Multi proyectos 0059

In most of my own projects I define and write my own NMEA standard communication protocols. This makes communications human readable and easy to debug, but proves wasteful with bandwidth and processing power so it’s not right for every application. Binary communications is much more efficient and versatile, but requires careful handling. This library abstracts the finer points of packetized serial communication away from the user so it easy to use and understand.

[few days ago] ADK  was presented on Google’s blog, a platform that enables communication between Android and Arduino. The downside was that the development kit costs around 300 €.

Today we bring you a scoop. After seeing different people online who managed to run the ADK on  Arduino with a USB Host Shield controlling a servo or LED, we intend to play all the devices included in the kit but in our BricoGeek DIY version, with the products we have available in the store.

The Phi_big_font library utilizes 3 X 5 dot matrix technique I developed to display characters 6 times the size of ordinary characters seen on HD44780-compatible character LCDs. You will need two rows and 4 columns to display one character (with one column blank to separate characters). A 16*2 display can display 4 such characters, making a perfect clock display like HH:MM, or month or day display in three characters. A 20*4 display can display 5 characters by two rows, totally 10. You can display the characters anywhere you want. Make an animation if you want.

If you’re a both nature lover and a geek, you would certainly love the Yahoo Farm. The Yahoo Farm is a 60 cm wide diorama, sitting in your bedroom and bringing you online data from the Yahoo ecosystem.

For example, the wind mill rotation below is directly controlled by the wind speed outside (being connected to the Yahoo Weather API), the hand-painted backgrounds are switched according to the weather state, a new sheep is coming out of the barn each time one of your friends gets online on Yahoo Messenger, and each new email lights up a fruit in the Email Tree.

The control panel on the front of it died, it failed from corrosion getting into the laminated plastic PCB that it’s made up of. Not really repairable, just meant to be replaced, except that it’s a $150 part. From what I could find online, it seems to be a common failure, so why buy an overpriced part that’s just going to fail all over again?This is one of the things I love about the Arduino, it allows me to consider alternatives that I’d have NEVER been able to consider before. If I had to program a controller in assembly, or flat do it with just discrete chips, I’d have never considered this as an option. But with the Arduino, not only can I build my own controller, but it’s almost stupidly simple to do.

Conferences, workshops, concerts and performances!!
There will be about 10 different talks on subjects as various as DIY, legal hacking, alternative social networks and other weird topics… But not only! You’re invited to workshops where you can build, hack, tinker with your own creations and learn stuff too! Lecturers are coming from all over France, but also from Italy and Spain.
Artistic performances, video mapping, installations and concerts: all the ingredients for a tasty artistic hacking jam!

si parlerà, rivoluzione digitale e condivisione di informazioni e futuro della città di Torino. Interpretando un crescente interesse da parte della società e di numerosi giovani creativi riguardo queste tematiche avremo nostri ospiti Juan Carlos De Martin, Fosca Nomis e Vittorio Bertola che ci parleranno di Creative Commons e di Torino Digitale, il progetto che vuole fare di Torino “la prima città italiana al passo con l’Agenda Digitale europea”.