We are happy to announce 3 new products available at the Arduino Store: two powerful servos with the standard Tinkerkit 3pin connector (T010050 and T010051) and OpenSoftwear, a book about fashion and technology by Tony Olsson, David Gaetano, Jonas Odhner, Samson Wiklund, in it’s second, revised edition.
[Alan Rorie] developed The Simple Act of Making a Mark, an installation about abstracting the creative process: The machine begins by looking at what is placed before it and detects patterns within it. The machine then traces those subtle patterns, amplifying and solidifying them until generative patterns emerge autonomously.
The installation uses an Arduino Uno, an AdaFruit Motor Shield, a single USB HD web camera is used for both the computer vision and to build a time lapse movie of each loop. The software is built using Processing with Messenger, controlP5, fullscreen libraries, and v3ga blobDetection. In addition gCode command structure was used and Bresenham’s line algorithm to determine where and when the steppers should move.
via [creativeApplications]
Hypnotic installation from David Bowen representing *real* waves.
[...] Tele-Present Water installation draws information from the intensity and movement of the water in a remote location. Wave data is collected in real-time from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data buoy station 46075 Shumagin Islands Alaska. The wave intensity and frequency is scaled and transferred to the mechanical grid structure resulting in a simulation of the physical effects caused by the movement of water from this distant location. The installation uses MAX/MSP to drive an Arduino mega running servo firmata. It uses 11 x 24volt dc motors with drivers for the movement.
via [CreativeApplications]
[pe lang] shares a system to spill water drops over a surface: many different uses from medical to artistic purposes.
achine that adds drops of water onto a special textured surface. Each drop forms into an almost perfect sphere through the surface tension of the water and the omniphopic Material. The electronically controlled pipette wanders through a square grid of 21 x 21 drops to form a micro-matrix and returns to the beginning. After approximately 300 minutes, and when thewater drops have evaporated, the same process starts again.
Via [Gizmodo], source [Arduino Forum]
[Viorel] wrote me about an interesting project he and his friends from Robofun developed during the 2011 Yahoo Open Hack in Bucharest, and won the Hacker’s Choice Award. The diorama becomes a physical representation of tour friends’ behaviours.
If you’re a both nature lover and a geek, you would certainly love the Yahoo Farm. The Yahoo Farm is a 60 cm wide diorama, sitting in your bedroom and bringing you online data from the Yahoo ecosystem.
For example, the wind mill rotation below is directly controlled by the wind speed outside (being connected to the Yahoo Weather API), the hand-painted backgrounds are switched according to the weather state, a new sheep is coming out of the barn each time one of your friends gets online on Yahoo Messenger, and each new email lights up a fruit in the Email Tree.
Give a look at the presentation used for the 90 seconds pitch during the event.
via [Technorama.ro]
A step-by-step guide on controlling physical things (like grabbing candies with a mechanical arm) via Internet (please, try!).
In this instructable you will learn how to connect to your arduino and control it over the net, set up a video stream, and how to control stuff with your arduino all in realtime. I’ll try to show you on a concrete example how this could be done, but the code I used and wrote is going to be generic so you can use it for your projects. Note that I haven’t discovered anything new but rather used code that I found lying around the net, built from it and changed it fit my needs.
(…) So how should it work? The idea is that there is a Flash AIR app on my home computer that when a remote client connects to it starts the video broadcast. The communication between the client and the AIR app would be through a PHP socket because it can instantly push messages from one to the other. The socket will handle all the clients and the queuing. The Red5 server is used to handle the video broadcast, stream the video and send the arduino commands from the client that is first in the queue to the AIR app (although it could do so much more… we’ll talk about that in a later step). Finally TinkerProxy is used to send commands from the AIR app to the arduino that is connected to the same computer.
Thanks to Mario for the link!
via [Instructables], grab the thing [here]
[pabloxid] shared an Hexapod project on the forum based on an Arduino MEGA 1280 and 18 Dynamixel AX-12 motors:
SAMSA is based on the Wiring board, with an ATmega128 microcontroller, and SAMSA II on the Arduino Mega, with an ATmega1280. Both are pretty similar, tough the ATmega1280 has 8 KB SRAM, twice the ATmega128. For SAMSA II the Arduino IDE was not used. The software was written directly in C++, using some libraries from both Arduino and Wiring.
SAMSA II has also two additional microcontrollers. One is an old Arduino Mini (ATmega168) located in the head, tasked with handling the sensors. The other is an ATmega8 and is integrated in the display. The firmware in the display was replaced with another one, freeing the main microcontroller from handling the display pixel by pixel, storing the frame buffer, etc.
The head’s microcontroller is responsible for sampling, filtering and processing sensor’s data. The data from the Sharp distance sensor and the lateral IR sensors are combined in a single “super smart distance sensor”. This microcontroller also decodes the data coming from the 38 KHz IR receiver, used for the Remote Control.
These two additional microcontrollers further reduce the load on the main microcontroller, allowing for more sophisticated behaviours.
[Max] forwarded me an impressive project about a DIY Themal Camera. The overall cost for building it is around 104$, compairing to professional products ranging from from 2000$ to 30.000$.
after some time of research I want to present my latest project called “Cheap-Thermocam”. It enables to create thermal images of houses, electrical devices or other things. An infrared sensor is mounted on two servos for moving it up/down – left/right. For an optical image of the scanned area, a webcam is installed under the sensor. An easy to install computer software written in JAVA shows a preview of the webcam image and then collects all the temperature data neccessarry to create the thermal image. To do this, 1344 single points are measured in about 2 minutes, this is a rare resolution of 42×32 Pixels. The advantage of my project compared to commercial thermal cameras is obviously the price. Another positive aspect is that the pictures can be analysed and edited with my easy to use pc software. The whole project can be built in 2-3 hours without any difficult parts do be soldered.
Related Arduino projects about this theme can be seen here (DIY Thermal Imaging System for under $200) and here (Thermoscanner). All Codes are provided
via [CheapThermocam]
Everybody’s amazed about the incredible things done with Kinect and Processing + Arduino. Tutorial need!
This is a project in development for the module “Digital Ecologies”, at the Bartlett’s Adaptive Architecture and Computation MSc. – University College London
A Delta-Robot is controlled by a Kinect through Processing and Arduino. The movements of the performer control directly the position of the robot’s effector, and the rotation and opening of the gripper.
Once the plattform is properly calibrated (still a little rough round the edges!), several autonomous behaviours will be implemented.
have a look at [resources]via [KinectHacks]
[Charlie Bucket] is developing a personal look towards materials: pumping fluids in tubes to change objects’ (and cloths’, as you see in the video) substance and feeling. Magic-like.
The installation is based on openFrameworks, and uses 6 arduino-driven pumps to make the fluid flowing through the tubes. Very interesting fabrication pictures on Flickr.
More on [Hex.la] Source [CasualProfanity]
