Multi proyectos 0039

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

Migicovsky also shared a photo of the first Pebble prototype, below, using an Arduino and some similarly cobbled-together hardware. That was four years ago, he says; now the Pebble team consists of ten people and, currently at $9,737,000 at time of writing and with nine days yet to run, the Kickstarter is well on track to comfortably exceed $10m and maybe even hit closer to $12m before it closes.