Multi proyectos 0054

Last year at about this time, crews in the Gulf of Mexico were working feverishly to bring BP’s blown-out oil well under control. Some of the more spectacular parts of that effort, as you may recall, involved the use of remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs. Perhaps you had the same thought as I did—that it would be cool to build one.

Outputting data can be extremely useful, and typically when we look at doing this, it is either to the Arduino’s serial terminal, or to some sort of display. But what about making physical copies of the data? (…) If you dont know about thermal printers, they are most often the printers your store’s receipts are printed on. The reason for this is that they dont use ink, or use a cartridge of any sort. The paper it prints on turns black when heated. So this printer simply applies heat where another printer would apply ink.

After I got comfortable programming and building with an Arduino, I decided to build a robot.  I did not have any particular type in mind, so I wracked my brain (and the internet) for cool robot ideas.  Eventually, somehow the idea popped into my head to build a robot that could climb trees.  At first I dismissed the idea as beyond my skill level, but after further thought, and some time in Sketchup, I decided to take a shot at the challenge.

I began the first few days by developing a stand alone application build inMaxMSP that understands the notes that a play on my (recently purchased second-hand) flute. I set the range from low C right up to the 3rd octave D. Each note of the chromatic scale triggers a bang, which is coloured uniquely to the other notes bang messages.

ArduinoDashboard is an application for viewing analog and digital pin sensor values from an arduino in real time. This can be used with any arduino sketch and now has compiled versions with no need to download processing.org ide. Sources included as well.

On this weeks The Ben Heck Show, Ben jumps right in to using the Android Accessory Development Kit and gets started on building a Baby Rocker that simulates vehicle motion from logged Android sensor data.

It measures the distance to things and translates that into pressure on the wrist.[...] It’s wrist mounted and senses objects from about 1 inch (2 cm) to 10 feet (3.5m).  It has generally fast response time (fractions of a second) to quickly navigate complex environments.

The headband was a great first test, and it did work, but it had two fatal flaws:

1) The most dangerous obstacles are not at head level. Furniture and most of the other things that can be tripped over and stubbed on are waist level or lower.

2) Vibrating motors stuck on your skull will drive you insane quickly.

In addition it would be a challenge to disguise it as anything but some mad-science-looking headband, and blind people do care how they look.

Since it is located in his basement, he hated having to check on the machine continually to know when his clothes were done. Instead of hauling up and down the stairs over and over, he decided to hack in an “end of cycle” notifierof his own.

The washer has an LED that lights when it is finally done doing its thing, so [Micha] removed the LED and soldered in two wires, which he then connected to his Arduino. When the washer is finished and the LED should be lit, the Arduino senses that the input has been pulled low, signaling the end of the cycle. The Arduino was hooked into his home network via an Ethernet shield, enabling him to monitor the process from the comfort of the nearest web browser.