Maker Aki Mimoto wrote in to let us know about his exciting new Arduino/VR/Web app mashup. He’s wired up his wife’s bike on a stationary platform to an Arduino using a reed sensor. Using the sensor data from the bike, along with data from a head mounted display (HMD), Ari is able to accurately pinpoint his position within Google Street View.
Say you want to build a re-programmable toy, but the person you are making it for doesn’t have access to a computer. How could you do it?
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.
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.
After sorta-kinda hacking together one RFID-based project, Benjamin Eckel decided that enough was enough, and went through the effort of documenting the process correctly.
Alan Stein built this $10 Arduino beatbox for his first Arduino project.
Using an Arduino Diecimila, breakout board, female PS/2 connector, and sundry components Ben has built an interface to connect a full-sized keyboard to his jailbroken iPhone.
