Phil asks: “A geek friend of mine suffered a stroke last week and will be in a rehabilitation hospital for a few weeks. His room has WiFi in it. I’d like to make him a device with a single rocker switch (or slider switch) where he can indicate whether he is up for having visitors.”
Not something you’ll see at CES :) This is really cool, lots of people will be able to quickly crank out shields on site for the Arduinos at workshops and/or at home.
Uwe Oehler has written a simple program that prints out fold-up paper templates for the conic sections that make up the reflective surface of a Fresnel mirror. Cut the templates out of cardboard, cover the cardboard with aluminum tape, fold up the sections, and apply them to a flat backing. Even the relatively simple, five ring, 59% coverage reflector shown in the video will burn holes in construction paper under modest sunlight.
If you’re planning to build a robot with an Arduino, you’ll likely need a motor shield to drive your motors! The Official Arduino Motor Shield, now available in the Maker Shed fits right on top of your Arduino Uno (or compatible) microcontroller and uses a full-bridge L298 driver to provide 2 channels with 5-12V at 2 amps per channel.
We haven’t even had a moment to work off the extra holiday weight yet and it’s already that time again: the Consumer Electronics Show! Here at MAKE, each year, we program a little thing we call alt.CES.
Master modder Ben Heck is at it again. This time around he’s created a hand-held game controller for the iPhone using the guts from an Ion iCade iPad game controller and some laser-cut parts. As ever, Ben pulls off a slick portable mod suitable for the store shelves.
If you’re building a standalone project with an embedded PC (say, a CNC rig or a MAME cabinet) one of the easiest ways to get instructions to the software is using the PC’s baked-in keyboard interface. But if you don’t want to actually use a keyboard to control the thing, you need some way to convert button presses and/or joystick movements from your custom control panel into signals that look like keyboard input.
