Arduino Blog

For the past couple weeks I’ve been wrapped up in finals at ITP, and in producing the ITP winter show 2011, along with my colleague Marianne Petit. I lost count of all the great Arduino projects in the show, but probably somewhere around 70% of the 110 projects in the show have a little blue board somewhere inside. If you’re in New York City today or tomorrow, come on down, it’s a good time, with lots of creative projects covering a range of application areas from healthcare  to fashion to video sculpture to politics, data visualization, assistive technologies, and more.

 

 

Here are a few selected at random that are using Arduino:

• FOLKBOX is a device that allows a person with limited left-hand dexterity to play the acoustic guitar, by Justin Lange.
• Glute-o-licious is a virtual cycling experience in which the user controls the speed of a first-person video by riding a stationary bike, by Courtney Mitchell
• HeartRacer is a portable exercise-based video game that plugs into your TV and is powered by your heartbeat, by Nick Santaniello
• Kinetic Sculpture 5 is composed of five pendulums that the viewer can control. Simply wave your hand over the sensors to “play” the piece, by Ben Light
• Metrochange is a charity donation platform using New York City subway cards, by Genevieve Hoffman, Paul May, and Stepan Boltalin
• RFID Beat Box is an instrument that lets you create and play your own music using RFID tags, by Danne Woo and Stefanie Kleinman
• Nostalgia is an interactive art piece where you can view a memory of the artist’s past by typing, by Yoonjo Choi

Here is a full list of the projects. Come and see them all!

Spanish artist and Fine Arts professor Rubén Tortosa partnered with Computer Science professor Miguel Sánchez, both from Universitat Politècnica de València, to create an interactive arts installation that captures visitors’ silhouettes using a Kinect depth-camera and print them on the wall using an Arduino and a couple of stepper motors. Image processing uses OpenCV library and Daniel Shiffman’s Kinect library for Processing. Arduino code is tasked to act as an interface between the PC and a couple of microstepping motor drivers.

Check the other videos in Miguel’s profile to fully understand how this works. He promised to make better documentation as soon as he has the time, but he couldn’t help sending his proof of concept to our blog as soon as it was done.

Thanks Miguel for the videos, this is beautiful!

[Rave Rover's Chris Williamson] made a portable DIY dancefloor, sharing instructions and schematics.

Like with many projects similar to this, an Arduino board controls pretty much everything. The floor is dominated by powerful LED lights, which respond to a Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). A small computer is also inside (complete with Wi-fi), along with a car radio hooked up to speakers. Oh, and thanks to additional wheelchair motors, the floor can be wheeled away to wherever it’s needed.

Chris managed to build the dance floor in just one month, and documented how to do it on Instructables for anyone who wants to make their own. And now you’ve seen this, would you really want to throw a party without one?

via [PCworld] source [Instructables]

TriggerTrap, is a very interesting product developed by Ziah Fogel & Haje Jan Kamps. Arduino-based & open-source, is now on preorder. What does it do? (Watch Video)

(With TriggerTrap) your camera will be easily controlled in a number of ways either by sound, by breaking a laser beam, time or any other method you can think of using its built in a Aux port.

TriggerTrap comes in the well designed, finished product and with the TT Shield (75$). More info soon.

via [GeekyGadgets] source [TriggerTrap]

[Andre Konig] is sharing Fritzing’s Christmas Challenge (ending the 18th of December).

[...]Take a look at what you’ve built with Fritzing this year, and snap a couple of photos/screenshots. If you think it’s an interesting concept, a technical masterpiece, or just fun, we want to see it all.  
Then either upload it to our projects gallery or mail them to info (ät) fritzing.org. (Also, you must agree that we may publish what you send us (if you prefer, anonymized).

Deadline is Sunday, December 18th.

[Fritzing Blog]

 

Adding just a few conditions in a small program, and using Arduino integrated with sensors, we get to add intelligence to a BlackBerry Playbook application.

The Arduino board uses an IR range sensor to find targets. The IR sensor is placed on a servo to scan the area of interest (e.g. kitchen). The data is sent to the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet, on which we’ve built an application to present a sonar map and look for movement. If movement is detected, the application will sound an alarm and take a picture.

