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.

via [UberGizmo] source [mechatronicsGuy]

[Alex] collects retro gaming consoles. One day while playing a SNES title, his save games got wiped when he powered off the system. It turned out that the battery inside the game cartridge got disconnected somehow, and it got him thinking. He decided he wanted to find a way to back up his save games from the cartridges for safe keeping.

While cart readers exist, he says that they are hard to find nowadays, so he decided to construct his own using an Arduino. SNES cartridges are relatively complex, so he opted to focus on Gameboy cartridges for the time being. Before attempting to back up save games, he first chose to learn how to communicate with the cartridges in general, by reading the ROM.

via [HackADay]

Marco Sangalli and Alex Rigamonti have recently finished a server-controlled system to monitor the access of the customers in a gym using a prototype of the Arduino Ethernet, RFID, and digital sensors of a turnstile.

The system was meant to monitor easily the different kind of tickets and timing people may have in a gym. To accomplish that we use a turnstile at the entrance and an RFID reader to authenticate the customer. The RFID reader sends the data to Arduino via serial (TTL). Arduino checks the received data and sends it on a server via ethernet. The server controls and authenticate: ticket, time, day, expiry date and all the credits the customer has. This is the time when the server tells the Arduino to open the turnstile by triggering some relays.

Using the Arduino Ethernet made the all process flexible & cheap: controlling the turnstile, interfacing the RFID and sending the data to a linux server over RJ45.

Marco Sangalli and Alex Rigamonti have recently finished a server-controlled system to monitor the access of the customers in a gym using a prototype of the Arduino Ethernet, RFID, and digital sensors of a turnstile.

The system was meant to monitor easily the different kind of tickets and timing people may have in a gym. To accomplish that we use a turnstile at the entrance and an RFID reader to authenticate the customer. The RFID reader sends the data to Arduino via serial (TTL). Arduino checks the received data and sends it on a server via ethernet. The server controls and authenticate: ticket, time, day, expiry date and all the credits the customer has. This is the time when the server tells the Arduino to open the turnstile by triggering some relays.

Using the Arduino Ethernet made the all process flexible & cheap: controlling the turnstile, interfacing the RFID and sending the data to a linux server over RJ45.

Marco Sangalli ed Alex Rigamonti hanno recentemente portato a termine un progetto molto interessante che aveva come obiettivo il controllo centralizzato degli accessi ad una palestra, via server.

Il sistema è stato ideato per rendere più facile la gestione degli abbonamenti e del flusso in ingresso della palestra. Per far ciò è stato predisposto un tornello all’ingresso del locale con un lettore RFID per effettuare l’autenticazione.

L’utente avvicina la tessera RFID al lettore che a sua volta manda i dati tramite seriale (TTL) ad Arduino. Arduino verifica il dato ricevuto e a sua volta trasmette i dati ad un server tramite ethernet.

Il server effettua il controllo dei dati: esistenza abbonamento associato alla tessera, orario e giorno di accesso consentito, controllo crediti e scadenza dello stesso

A questo punto il server  trasmette  il comando ad Arduino Ethernet per l’apertura del tornello svolta tramite il pilotaggio di relays.

L’utilizzo di Arduino ha reso possibile, con un costo molto contenuto e con un’ottima flessibilità, di interfacciare il tornello, che ha solo ingressi digitali per il comando, ad un server linux tramite la ben nota RJ45.

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Roth Mobot shared a nice project about an “interface between the Internet and a common circuit bent toy.

We decided to create a circuit that would activate a toy whenever someone logged into Roth Mobot’s web site. We designed a simple and elegant solution using an Arduino, a home made Vactrol, a common electronic toy, and three simple scripts written in different programming languages. We’d like to thank William Swyter for lending us his Arduino, and Factory Smoke for his Vactrol suggestion, which stopped us from creating overly-complicated custom circuitry with transistors and diodes, and made the programming a piece of cake. The result was an elegant circuit that electrically insulates the toy from the Arduino (and the computer) by “optically coupling” them with light.

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[Bilbo] forum user shared a nice piece of code to communicate to Arduino via Twitter (and Php, and Python, and offcourse a PC hooked up to the Arduino). If you need to get rid of shields and stuff you may want to follow his post:

Alright now I know that there have been lots of threads on this, but I think this is a different approach. I wanted to be able to control my arduino from my cell phone, and without a cell shield or ethernet shield. Thus, i did it through twitter through my computer.

via [ArduinoForum]

A very nice link from a friend shone my week-end. This is the “Who is this book for?” section:

Programming isn’t hard. But it is hard to find learning materials that teach you to do interesting things with
programming. Other computer books go over many topics that most newbie coders don’t need. This book will
teach you how to program your own computer games. You will learn a useful skill and have fun games to show for
it!
This book is for:
- Complete beginners who wants to teach themselves computer programming, even if they have no previous
experience programming.
- Kids and teenagers who want to learn computer programming by creating games. Kids as young as 9 or 10
years old should be able to follow along.
- Adults and teachers who wish to teach others programming.
- Anyone, young or old, who wants to learn how to program by learning a professional programming
language.

It’s free to download or sold on amazon for $25.00.

via [KostaSprint] source [InventwithPython]

not the first, but the oldest teletype hack ever (up to now). Check out the video from NYC Resistor.

NYC Resistor was invited to exhibit our old Teletype Model 15 at Eyebeam’s MIXER event last March.  To make life interesting, we used a small Python program to grab tweets from Twitter matching the “eyebeam” keyword.  Watching a 50+ year old device once used to bang out the news of the day turn to printing the trivialities of the moment seems to echo the fate of professional journalists as the world’s attention span dwindles. To make things more interesting, we used a sentiment analysis algorithm to parse incoming tweets for positive or negative sentiment. The results were reflected on an old chart plotter. Positive sentiments moved the mark left. The middle of the paper represented neutral sentiment. Click the image for more photos and a video awaits after the break.

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wow. Android G1 Driven Bot!

Playing with apps on an Android phone is fun. Building your own apps, even more so. But what about using the phone to operate a moving, talking bot? Tim Heath and Ryan Hickman have done exactly that. [...]

They could have purchased the pricey $175 Oomlout kit, which includes wheels, motors and an Arduino-based brain. Hickman and Heath opted for making their own chassis. Here’s a full list of parts they used:

• $16 Bare bones Arduino
• $3 Micro servo
• $0.25 Hex inverter (handled 3.3v to 5v conversion)
• $4 HTC USB breakout board
• $4 miscellaneous cardboard, strap ties, wires, rear wheel
• $3 Mini breadboard

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Nice simple example in interfacing Arduino with Python.

Via [Stealthcopter]