“Years” is an artwork created by Bartholomäus Traubeck that translates wood’s year rings into sound. The record player uses a system  that analyse tree’s years for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data are mapped to a scale defined by the overall appearance of the wood and serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. The system is composed by arduino, ps eye, stepper motor for moving the tonearm, vvvv and ableton live, all connected via midiyoke and/or serial.

For more information: http://traubeck.com/years/

Via:[Boingboing.net]

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.

For more information and sample code, see here.

[Via: Building Internet of Things]

ArduGate: a web gateway for Arduino that makes possible to use JavaScript inside the web browser to interact with Arduino. Currently available just for Windows,  however, release for Linux and MAC OS X will be available soon.

PLOTS guys propose an interesting way to measure the quality of the air for indoor environments, by hacking a second-hand Roomba robot (an autonomous vacuum cleaner).

These robots are programmed to randomly move inside rooms to clean up the floor, so by adding a simple air quality sensor on top of one of them, it is possible to easily implement a sort of “random walker” that will sense for us the presence of gases (volatile organic chemicals, VOCs), such as NH3, alcohol, CO2 and so forth.

To keep track of the air quality measurements, the authors equipped the so hacked Roomba with an RGB led, whose color can be changed according to the air sample. By taking a long exposure picture of the room where the robot was roaming in, they could determine the areas where a high concentration of VOCs was present.

The complete description of the project can be found on the PLOTS’ website, while here you may find a short video about it:

PLOTS guys are also working on a different approach to air sensing, which does not make use of a Roomba robot but uses a hamster ball, instead. Further details can be found here.

[Via: Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science]

To coordinate the efforts around Arduino in India, we have gathered an excellent group of forum moderators (their nicknames are mentioned for you to find them in the forum):

• Priya (our Arduino representative in India) – beachbrake
• Sudar -  Sudar
• Nishant -  NI$HANT
• Jobin –  jo_v

(there is more to come, as we expect the Indian community to move quick, we will need all the help in the world)

So if you are in India and want to find your pals at our forum, refer to the following website and contribute!

http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php/board,82.0.html

India, our forum salutes you!

I’m very happy to announce that Arduino 1.0.1 is now available on the software page. This release includes a ton of bug fixes and new features (see the release notes for details). The biggest additions are support for the Arduino Leonardo and translation of the Arduino development environment into multiple languages. We’ll be doing a blog post on the Leonardo soon but, for now, see its getting started page and hardware page.

The translations were the work of many people, particularly Shigeru Kanemoto (who internationalized the software and translated it into Japanese) and David Cuartielles from the Arduino team (who coordinated the translation process). Languages in Arduino 1.0.1: Arabic, Aragonese, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Danish, Dutch), English, Estonian, Filipino, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuaninan, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese – Brazil, Portuguese – Portugal, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Tamil. (For details or to help with the translations, see this page on the playground.)

Thanks to the many people who contributed to this release (see the release notes for credits). Again, you can download Arduino 1.0.1 from the software page.

[Via: elektor.it]

Goal of the workshop is the design and prototyping, through the Arduino platform, of objects that sense, interpret and react to the real world and that can be wearable and digitally fabricated.

More info here.

Via [openwear.org]

Il 16-17 Giugno prossimi si tiene a Torino, presso le Officine Arduino, l’ArduinoCamp 2012 (leggi post di Massimo sul Forum di Arduino)

La partecipazione è gratuita ma i posti saranno limitati dalla capienza del luogo dell’incontro.

• Vuoi partecipare all’ArduinoCamp e/o HackDay? Inserisci i tuoi dati qui   http://bit.ly/JFqWxP
• Hai  fatto un progetto con Arduino o stai usando Arduino nella tua azienda, faccelo sapere inserendolo qui:  http://bit.ly/Lwm6BW
  Saremmo contenti di vedervi raccontarlo nel nostro tradizionale pecha-kucha
• Vuoi essere volontario? ne stiamo cercando 6  http://bit.ly/K82OkU

Due giorni di Arduino, il primo dedicato a presentazioni sui vari utilizzi di Arduino (con il tradizionale pecha-kucha), il secondo con l’HackDay a premi. Per trovare indirizzo e programma consulta la pagina creata sul playground di Arduino.