Ever want to add a more interactivity to your Arduino projects? The Video Game Shield from the Maker Shed lets you create graphics, text, games, sound effects and more using your Arduino! Make great black and white video games that you can play right on your TV.
I’m proud to announce that my book, Making Things See: 3D Vision with Kinect, Processing, and Arduino, is now available from O’Reilly. You can buy the book through O’Reilly’s Early Release program here. The Early Release program lets us get the book out to you while O’Reilly’s still editing and designing it and I’m still finishing up the last chapters. If you buy it now, you’ll get the preface and the first two chapters immediately and then you’ll be notified as additional chapters are finished and you’ll be able to download them for free until you have the final book. This way you get the immediate access to the book and I get your early feedback to help me find mistakes and improve it before final publication.
Building robots is easy if you have the right parts. This Make: Project shows you how using readily available items from the Maker Shed. All you need is a 4WD platform, a motor shield, a PING))) sensor, and an Arduino Uno. Put everything together, load the code, and you’ll have a great robot platform to build from. Good job Nick!
Shrink your Arduino down to a single 8-pin ATtiny chip. Matt shows you how, based on a tutorial from MIT Media Lab’s High-Low Tech Group.
At World Maker Faire, I finally got to see paintable circuits in action. Matt Johnson spoke with me about the conductive paint that people were using and showed me a few projects that demonstrate the possibilities. The business cards they brought were printed with a swath of conductive paint suitable for some home experimenting.
Bare Conductive grew out of the founders’ graduate studies at the Innovation Design Engineering Course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The version of their conductive paints they had at Maker Faire is similar to the skin paint featured in a music video of a few years back.
The paints can be used to create traditional circuits, and for signalling with the Arduino. Since the company has just passed its’ regulatory approvals, we can expect to see many new experiments as the community of users grows.
Today at Maker Faire New York, Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project, unveiled several new boards in a main stage presentation, What’s Ahead for Arduino. The new boards are on view in the Arduino tent at Maker Faire, and you can read about them on the Arduino blog, too.
Ed Rogers lives next to active train tracks, which leads to a lot of noise in his bedroom when a train passes and the windows are open. Like any good maker, Ed solved his problem with a homebrew automatic window closer. He attached a pair of linear actuators to the windows with 3D printed brackets. These actuators are controlled by an Arduino with an H bridge and can be activated by a button on his nightstand. Not only that, but the project also integrates a motion detection system to close the windows automatically when a train is passing.
