Agy used for the first time Lilypad Arduino and LEDs on a textile project called Blinky Bike Bag, combining her expertise in fabric hacking with electronics:

The bike bag is made from umbrella material to make it waterproof, and I made it with safety features using the Lilypad light sensor and LEDs. My husband always forgets his reflectors but with the bikebag always being on the bike, he’ll have no excuse not to be a safe cyclist! Read the rest of this entry »

Mochamad shared with us his project about a touchless rotary encoder made with Arduino Duemilanove able to count rounds per second:

If you have problems with the language, check the blogpost in english!

Massimo Banzi shares things he wishes he knew when he was younger – By Ciara Byrne on FastcoLabs

The cofounder of the open source microcontroller Arduino, Massimo Banzi, doesn’t mince words. “Italy is the kind of a country where if you are young, you don’t exist,” he says. “It’s a country run by old farts.” Banzi decided not to accept the status quo.
Arduino was designed in Italy, by virtue of a foolish young Banzi on a quest for love. Today, Arduino is an enormously popular single-board microcontroller used to develop interactive objects.

The Power Of Love

Banzi’s career hasn’t followed a conventional path. “I was always interested in technology but I started using the Internet because I met this American girl when I was like 18,” he says. ”I wanted to write to her and the post would take three weeks. So I started using the Internet because I could email her. There wasn’t even a browser. And that became my career for several years. So every time I get a passion about something I try to do it on the side and it turns into my job. It’s also a curse also because you can never have a hobby.”
Banzi trained as a electrical engineer, but always had an interest in design. Ten years ago he was teaching interaction design at the now defunct Design Institute in Ivrea. Arduino started out as a tool to allow Banzi’s design students, most of whom has no technical background, to use technology in their projects.What do you think? Read the rest of this entry »

Bicolor square heart/valentines necklace is a project made with Arduino Micro by Dr_Speed who shared some photos and code  on the Adafruit Forums!

heart_bmp[] =
{ B01101100,
B11111110,
B11111110,
B11111110,
B11111110,
B01111100,
B00111000,
B00010000},

I use a micro, but just about anything will do. There’s some Sugru on there to keep the sharp bits from catching on clothing/pockets. Usb battery powers the whole thing. It’s pretty bright, definitely not subtle.

The SmartUp Team submitted on Intel Community a project developed in their new digital fabrication laboratory, tinkering with  Intel Galileo boards and Spacebrew.

Spacebrew  is “an open, dynamically re-routable software toolkit for choreographing interactive spaces”, basically a way to connect smart objects of any kind using the WebSocket protocol.

Basically, they modified the Arduino WebsocketClient library to use it with Intel Galileo and specifically with Spacebrew:

The received situation was of a version of the Arduino WebsocketClient library: https://github.com/labatrockwell/ArduinoWebsocketClient (oriented to Spacebrew) adapted from: https://github.com/krohling/ArduinoWebsocketClient (implementing the online websocket protocol) neither of them supporting Galileo, an Intel SoC Pentium-based board. It has been revised, modified, and integrated, so that this version runs on Galileo and works for both the connection to a server such as echo.websocket.org and Spacebrew. This version includes extended tracing facilities for debugging (see WebSocketClient.h). The main changes with respect to the previous versions are marked by slash-slash-star-slash-slash.

You can explore the library on Github.

Holger from Fablab Düsseldorf writes in about a small robot they prototyped with Arduino Uno, helping them  raise some funds for their local space:

We created the idea in our non-commerical FabLab in Düsseldorf, Germany to create a small robot, who makes our vistors and guests aware of placing a small money donation. This robot was required to be transportable, robust and to draw as much attention as possible.
Thus, we included LED-Stripes, servos, sensors and sound to the project. Packed in a very old german vacuum cleaner. The work took about 1 year to construct, print and integrate all 3D-printed parts, wiring and software development with the Arduino Uno. But software development was the minor part, although parallel processing on the Arduino in order to run every component simultaneously required a small trick.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few years ago Sven and Juho started working on the same type of project without knowing about each other and only by a coincidence their paths crossed. They wrote me about their cool story and the successful experiment of upgrading a diesel engine using Arduino Mega: Read the rest of this entry »

John Thomson  managed to build a pressure sensor to behave like a switch, when it’s in an idle state the LED is off, if you apply some pressure,  light goes on:

The pressure pad doesn’t just work straight out the box – it requires a little bit of craft. What I’ve done is sandwich a pressure sensitive conductive sheet – known as Velostat – between two pieces of felt. I then stitched some conductive thread through each piece of felt – this applies a current to the pad and when the sandwich is put together, the circuit is complete. The Velostat acts like a resistor – the value changes when pressure is applied. It’s then just a case of writing out code that tells the LED to come on when the pressure reading goes over a certain threshold.

Take a look at the first and  second part of the experiment on his blog.

“You can’t touch this”  is the project submitted by Stefano Guglielmetti for the Connected Home Project Contest by Make Magazine.  It’s composed by a movement sensor (PIR) plus a camera and an Arduino Yún. When the sensor perceive a movement, Arduino plays a sound, takes a picture and sends you an email: Read the rest of this entry »

L‘Arduino Tour torna nel 2014 con due tappe  ’on the beach‘: Rimini e Pula. Le due location ospiteranno nelle prossime settimane due workshop dedicati all’alfabeto di Arduino e alle wearable technologies.

• L’appuntamento di Rimini si terrà sabato 22 febbraio negli spazi del nuovissimo MakerRn Lab di Rimini, dove Zoe Romano e Riccardo Marchesi di Plug&Wear introdurranno in otto ore di workshop il mondo dei wearables. Nella prima parte della giornata ci si avvicinerà a livello teorico alle applicazioni wearable, mentre nella seconda i parteciperanno produrranno un piccolo progetto con un sensore tessile. Appassionati di moda, design e smanettoni sono benvenuti, non è infatti richiesta alcuna conoscenza di programmazione o di taglio e cucito.  Qui trovi i dettagli per prenotare uno degli ultimi posti ancora disponibili!

• La tappa sarda dell’Arduino Tour toccherà mercoledì 26 febbraio la sede dello IED di Cagliari (Viale Trento 39, h. 17) con un’introduzione alla scheda Arduino curata da Mirco Piccin e aperta a tutti. Tra giovedì 27 e venerdì 28 febbraio, il team Arduino si sposterà invece con Davide Gomba a Pula negli spazi del Parco Tecnologico della Sardegna, dove il Fablab di Sardegna Ricerche ospiterà le 16 ore di workshop vero e proprio. Al termine del percorso, i partecipanti avranno per competenze per mettere a punto mini-progetti, da implementare poi in autonomia a casa.  Prenota la tua partecipazione  qui!