How-To Tuesday: Ping))) ultrasonic sensor
How to use a Ping ultrasonic sensor with an Arduino. You can purchase a PING ))) ultrasonic sensor at makershed.com
Arduino
As the preeminent tool for makers, Arduino is a versatile platform that covers almost every type of creative making. With its simple-to-use coding language and fun programming concepts, Arduino enables users to create modern electronics with ease. From beginner level projects like flashing LED lights to more advanced builds such as interactive robots, there are an endless number of possibilities when it comes to building projects with Arduino. Whether you are new or an experienced builder in search of fresh ideas, these posts will provide interesting Arduino tutorials and unique ideas that may spark your creativity and motivate you take on any type of maker project!
Octoplex polychromic LED pumpkin display
The boys from MaceTech cooked up an impressive yard display with eight RGB LED modules in eight different pumpkins around the yard. Garrett explains:
We made a control board for eight pumpkins, using eight ShiftBars, 50mm cables, a Seeeduino, a ShiftBrite Shield, and a 12V power supply. The ShiftBar potentiometers were adjusted to deliver about 100mA to each of the 24 LED channels. We wired the LED array boards to the control board using cheap 4-wire telephone station cable from Home Depot.
Read more about it here.
Making Football Hero
We never do the same thing twice, and the projects can be pretty stressful as we’re always taking a risk and sticking our necks out, often doing things that have never been done before. We also work with relatively small budgets. Luckily it’s almost always worth the hard work though.
The Maker scene and the general explosion in low cost high technology have been a huge inspiration to us. Many of the things we do would have been pretty much inconceivable ten years ago. It’s also important that we try to work with technologies that the world and his dog aren’t all trying to innovate with. So for example we’ve stayed away from augmented reality as pretty much everyone is trying to create something with those tools.
CD scrounged drawing machine
It’s actually a drawing machine. It’s built from
two stepper motors I salvaged from come old CD-ROM drives.
You can’t see it in any of these pictures, but in its
current incarnation, it has two pots each of which controls
the movement of one of the two motors: for moving the pen up
and down or left and right.
In the Maker Shed: Arduino Ethernet shield
The Arduino Ethernet shield allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet using the Ethernet library. Connect the shield to your computer or a network hub or router using a standard ethernet cable (CAT5 or CAT6 with RJ45 connectors). Connecting to a computer may require the use of a cross-over cable (although many computers, including all recent Macs can do the cross-over internally). Fully assembled. SD Slot shown but not included or supported
New in the Maker Shed: ProtoShield for Arduino Kit
An open-source prototyping shield for Arduino, the ProtoShield kit has tons of cool features to make prototyping on your Arduino easy. With room for small or large breadboards for DIP chips, plus a surface-mount prototyping area too, you’ll be testing all kinds of project ideas in no time.
Translating a digital volume into a physical volume
I love these physical expressions of digital data. Here, a computer trashcan filling up is reflected in an inflating balloon. Empty the trash, and the balloon deflates. Lots of other nice physical computing examples on this page. Tangible Prototypes Lab