A very impressing project that brings out the idea (seen some time ago with Bikes against Bush, and later enpowered by the Tour the France) of triggering several motors/paintBrushes in sequence, and printing out some messages.
The project is well designed, well-referenced, and German. I’m getting used to see wonderful urban-related projects from Germany.
The txtBOMBER is a one-hand-guerillia-tool – a machine not much bigger than a pressing iron – that generates political statements on the fly and immidiately prints them on any flat surface.
If you feel you are part of our modern viewless generation, the txtBOMBER is the perfect tool for you! Just switch it on, it’s powered by a strong battery. And move it along a wall. It’s that easy to show your?its?someones? opinion of something?someone?! Hell! You should reconsider if you are keen enough to use it!
The txtBOMBER has seven build-in pens to “print” the letters and a micro-controller-brain (Arduino), no need for a computer or any other brain.
The SMSlingshot is an autonom working device, equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a colored splash with the message written within. The text message will also be real-time twittered – just in case.
have a look at the video on the official page of the project. Very interesting use of the sling in a digital way.
Very interesting Make post about an Arduino-controlled Scanning-Tunneling Electron Microscope (STM) by Sacha de Angeli.
Building the first Open Source (inexpensive) Scanning-Tunneling Electron Microscope (STM) – With just enough electronics knowledge to be dangerous and a lot of helpful friends, I embarked on the design and build of an arduino-controlled, affordable STM with the intention of releasing the hardware design, firmware, and software via open source licensing. The goal of this project is to address the following two problems in the world of STM:Problem 1: The Scanning-Tunneling Electron Microscope, capable of resolving individual atoms, is so elegant a device that it won the 1986 Nobel Prize in physics. Despite it’s simplicity, STM microscopy can be an expensive endeavor: commercial equipment, while truly excellent, costs tens of thousands of dollars – well above the budget of hobbyists and entrepreneurs.
Problem 2: Due to Problem 1, there is a rich history of graduate students building STM devices on modest budgets. However these devices commonly require expensive external equipment (storing oscilloscopes, signal generators, commercial data capture boards, etc.). This external equipment is common in research labs, but not necessarily common to hobby and entrepreneurial workspaces. Additionally, the design information for these graduate student-built devices is spread out amongst theses and dissertations with no central repository of information; therefore, problem solving effort is often duplicated.
Sacha has worked in and around chemistry and engineering as a technician, student, researcher, hobbyist, and entrepreneur for over 14 years. He is currently the president of Pumping Station: One, Chicago’s premier hackerspace where he mostly herds cats and hackers. He also runs chemhacker.com where he discusses the intersection between science, art, opera, creativity, chemistry, and scanning-tunneling electron microscopy. He has recently spoken at Notacon 2010 and will be presenting his STM project at the Open Science Summit in Berkeley, CA July 29-31.
A must-see video produces by SparkFun about a very interesting installation by Jen Lewin, The Pool:
The Pool is an environment of giant, concentric circles created from interactive, wireless circular pads. By entering the pool, you enter a world where play and collaborative movement can create a cascading effect of swirling light and color .
Each pad in The Pool is its own wireless controller. All of the 106 pads communicate and listen to each other in an organic network formed in the same way people interact. The Pool has no single master computer and does not use a router to route or control connections. Each pad is independent, and simultaneously interacts and listens to its environment based on user feedback. Together, the 106 pads create complex, surprising, and unpredictable color arrays with their user participants.
Amazing Daft Punk helmet replica from [Volpin Props]. It took a long time to came around a wonderful replica of the famous iconic helmet used by Daft Punk. The lighting is powered by Arduino.
Its been a long road. Seventeen months, countless hours, multiple dead ends, hundreds of lessons learned, and one helmet made. In the past two installments I’ve discussed sculpting, resin casting, chroming and vacuum forming. This is where the magic happens though… Illumination.