Via: BlackBerry Developer’s blog.

[quetwo] aka Nicholas Kwiatkowski developed a native interface to receive serial data in Flash.

[...]  The AIR Native Extension (ANE) is a C based .DLL / .framework for the Windows/Mac platforms that allows AIR to essentially open a COM port.  I wrote it in a way that is supposed to emulate the functions of the flash.net.Socket library that is included in the AIR runtime.  I’ve posted the entire project, including the source code and final binaries on Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/as3-arduino-connector/

via [quetwo], [GoogleCode]

Marcus with his hack

We all dream of a technology matching the Jetsons someday. And there came Siri, so close to a personal assistant to a gadget-lover. Here is Siri taken to the next level by Marcus Schappi, who dreams of using it to automate his home next.

An Australian man has become one of the first to hack the iPhone 4S voice recognition app Siri but his motives were not sinister – he wants to use the smartphone as a home automation tool.

He joins another Sydney developer and founder of Remember the Milk – a task manager app for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms – in hacking Siri.

Mr Schappi says his hack could allow users to do simple tasks such as turn their air conditioning on or off, control their home entertainment or alarm system and unlock their front door or car.

But the hack may not last long, with Mr Schappi predicting Apple would want to close the hole he exploited.

To understand how the hack works one must know a bit about how Siri operates. It sends “voice packets” to Apple’s servers. The tech giant’s computer servers then provide voice recognition on these packets and returns a string of text.

To cap it all, it does not involve the jailbreaking of the iPhone! Mr Schappi described the set-up as “relatively inexpensive”. It uses what is known as an Arduino board with an Ethernet port ($69.95), at least two Arduino compatible relay modules or electronic switches ($13.50 each) and one wireless mains remote ($24.95), bringing the total to $121.90. Mr Schappi is the director of Little Bird Company, an electronics ’boutique’ as he puts it. [Via: The Sydney Morning Herald]

Arduino 1.0 is now available from the download page.

A long time coming, this release brings small but important changes to clean up the Arduino environment and language – as well as adding lots of additional features. Updates to the environment include a new file extension, toolbar icons, and color scheme as well as a progress bar on compilation and upload. The language changes include modifications to the Serial class, addition of DHCP and DNS support to the Ethernet library, a new SoftwareSerial library, multi-file support in the SD library, modifications to the Wire library and UDP class, etc. For details, please see the release notes or this blog post. We’ll be pushing the updated reference for Arduino 1.0 live in the next day or two.

This release is the product of many people (listed in the release notes). Thank you to everyone who helped us get here!

Even if some of you (thanks for the wonderful picture, Bill) already realized it, we are officially announcing a big Christmas surprise for all Arduino users in North America: Radioshack sells Arduino in most of its 6000+ stores all around US!

This means that you’re going to find Arduino UNO, Arduino MEGA 2560 and Arduino ADK, together with four shields, in the main Radioshack stores in your homecity.

Arduino jumps into the retail market in its new *sexy* retail packaging developed by TODO. We are asking you to celebrate this wonderful achievement by taking pictures of  the Arduinos in the Radioshack nearby and twitt them with #Arduino@Radioshack hashtag. Wonder if any of these new products (and retail packaging) will be sold on the Arduino Store? Stay tuned for next week Christmas’ Specials.

 

Maker Faire New York is over and we are seeing a lot of reports and reviews about the new products Arduino has announced, we’re sincerely impressed by the amount of positive feedback and offers of collaboration that we have received.

We are  releasing a two part video extract of  my speech on saturday at Maker Faire New York. The title of the speech is “what’s ahead for Arduino”  and it describes the new products we’ve already announced on friday.

Yesterday we’ve had the pleasure of being slashdotted for the first time in our history with the side effect of being mentioned on a lot of websites. In particular what caught my attention is this article by Steve Rosenboaum on the Huffington Post entitled “What Barack Obama Could Learn From Maker Faire” :

Arduino is the kind of innovation eco-system that The White House could support today. Much like the President’s Fitness Challenge drove health and set goals for the nation, it’s easy to imagine an Arduino White House Challenge that would give young people the goals and rewards to drive big ideas into the economy. Today Dean Kamen’s US First Robotics teams are doing that in high schools across the country. And yet President Obama stays almost entirely silent on technology as if somehow the future of America is about us embracing and revitalizing the past.

