In his blog, Charalampos describes his experience with SeeedStudio’s Grove Ear-clip Heart Rate sensor and Cosm (former Pachube) cloud service. The employed sensor is quite cheap and can detect heart pulses from the ear lobe, by measuring the infra-red light reflected by the tissue and by checking for intensity variations.
By connecting this sensor with an ADK board and, in turn, with an Android smartphone, Charalampos implemented a portable heart-rate tracker, which is used to send the recorded data to Cosm cloud service.
Ever wanted to see how much electricity your next project is consuming? Look no further; this Instructable will guide you about how you can, too, make a device to monitor the same.
“There’s a couple of commercial products that can do this, but not with the flexibility I wanted. I designed an Arduino micro-controller based solution that is very extensible. Right now it monitors the above values of attached gear, and I’m thinking about adding web monitoring and an SD Card for data collection.”
Get a personalized messages, order number or sponsor a coffee to the cute guy in the coffee shop with your number. Now the Arduino style!
We made the Textspresso machine to show off our cloud texting technology. It’s a robotic coffee machine. It utilized java script, 3 arduino microcontrollers, a couple servos, an ikea cupboard, and about 100 other pieces. We think it’s great. We’re open sourcing the plans in the coming weeks.
Created by Kelsey Klevenberg of the cloud texting service Zipwhip.
Coder Matt Bell is continuing to improve his exceedingly clever water-based display screen.
Inspired by a Jeep display that spelled out words with falling water, Bell’s design consists of a water tank connected to a grid of clear plastic tubes and an Arduino. Individual solenoid valves at the bottom of each tube can let in air, creating the effect of individual white pixels on a black screen, and preprogrammed sequences can spell out letters or numbers. His newest version adds an air reservoir to control the size of the bubbles, as well as completely separate vinyl tubes rather than one large tank with dividers.
More about the build-instructions and inspiration can be read here and here.
A Nintendo Wii-remote along with bluetooth communication and an arduino gives us this magical cart with a wireless steering wheel.
These cool people are staunch DIY-ers and would love to see the community build more such vehicles.
The cart has two motors which use a chain to drive each of the rear wheels. A pair of H-bridge controllers let the Arduino interface with them. It’s also has a Bluetooth module that makes it a snap to pull accelerometer data from the Wii remote. The front end looks like it uses rack and pinion steering, but you won’t find a pinion or a steering column. Instead, a linear actuator is mounted parallel to the rack, moving it back and forth at the command of the Arduino.
The only downside I spot is the Battery life. I am sure that would be worked out too! Till then – Kudos to the inventors! I smell futuristic looking vehicle controls here.
What do you do when you have an arduino, a camera, an ethernet shield and a doorbell? You make your own intelligent security system.
The system is actually pretty simple. When the doorbell rings an Arduino sends a request to a notification service called PushingBox which then grabs a picture from web camera located outside. Then PushingBox sends a notification to an iPhone (it looks like this can be modded slightly with PushingBox to include Android and Windows Phone as well) and an email with a picture attached.
With the help from Lindsey French, some houseplants in Chicago have enjoyed a concert generated by the vibrations of a cherry tree in western Massachusetts.
Attached to the cherry tree was a piezo sensor, which measured the tree’s vibrations. These were uploaded to the world wide web using an Ethernet Pro as a server, and a friend’s wireless router, configured to allow port forwarding. On the chicago end, a processing sketch gathered the data and wrote it to the serial port my laptop. An Arduino attached to the laptop output the data to transducers, which were attached to ceramic saucers (and later, a plywood shelf) as the medium for the vibrations. The Arduino and breadboard were housed in a custom laser-cut box, based off of a modified thingverse template.
So you want to gift your Mother a box of chocolates for Mother’s day. Spice it up with Arduino. A hack by Dmitriy Abaimov which originally uses an ATTiny13, a very tiny microcontroller, along with 10 LEDS tucked into the heart-shaped Ferrero Rocher box to flash lights inside the plastic. It’s a nice touch that will stand out among the flowers, chocolates and cards.
Get making! The code and instructions can be found here.
This is the final project for my Advanced Mechatronics class at Penn State University. The robot is the skeleton of a turret from the game Portal that uses an IP webcam to track a target and fire nerf bullets at them. This is the current state of the robot as of 5/9/12, but I am currently molding a shell for the frame to make it look like the Portal turret, along with improving my code to make the tracking faster. All programming is done with MATLAB and Arduino. Enjoy!
Arduino counts with two twitter accounts: @arduinoteam is the one used by the team to report about things we think matter to the community. @arduinoblog is twitting for every blog post, and allows us handling answers on our blog.
