bolt manages to hold.

At this point I only have a vague idea of what motor will be turning Makey's "eyes" or how to fit it inside. We zoom off to the local hobby shop and pay way too much for the smallest servomotor they have in stock.

Steven offers to take on the servomotor/sonar sensor mounting problem. He's making detailed measurements and calculations, trying to figure out how much space there is and where the servomotor will fit into this 3D space without hitting the electronics. He marks everything and explains his calculations to me. I can't follow them, but it sounds good and looks like it might just fit. I drill the holes, we put the servo in, then close up the robot. It fits! There is much rejoicing.

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Jakub's Decaudion project uses Supercollider, Processing, & Arduino along with an array of photocells to create some elegantly simple interactivity. [via Arduino Forums]