Education and Community have always been at the core of Arduino….

Another big deal was the announcement that Radio Shack is going to be stocking Arduino in its thousands of stores. Everybody I met was tremendously excited about this (like we have been throughout the negotiation) and a momentous event for an open source project.

We closed our presentation with “Arduino is You”, this is something we like to remind everybody because the community is the lifeblood of Arduino. Give yourself a round of applause like we did in New York.

 

Stahl adjusting the body suit

Stahl Stenslie, Norwegian artist, PhD, and professor at the Oslo School of Architecture, has been working with the guys at 1scale1 in making a wearable device for about a year. Prototype’s last version uses an Arduino ADK together with an Android phone. It is a location based sculpture + soundscape. When reaching a certain place, the sound starts playing binarual sounds and an array of motors embedded in the garment, a coat in this case, will give you physical feedback.

The project can be named Sense Memory [...] the binaural sounds and haptic patterns were made as a response of the 22/7 terror.

However, while trying out the coat at Oslo’s main square, they got approached by the police:

[They] held us in custody on the spot for half an hour, positioning themselves around and behind us as if we were expected to do something violent towards them. It was all a pretty violent experience for us. [...] Interesting they would accuse us for being terrorists and potential suicide bombers. Our prime minister called for a more open society, a society with more democracy and creativity. But the police seem determined to go ahead with their own agenda.

Police stopping Stahl and his partner

Stahl was trying out his piece together with the director of the center curating and commissioning the piece. In the pictures you can see Stahl (2m tall) adjusting the coat on his partner, how the second goes for a walk and the instant when the police comes in and stops them of testing the prototype.

I have not been contacted by the police for an interrogation yet. But they said we had been reported – which again means they somehow want to punish us.

The main newspaper in Norway had announced the event in an article,  the day before. However, that wasn’t enough to convince the police about their non-violent intentions.

Our show was therefore announced publically as well. Not that it matters for the police, but, hey, ask before you shoot…

Stahl closed the call with a statement about the current state of arts and the fear generated by terrorism and violence in any form all around the world:

Concerning the use of new, experimental media: if you want to use your handheld device, use a different design of your clothing like our haptic bodysuit or otherwise behave differently than ‘normal’ people, well, you’re most likely a terrorist. That’s the impression you get.

I seriously hope court will dismiss any charges on Stahl and his partner regarding this matter. 1scale1 worked really hard in trying to put together a meaningful and enjoyable experience for the audience. It is really sad it turns out this way.

Check all the pictures we got from this case clicking here.

 

For the second year in a row we decided to announce our new products at Maker Faire in NYC.

Tomorrow morning, if you come to the Arduino tent, you will be able to see:

Arduino 1.0, we finally froze the Arduino API, the IDE and the layout of the boards. We’ve made some minor additions to the Arduino connectors to make them more flexible. Tomorrow you will be able to download the release candidate and in 1 month of frantic testing with the community, the platform will be ready and stable.

Arduino Leonardo, a low cost Arduino board with the Atmega32u4. It has the same shape and connectors as the UNO but it has a simpler circuit. On the software side it has a nifty USB driver able to simulate a mouse , a keyboard, a serial port (with more drivers coming later). As usual for Arduino, everything will be released as open source (Core, Bootloader, Hardware).

Arduino Due, a major breakthrough for Arduino because we’re launching an Arduino board with a 32bit Cortex-M3 ARM processor on it. We’re using the SAM3U processor from ATMEL running at 96MHz with 256Kb of Flash, 50Kb of Sram, 5 SPI buses, 2 I2C interfaces, 5 UARTS, 16 Analog Inputs at 12Bit resolution and much more.

