Category Archives: adafruit

You Probably Don’t Want To Find This Toilet In Your Washroom

Posted on by

Ok, this one is a bit bizarre, but in perfect keeping with the subject matter: a talking toilet ripped from the pages of the Captain Underpants children’s books. Hackaday.io user [hamblin.joe]’s county fair has a toilet decorating contest and at the suggestion of their neighbour’s son, [hamblin.joe] hatched a plan to automate the toilet using an Arduino in the fashion of the hero’s foes.

Two Arduinos make up this toilet’s brains, an Adafruit Wave Shield imbues it with sound capabilities, and a sonic wave sensor will trigger the toilet’s performance routine when someone approaches. A windshield wiper motor …read more

Continue reading You Probably Don’t Want To Find This Toilet In Your Washroom→

Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter

Posted on by

Once you have a track and a kart to race on it, what’s missing? A lap counter that can give your lap times in hardcopy, obviously! That’s what led [the_anykey] to create the Arduino-based Lap Timer to help him and his kids trim those precious seconds off their runs, complete with thermal printer for the results.

The hardware uses an infrared break-beam sensor module (a Velleman PEM10D) to detect when a kart passes by. This module is similar to a scaled-up IR reflective object sensor; it combines an IR emitter and receiver on one end, and is pointed at a …read more

Continue reading Reflective Sensor Becomes Kart Racing Lap Counter→

A Table From Beyond Infinity

Posted on by

Infinity mirrors are some far-out table mods and make a great centerpiece. Instructables user [bongoboy23] took a couple steps beyond infinity when designing this incredible table tailor-made for our modern age.

Poplar and pine wood make up the framing, and red oak — stained and engraved — make for a chic exterior. Programmed with Arduino and run on a Teensy 3.1, the tabletop has 960 LEDs in forty sections. There are, four USB ports hidden behind sliding panels, as well as a two-port AC outlet and an inductive charging pad and circuit.  A hidden Adafruit TFT touchscreen display allows the …read more

Continue reading A Table From Beyond Infinity→

T-Rex Runner Runs on Transistor Tester

Posted on by

If you’ve ever spent time online buying electronic doodads — which would mean almost all of us — then sooner or later, the websites get wind of your buying sprees and start offering “suggested” advertisements for buying more useless stuff. One commonly offered popular product seems to be a universal component tester, often referred to as a “Mega328 Transistor Tester Diode Triode Capacitance ESR Meter”. These consist of an ATmega328, an SPI LCD display, a Button, a ZIF socket and a few other components. Almost all of them are cheap clones of the splendid AVR-TransistorTester project by [Markus Frejek]. [Robson …read more

Continue reading T-Rex Runner Runs on Transistor Tester→

Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine

Posted on by

Did you forget about Valentine’s Day? Do you need a quick project to get ready for Valentine’s Day? [Becky Stern] has you covered. She’s whipped up a neat Internet-enabled Valentine project which should be pretty quick to put together.

At its heart (pun intended) is an ESP8266 microcontroller, in this case an Adafruit Feather Huzzah. Several layers of tissue paper heart are stitched together and cut out into a heart shape and then attached to a spring. A vibrating pager motor is used to shake the it when a signal comes in. Two buttons are used to send the message …read more

Continue reading Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine→

Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine

Posted on by

Did you forget about Valentine’s Day? Do you need a quick project to get ready for Valentine’s Day? [Becky Stern] has you covered. She’s whipped up a neat Internet-enabled Valentine project which should be pretty quick to put together.

At its heart (pun intended) is an ESP8266 microcontroller, in this case an Adafruit Feather Huzzah. Several layers of tissue paper heart are stitched together and cut out into a heart shape and then attached to a spring. A vibrating pager motor is used to shake the it when a signal comes in. Two buttons are used to send the message …read more

Continue reading Forgot About Valentine’s Day? A Quick IoT Valentine→

These Five Hackaday.io Members Just Won Fancy New CircuitPython Boards

Posted on by

Just a few hours ago, we had a HackChat over on Hackaday.io with Adafruit discussing CircuitPython, their new extension to the MicroPython codebase. During the chat, the folks at Adafruit took questions and asked participants in the chat what they’d like to build with some cool new hardware. These CircuitPlayground M0 Express boards are brand new, unreleased hardware. Really cool stuff.

The winners of these unreleased boards, and the projects they’ll be using them for are: [RaidDude8] for a light painting system, [gelatinousslime] for a ‘magic wand’ for his daughter that reacts to gestures, [Neon22] for a multiuser game using …read more

Continue reading These Five Hackaday.io Members Just Won Fancy New CircuitPython Boards→

3D Printed Mini-Printer Enables Obsession With Lists

Posted on by

When going about a busy day, a hard copy listing all your tasks helps if you aren’t inclined to pull up a notepad — or whatever app you use — on your phone each time; doubly so if you want to pin it up in one place to refer to. Besides, using a full sheet of paper for a few items is impractical — and wasteful. To that end, [Jed Hodson] has concocted a mini printer for all your listing needs.

[Hodson] designed and 3D printed the case, making the files available for download and instructions on how to assemble …read more

Continue reading 3D Printed Mini-Printer Enables Obsession With Lists→

Mini Retro PET Computer

Posted on by

There was a time that the Commodore PET was the standard computer at North American schools. It’s all-in-one, rugged construction made it ideal for the education market and for some of us, the PET started a life-long love affair with computers. [Ruiz Brothers] at Adafruit has come up with a miniature PET model run on a microcontroller and loaded up with a green LED matrix for a true vintage look.

While not a working model of a PET, the model runs on an Adafruit Feather M0 Basic Proto which is an Atmel ATSAMD21 Cortex M0 microcontroller and can display graphics …read more

Continue reading Mini Retro PET Computer→

Payphone Boombox Straight Out of the 1990’s.

Posted on by

Due largely to the overwhelming dominance of mobile phones, payphones are a sometimes overlooked relic from the 90’s and earlier eras. While seldom seen out in the wild these days, they can however still be acquired for a moderate fee — how many of you knew that? Setting out to prove the lasting usefulness of the payphone, Instructables user [Fuzzy-Wobble] has dialed the retro spirit way past eleven to his ’90 from the ’90s’ payphone boombox.

Conspicuously mounted in the corner of his office, a rangefinder sets the phone to ringing when somebody walks by — a fantastic trap for …read more

Continue reading Payphone Boombox Straight Out of the 1990’s.→