Collaborate Disseminate
Drum kits are excellent fun and a terrific way to learn a sense of rhythm. They’re also huge and unwieldy. In contrast, air drums can be altogether more compact, if …read more Continue reading Impressively Responsive Air Drums Built Using the Raspberry Pi Pico
If you’ve got a resistor and you can’t read the color bands (or they’re not present), you can always just grab a multimeter and figure out its value that way. …read more Continue reading Talking Ohmmeter Also Spits Out Color Bands For You
When reading textual communications, it can be difficult to accurately acertain emotional intent. Individual humans can be better or worse at this, with sometimes hilarious results when it goes wrong. Regardless, there’s nothing a human can do that a machine won’t eventually do better. For just this purpose, Tweetbot is …read more
After nearly 60 years and a lot of stairs and squares, there is finally an easier way to draw on an Etch A Sketch®. For their final project in embedded microcontroller class, [Serena, Francis, and Alejandro] implemented a motor-driven solution that takes input from a touch screen.
Curves are a breeze to draw with a stylus instead of joysticks, but it’s still a 2-D plotter and must be treated as such. The Touch-A-Sketch system relies on the toy’s stylus starting in the lower left hand corner, so all masterpieces must begin at (0,0) on the knobs and the touch screen. …read more
Continue reading Touch-A-Sketch Gives an Old Toy a New Twist
On paper, bicycling is an excellent form of transportation. Not only are there some obvious health benefits, the impact on the environment is much less than anything not directly powered by a human. But let’s face it: riding a bike can be quite scary in practice, especially along the same roads as cars and trucks. It’s hard to analyze the possible threats looming behind you without a pair of eyes in the back of your head.
[Claire Chen] and [Mark Zhao] have come up with the next best thing—bike sonar. It’s a two-part system that takes information from an ultrasonic …read more
