Category Archives: Arduino Uno

How Good Is Your Aim First Thing In The Morning?

Posted on by

For the less than highly-driven individuals out there — and even some that are — sometimes, waking up is hard to do, and the temptation to smash the snooze button is difficult to resist. If you want to force your mind to immediately focus on waking up, this Nerf target alarm clock might get you up on time.

Not content to make a simple target, [Christopher Guichet] built an entire clock for the project. The crux of the sensor is a piezoelectric crystal which registers the dart impacts, and [Guichet]’s informative style explains how the sensor works with the help …read more

Continue reading How Good Is Your Aim First Thing In The Morning?→

How Good Is Your Aim First Thing In The Morning?

Posted on by

For the less than highly-driven individuals out there — and even some that are — sometimes, waking up is hard to do, and the temptation to smash the snooze button is difficult to resist. If you want to force your mind to immediately focus on waking up, this Nerf target alarm clock might get you up on time.

Not content to make a simple target, [Christopher Guichet] built an entire clock for the project. The crux of the sensor is a piezoelectric crystal which registers the dart impacts, and [Guichet]’s informative style explains how the sensor works with the help …read more

Continue reading How Good Is Your Aim First Thing In The Morning?→

Turning Television Into A Simple Tapestry

Posted on by

Teleknitting, the brainchild of Moscow artist [vtol], is an interesting project. On one hand, it doesn’t knit anything that is useful in a traditional sense, but on the other, it attempts the complex task of deconstructing broadcasted media into a simpler form of information transmission.

Teleknitting’s three main components are the processing and display block — made up of the antenna, Android tablet, and speaker — the dyeing machine with its ink, sponges, actuators, and Arduino Uno, and the rotating platform for the sacrificial object. A program running on the tablet analyzes the received signal and — as displayed on …read more

Continue reading Turning Television Into A Simple Tapestry→

Alexa Robot Coffee Maker Brews Coffee, Speaks For Itself

Posted on by

To keep hackers fueled and hacking, why not hack a coffee maker into a coffee brewing robot? [Carter Hurd] and [David Frank] did just that at The Ohio State’s Hack OHI/O 24 hour Hackathon. They even won the “Best Hardware Hack”. The video below shows it in action but the guys sent us some extra details on how it’s made.

To give it a voice they put Alexa on a Raspberry Pi. Using an audio splitter they have the voice go both to a speaker and to an Arduino. The Arduino then uses the amplitude of the audio signal’s positive …read more

Continue reading Alexa Robot Coffee Maker Brews Coffee, Speaks For Itself→

All I Want for Christmas is a 4-Factor Biometric Lock Box

Posted on by

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! No, we’re not talking about the holiday season, although that certainly has its merits. What we mean is that it’s time for the final projects from [Bruce Land]’s ECE4760 class. With the giving spirit and their mothers in mind, [Adarsh], [Timon], and [Cameron] made a programmable lock box with four-factor authentication. That’s three factors more secure than your average Las Vegas hotel room safe, and with a display to boot.

Getting into this box starts with a four-digit code on a number pad. If it’s incorrect, the display will say so. Put …read more

Continue reading All I Want for Christmas is a 4-Factor Biometric Lock Box→

More Blinky = More Better – The WS2812FX Library

Posted on by

The WS2812 is an amazing piece of technology. 30 years ago, high brightness LEDs didn’t even exist yet. Now, you can score RGB LEDs that even take all the hard work out of controlling and addressing them! But as ever, we can do better.

Riffing on the ever popular Adafruit NeoPixel library, [Harm] created the WS2812FX library. The library has a whole laundry list of effects to run on your blinkenlights – from the exciting Hyper Sparkle to the calming Breathe inspired by Apple devices. The fantastic thing about this library is that it can greatly shorten development time of …read more

Continue reading More Blinky = More Better – The WS2812FX Library→

My DIY BB-8: Problems, Solutions, Lessons Learned

Posted on by

Imagine trying to make a ball-shaped robot that rolls in any direction but with a head that stays on. When I saw the BB-8 droid doing just that in the first Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer, it was an interesting engineering challenge that I couldn’t resist. All the details for how I made it would fill a book, so here are the highlights: the problems I ran into, how I solved them and what I learned.

The Design Criteria: Portable and Inexpensive

I had two design criteria in mind. The first was to keep it low-cost. Some spend $1000 …read more

Continue reading My DIY BB-8: Problems, Solutions, Lessons Learned→

Cheap Dual Mirror Laser Projector

Posted on by

[Stanley] wanted to make a laser projector but all he could find online were one’s using expensive galvanometer scanners. So instead he came up with his own solution that is to be admired for its simplicity and its adaptation of what he could find.

At its heart is an Arduino Uno and an Adafruit Motor Shield v2. The green laser is turned on and off by the Arduino through a transistor. But the part that makes this really a fun machine to watch at work are the two stepper motors and two mirrors that reflect the laser in the X …read more

Continue reading Cheap Dual Mirror Laser Projector→

Licorice Launcher Locks on to Your Voice

Posted on by

As the red licorice wars rage on inextinguishably, it appears that Team Red Vines has a new advantage over Team Twizzlers—[TVMiller]’s voice activated, room-tracking, catapult-launching, magazine reloading Arduino licorice launcher.

Hacking and snacking often go hand in hand. They go together even better if you have a robot that can throw a tasty treat to you on command. That’s the dream behind this candy catapult. We’ve featured quite a few of [TVMiller]’s projects in the past, so we know he spends a lot of time hacking. So, how does this licorice launcher work to him keep going?

Like we said, …read more

Continue reading Licorice Launcher Locks on to Your Voice→

Filtering Noisy Data with an Arduino

Posted on by

One of the first frustrating situations a beginning microcontroller programmer will come across is the issue of debouncing switches. Microcontrollers are faster than switches, and the switch has yet to be built that can change state in zero time like they can on paper. This hurdle is easily overcome, but soon we are all faced with another issue: filtering noise from an analog signal. Luckily [Paul Martinsen] has put together a primer of three different ways to use an Arduino to filter signals.

The first (and fastest, simplest, etc.) way to filter an analog signal is to sample a bunch …read more

Continue reading Filtering Noisy Data with an Arduino→