[Alan Amon] posted a cool vintage hack on Instructables, adding GPS-based clock funcionalities to a Bally Wizard pinball.
Pinball machine will automatically power up at the preset time each day and then resets to display the current time, the year, the time the alarm is set for and the date month/day. Then as long as the GPS has a signal the time will update once a minute for the rest of the day. At the time you would like to go to bed the Arduino will cut power to the game and it will remain off until the alarm time. Should you have a power failure in the night the machine will not lose it’s settings. If power is restored prior to the alarm time the machine will wake up as normal, otherwise the machine will wake up once power is restored.
If the game is powered on because it is not yet bed time and it is after the alarm time then at 12am, 1am or 1pm the game will do a full reset. This makes sure the clock hasn’t gotten off due to a stuck score reel, keeps the time in a 12 hour format and keeps the date display up to date.
Have a look at the “cool features” and “coolest features” in the instructables article
We are happily announcing two new products in the Arduino Store: [E000011] 32×08 Red LED 5mm Matrix and [E000013] 32*16 Green/Red LED 3mm Matrix from Sure Electronics. Both products are coming with tutorials and related projects.
A beautiful project by [Leigh Davis]. It is a brilliant proof of how Arduino fits into virtually any sphere of thought and is the shortest path for a creator realizing his idea in reality.
He writes:
I began the first few days by developing a stand alone application build in MaxMSP that understands the notes that a play on my (recently purchased second-hand) flute. I set the range from low C right up to the 3rd octave D. Each note of the chromatic scale triggers a bang, which is coloured uniquely to the other notes bang messages.
The bang message then sets the corresponding color to the display screen on the application. Which will in turn send a signal to the arduino to dispense the corresponding oil color on water according to the different notes. (Something like a physical Milkdrop!)He further plans to control different LEDs, motors and the likes using the Rayne application.
Barcelona-based IAAC school is hosting a summer school (in Barcelona and Mumbay). The theme of this year’s course is creating an urban tool of a networked city based on a new informational layer.
What happens if we think Urbanism and Energy through a new informational layer added in our cities?
Some of you may know “light painting“ it’s a photographic technique which uses long exposures and a light source, to “paint” the photo with light. The project was inspired by the Wifi Netword Visualization, The Mechatronics Guy later brought in the concept of writing and painting pictures with the beams of light with a pc (wirelessly via Xbee).
The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time.
The video is stop motion, so every frame is an individually shot photograph. Each photograph is a long exposure photo, with exposures reaching up to 20 seconds in some cases.
To control the lights, I used an Arduino controlled via bluetooth to drive a stepper motor. The stepper motor controls the movements of the lights remotely from Processing.
Last week I was in Rome for the Arduino Day. I was amazed by the projects and the people there: true Arduino fans. This is the first post about some of those projects: more soon.
[anbello] generates – via MIDI – different light patterns on a strip of addressable RGB LED
MIDI messages from the keyboard (real or simulated on PC) enter the MIDI Shield’s MIDI IN and are presented to the Arduino serial port. The Arduino firmware interprets the MIDI messages NoteOn NoteOff, associates each key on the five octaves (60 keys) keyboard to a strip LED and lights it with color associated with the note. In the firmware to control the strip we used the FastSPI_LED library that allows you to address every single LED and turn the desired color (R, G, B). One interesting thing to note is the use of the firmaware function millis() to implement a sort of elementary multitasking. The idea was taken from this post after user “westfw” on the Arduino forum.
I really appreciate the effort of translating the post. Check the code and part list on [Sululab]