Instead of just releasing the finished platform we are opening the process to the community early on. We’re going to be demoing the board and giving away some boards to a selected group of developers who will be invited to shape the platform while it’s been created. After Maker Faire, we will begin selling a small batch of Developer Edition boards on the Arduino store (store.arduino,cc) for members of the community who want to be join the development effort. We plan a final and tested release by the end of 2011

Arduino Wifi Shield. It adds Wi-Fi communication capabilities to any Arduino. Instead of using any of the classic WiFi modules on the market we wanted to have something that will provide the maximum level of hackability to the user. The shield is based on a wifi micro module made by H&D Wireless coupled with a powerful AVR32 processor that carries the full TCP-IP stack leaving room to add your own protocols and customisations. We’ve also worked hard to make sure that you will be able to migrate your code from the Ethernet Shield with minor changes.

We’re also going to show some prototypes of new platforms we’ve been working on: We have robots, new IDEs and more.

It has been a crazy few months and we want to thank ATMEL very much the support that we got on all the new products.

Come over to Maker Faire and have a look for yourself!

Yesterday we had a wonderful day at New York Hall of Science, for the Open Source Hardware Summit, in its second edition. We had the chance to see amazing presentations from makers all over the worlds [see schedule & list of participants]  We had a good time in taking with Alicia Gibb, one of the organizers who explained us this year’s numbers and some ideas for the future.

[SlideShare presentation after the break]

Open Source Hardware Summit Speech 2011
As promised, we are sharing the presentation Arduino Team had on the stage. You can also see more documentation and OSHS uStream on OSHS site. Stay tuned for the upcoming news in the next days.

Or the Bubble-machine

Is an amazing and a cute entertainer for people and pets of all ages. This easy instructable is named ‘Bubblesteen’ can make an apt decoration for any party or just an evening with family.

[Via:Instructables]

 

 

What better option than Android arduino, could be used when we think of hacking phones and and interfacing them with the sensors?

As a member of illutron, Mads Høbye – MEDEA PhD student in interaction design – was asked by SonyEricsson to challenge the more conventional usage of mobile technology, by exploring alternative usage scenarios. He called in a combination of artists, geeks and tinkerers for a four day workshop.

 

The Android platform proved to be a great stepping stone in that direction. During the workshop we managed to use the phones in multiple ways, by taking advantage of the embedded technologies like GPS, Compass, Wifi, GSM/3, Accelerometers, touch screen and connecting them to the Arduino platform.The compressed format of the workshop proved to a fruitful for revealing new openings and possibilities – pushing the boundaries of the normal perception of what constitutes a phone and how it should be used. From a research-through-design perspective, the resulting prototypes work as conversation pieces around what constitutes material media and how we can design position aware devices that are constantly connected to each other.

 

Via:[Medea]

[Quasimondo] made an interesting exhibition project that can easily become a museum furniture.

this Arduino-based Facebook “Like” button by Mario Klingemann will be on display at the Ultra Social exhibition, a part of the UAMO Festival in Munich.

via [Make]

[Pierre] shares an interesting geo-localization project of sound, narration and  culture,  made in  ”plan d’Aou”, a district of Marseilles – France. The project dates back in September 2010, within the framework of the Smala project in order to trace a sound cartography of Islam in the city of Marseilles: the guys at [Echelle Inconnue] took their time to fully document the all project with schematics, codes, fritzing diagrams and so on.

Several mobile systems were distributed to the people to accompany their walk across the district with, by hand, a kind of speaker to be press on the walls which makes it possible to listen to the sound by vibrating the material of the wall.

The materials of urban furniture or buildings become the speakers required for sound diffusion. Each resonant body had its acoustic specificities, the words take shape in metal, wood or glass… Textures of the sound fluctuate from a surface to another and the listener must juggle with these characteristics to obtain a quality of optimal listening, between documentary in the walls and poetic sound creation.

source [echelleinconnue]

 

[Kim Pimmel] – which you may remember from the LightDrive Project – made a nice animation made out on bubbles & ferrofluid liquid.

I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.

Time-lapse sequences: Nikon D90, Nikkor 60mm macro lens and custom built intervalometer. 
Motion-control: Arduino driven scanner platform and mirror rigs
Score: Ableton Live

via [WiredUK] source [Vimeo]

Artist and educator Jody Culkin has written and illustrated a great new introduction to Arduino comic. It covers the basic concepts to get you started in clear graphic form, a nice intro for students who like their learning in visual form. Thanks to Jody for the link.