Some time ago I headed in one of the most complete DIY photo/cinema solutions for low-budget productions, the OpenMoco. It seems they spent some time in prototyping a brand new shield:
The DollyShield is an adaptation of the Arduino Motor Shield v3 that provides directional PWM control of two DC motors, at up to 1A of current each. In addition to the motor drivers, it also provides a stereo plug with dual opto-coupled outputs for direct camera control, a 2×16 LCD, five user input buttons, and four auxilliary inputs or outputs through two stereo jacks. It is designed to provide an inexpensive and easy-to-use interface for two-axis motion control integrated with a camera.
Nice tutorial letting you wirelessly communicate with oF cia Arduino. Cool.
In the last tutorial we used an openFrameworks application to control a process running on an Arduino board. In this tutorial we’re going to reverse that and use an Arduino board to control an openFrameworks application that’s playing back music and we’ll do it wirelessly and (relatively) inexpensively. The electronics in this tutorial are a little more involved than the previous one because we need an oF application to control and two Arduino controllers: one to send transmit data and one to receive data and communicate with the oF application. There are a whole bunch different ways to do wireless communication that we’ll outline in the section below on wireless but for this tutorial, to mitigate the cost of requiring two Arduinos, I’m going to use inexpensive Radio Frequency (RF) components to send and receive the data.
Chris Anderson met Gianluca and Massimo last week. He wrote a wonderful post full of pictures about the future of Arduino (see alco Arduino Blog) and the arduino PCB production.
A week ago I spent a day with the Arduino team in and around Milan (production lead Gianluca Martino at left above, with raw Arduino PCBs coming off the fab). Here’s a quick report.
First, we talked a lot about the Punto Uno (“Version 1.0″) release. It’s kinda incredible that Arduino is still described as Alpha software and stuck in decimal versions after all these years. Well, no more. In September, it will finally be released in a 1.0 version.
In italian, Punto and Uno is two name of different FIAT cars . He obviously means Uno Punto Zero, which is 1.0.
Wow. Original Arduino-based alarm clock “Alarm clock that finds perfect time to wake up”. I don’t think the project (code and schematics) is going to be posted. Still a nice project to be inspired of: the alarm listens to a numeber of sensors around the house and monitors the quality of your sleep.
Probably you know the feeling when you get out of bed on the wrong side. The only way to avoid this is to get up at the best time of sleep rhythm. How to do that? The only way is to keep track of various parameters of sleeping human and then decide when it’s time to get up. So the following project is what it tries to do. It is based on Arduino and measures various parameters like quality of air like temperature, humidity, dew point, light level and of course tracks time along with sleep pattern.
Oh_Oh robot, low cost, easy to replicate robot for Mexico DF. Commisioned by http://ccemx.org, and with the invaluable help from Gianluca Martino from Arduino.cc
I am amazed by the work David Cuartielles in collaboration with Xun Yang, Tlacotalpan, Alejandro Jimenez, Hugo and our common friend Gianluca Martino, the Hardware responsible for Arduino. The point is making a robot easy to build / repair / reproduce, low cost. Easy to be programmed by kids. As you can read, David is often involved in kid-related workshop in Mexico, and here and there in Europe. It seems that he’s achieved a good point in developing a strong yet cheap platform who is changing very quickly. Stay tuned & follow the visual diary of the prototypes at this gallery and some videos at this channel
Oh_Oh is the result of an exploration in the possibilities of cheap educational electronics. It is very important to keep the importance of low cost as a fundamental part of the project, since that will influence its design, as well as its accessibility.
We created Oh_Oh after a couple of basic workshops in electronics with Kids at FARO de Oriente in Mexico DF. Very early in the process we realized there was an interest in learning about robotics. The Computer Clubhouse counts with a couple of Lego kits, but not enough for a group of 20 kids.
We realized that Mexico has a couple of companies dedicated to designing, manufacturing and selling small robots. However they were not really complying with the idea of reprogramability and reusability of general electronics, due to a closed firmware and the lack of an IDE to easily reconfigure the robot’s behavior.
The important aspect for us was that we could get access to all the parts needed to build a cheap robot on-site. And that we could then easily hook up this robot to Arduino and build from there. So we decided to go on with the idea of making our own robot with as little parts as possible.
. He obviously means Uno Punto Zero, which is 1.0.