Collaborate Disseminate
These days, you could be forgiven for thinking driving an LCD from a microcontroller is easy. Cheap displays have proliferated, ready to go on breakout boards with controllers already baked in. Load up the right libraries and you’re up and running in a matter of minutes. However, turn your attention …read more
Continue reading Driving a Controllerless LCD With the Humble Arduino Uno
Many of the projects we feature on Hackaday are motivated by pure greed. Not on the part of the hacker, mind you; but rather the company that’s charging such an outrageous price for a mass produced item that somebody decides they can do the same thing cheaper as a one-off project. Which is precisely how [Bryan Kevan] ended up building his own carbon fiber tube wrapping machine. Not only do the finished tubes look fantastic, but they cost him a fraction of what even the “cheap” commercial ones cost.
The principle behind producing the tubes is really pretty simple: carbon …read more
Taking pictures in the 21st century is incredibly easy. So easy in fact that most people don’t even own a dedicated camera; from smartphones to door bells there are cameras built into nearly electronic device we own. So in this era of ubiquitous photography, you might think that a very slow and extremely low resolution camera wouldn’t be of interest. Under normal circumstances that’s probably true, but this single pixel camera built by [Tucker Shannon] is anything but normal.
At the heart of his unusual camera is the TCS34725 RGB color sensor from Adafruit which receives a tightly focused beam …read more
Continue reading Arduino One Pixel Camera Sees All (Eventually)
We’ve all got calculators on our phones, in our web browsers, and even in the home “assistant” that’s listening in on your conversations all day on the off chance you blurt out a math question is can solve for you. The most hardcore among us might even still have a real calculator kicking around. So in that light, building your own DIY calculator might not seem too exciting. But we can’t deny this Arduino calculator project by [Danko Bertović] would look good sitting on the bench.
In the video after the break, [Danko] walks us through the creation of the …read more
Continue reading Pocket Sized Arduino Calculator Makes a Great First Project
Puzzle boxes are great opportunities for hacking. You can start with a box which was originally used for something else. You get to design circuitry and controls which offer a complex puzzle for the players. And you can come up with a spectacular reward for those who solve it. [thomas.meston’s] Dr. Hallard’s Dream Transmission Box, which he created for an original party game, has all those elements.
The box was a broken 1948 National NC-33 Ham Radio purchased on eBay after a number of failed bids. Most of it was removed except for the speaker. The electronics is Arduino based, …read more
Continue reading An Enigma Wrapped In A Riddle Wrapped In A Vintage Radio
We know, we know. Getting PCBs professionally fabricated anymore is so cheap and easy that making them in-house is increasingly becoming something of a lost art. Like developing your own film. Or even using a camera that has film, for that matter. But when you’re in Brazil and it takes months for shipments to arrive like [Robson Couto] is, sometimes you’re better off sticking with the old ways.
[Robson] writes in to tell us how he decided to buy a ~$150 CNC “engraver” kit from an import site, in hopes that it would allow him to prototype his designs without …read more
Continue reading Turning a Cheap Engraver into a Decent PCB Mill
The view from America has long seen French women as synonymous with thin and/or beautiful. France is well-known for culinary skill and delights, and yet many of its female inhabitants seem to view eating heartily as passé. At a recent workshop devoted to creating DIY amusements, [Niklas Roy] and [Kati Hyyppä] built an electro-mechanical sushi-eating game starring Barbie, American icon of the feminine ideal. The goal of the game is to feed her well and inspire a happy relationship with food.
Built in just three days, J’ai faim! (translation: I’m hungry!) lets the player satiate Barbie one randomly lit piece …read more
Continue reading Sushi-Snarfing Barbie Uses Solenoid to Swallow
[NathanKing] has a cute, rambunctious pupper who eats way too fast for her own good. He’s tried various distribution methods intended to get her to slow down, but she’s just too excited to eat. [Nathan]’s latest solution is to launch the food piece by piece using a catapult. The dog loves the gamified feeding method, which is sort of like one-way fetch. She gets a bit of exercise, and everyone is amused for the half hour it takes to fling 1.5 cups of food one piece at a time.
Electronics-wise, this food flinger doesn’t use much more than three servos …read more
Continue reading Dog-Or-Catapult Controls The Speed Of The Feed
Infrared certainly has its uses, but if you’re trying to locate objects, ultrasonic detection is far superior. It’s contact-less, undetectable to the human ear, and it isn’t affected by smoke, dust, ambient light, or Silly String.
If you have one ultrasonic sensor and a microcontroller, you can detect plenty of useful things, like the water level in a rain barrel or the distance traveled by a tablet along a rail. If you have two sensors and a microcontroller, you can pinpoint any object within a defined range using trigonometry.
[lingib]’s dual sensor echo locator uses two HY-SRF05s, but the cheap …read more
Continue reading Dual Sensor Echo Locator Gives High Accuracy at Low Cost
Today ahead of the Bay Area Maker Faire, Arduino has announced a bevy of new boards that bring modern features and modern chips to the Arduino ecosystem.
Most ambitious of these new offerings is a board that combines a fast ARM microcontroller, WiFi, Bluetooth, and an FPGA. All this is wrapped in a package that provides Mini HDMI out and pins for a PCIe-Express slot. They’re calling it the Arduino MKR Vidor 4000.
Bringing an FPGA to the Arduino ecosystem is on the list of the most interesting advances in DIY electronics in recent memory, and there’s a lot to …read more
Continue reading Arduino Just Introduced an FPGA Board, Announces Debugging and Better Software