The democratization of hardware @ PowerSource | Blog on EDN.

Adafruit got into the parts/kit business with its detailed tutorials that include step-by-step instructions and photographs to lead newbies through the basics of Ohm’s Law and soldering, and on to programming the open-source hardware Arduino platform. Unlike traditional electronic distributors that rely on application engineers, the site effectively crowdsources its application engineering support through its forums and FAQ pages on the kits and parts. This reliance on the knowledge of the site’s fans is part of a well-thought-out business plan: Adafruit’s founder, Limor Fried, detailed the company philosophy in, “15 steps to starting your own electronic-kit business.”

Individual parts offered by Adafruit benefit from its excellent documentation and  tutorials. Speaking from personal experience, a couple of years ago I bought a TLS2561 light-to-digital converter from TAOS Semiconductor (now part of austriamicrosystems.) It seemed like a handy component to have in getting a quick, objective measurement of LEDs. However, although documentation existed for the part, its outputs were hard to interpret and it was not easy to hook it up to a computer for datalogging. I quickly gave up and forgot about it.

Then, last summer Adafruit introduced the a new product, aTLS2561 premounted on a small pc board with a couple of chip resistors and some headers, with a tutorial as well as a software library for the open-source Arduino platform. As theAdafruit tutorial says, “To use this sensor and calculate Lux, there’s a lot of very hairy and unpleasant math. You can check out the math in the datasheet but really, it’s not intuitive or educational – it’s just how the sensor works. So we took care of all the math and wrapped it up into a nice Arduino library.”

My sentiments exactly – I just wanted to start using the sensor. It worked great. (See photo, which shows a boarduino, a slimmed-down version of the arduino.) Adafruit was able to take a part that sells competitively for about $2 each, add a couple of passive components, and a well thought-out online tutorial, and sell it for $12. And it was worth every penny of it to me.

Digi-Key had a similar start back in 1972, selling its “Digi-Keyer Kit” to ham radio enthusiasts and today it’s a $1B company. History could repeat itself with a whole new generation of parts and kits providers.

Read more!

NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Ethernet shield R3 with micro SD connector – Assembled. The Arduino Ethernet Shield R3 (assembled) allows an Arduino board to connect to the internet. It is based on the Wiznet W5100 ethernet chip (datasheet). The Wiznet W5100 provides a network (IP) stack capable of both TCP and UDP. It supports up to four simultaneous socket connections. Use the Ethernet library to write sketches which connect to the internet using the shield.
The new Ethernet shield now includes a micro SD card connector, it is MEGA compatible and an on-board reset controller.

The ethernet shield connects to an Arduino board using long wire-wrap headers which extend through the shield. This keeps the pin layout intact and allows another shield to be stacked on top.
Arduino uses digital pins 10, 11, 12, and 13 (SPI) to communicate with the W5100 on the ethernet shield. These pins cannot be used for general i/o.

The shield provides a standard RJ45 ethernet jack. An Arduino is necessary to use this shield but is not included.

• Dimensions: 73mm x 54mm x 17mm (2.8in x 2.1in x 0.7in)
• Weight: 26g / 1oz

For more information, check out the Ethernet shield page and Getting started guide. We have a tutorial on how to use this shield as a file webserver!

In stock and shipping now.

Displaying Android Phone Video on an RGB LED Matrix by Michael at nootropic design.

I bought this awesome RGB LED matrix panel from Adafruit and really wanted to see if I could make it display video from an Android phone.

16×32 RGB LED matrix panel – MASSIVE BLINKY!. Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this 16 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York we see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes of them from a factory. They have 512 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 16×32 grid on the front. On the back there is a PCB with two IDC connectors (one input, one output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:8 scan rate.

These panels require 12 digital pins (6 bit data, 6 bit control) and a good 5V supply, up to 1A per panel. We suggest our 2A regulated 5V adapter and then soldering a jack on such as from our extension cord. Please check out our tutorial for more details!

Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you’re supposed to redraw the screen over and over to ‘manually’ PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz arduino, we managed to squeeze 9-bit color (512 colors) with 50% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by an FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs its not a particularly tinted white.

Of course, we wouldn’t leave you with a datasheet and a “good luck!” We have a full wiring diagrams and working Arduino library code with examples from drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. You’ll get your color blasting within the hour! On an Arduino, you’ll need 12 digital pins, and about 800 bytes of RAM to buffer the 9-bit color image.

In stock and shipping now!

Dan Malec’s Blog: Building an Arduino LCD Clock. Dan writes -

The first step in my Arduino monitored / controlled orchid vivarium is giving my Arduino the ability to track time with reasonable accuracy and display information on an LCD.  I went with a Boarduino for ease of prototyping, but the final build will probably use an Uno or Mega.

This projects uses the Adafruit Boarduino, Adafruit FTDI friend, DS1307 RTC breakout, Blue+White LCD, and I2C LCD backpack!

Chomp – the Affordable, Open-Source MIDI Controller by Max Justicz.

Hey Phil/Limor, I just posted up my first kickstarter project (I’m a high-school student).  It’s open-source, Arduino based, and awesome! I just wanted to let you guys know that you helped me get interested in electronics in the first place.  After raising $455 in under 1.5 hours, I think I’ve picked a pretty good hobby.

Here’s the link: http://kck.st/xdnUhp

Thanks so much for everything you guys! By the way — I taught a short term class at my school (which is about 4 weeks long) on the Arduino (we bought all of our kits, sensors, and LCDs from you guys) and it went GREAT!!!!  Here’s a project one of my friends made during the second week (having never programmed before):  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtwqUQUAPx8. You guys rock! -mjusticz

The GeekDad Arduino Guide: Introduction @ GeekDad – Wired.com.

Now, depending on your level of knowledge of engineering, electronics, and other technical topics, you may be a little unclear on the definition of a microcontroller. At its most basic, a microcontroller is a computer on a chip. It has a CPU capable of executing embedded code, RAM for storage of run-time data, and long-term storage for storing the code to be executed. What makes microcontrollers fun is the surrounding hardware that is also on the chip. This surrounding hardware makes it very simple to read signals from the physical world, translate them into something the code can take action on, and then react back out to the physical world. The Arduino is a small circuit board wrapped around one of these microcontrollers that makes it very easy for you to upload new code that you write, in a variation on C++, and access the set of inputs/outputs and interact with your world. This answers this second part of my question above, “How can it help launch me into the world of cool projects?”

Nice series!

The IR Shield. falldeaf writes -

Hi Lady Ada! I designed and built a custom Arduino shield and wrote some firmware and software that turn it into a web-connected universal remote…

Office Bling By DairDair

Our offices have these little peek-a-boo sections in the frosted glass. Some people stick post-it notes up describing what’s going on with them, but I wanted something more complex. I had recently picked up the Adafruit “RGB backlight negative LCD” display and was evaluating the X-Bee radios and decided to make an “almost wireless” LCD display for the front of my office. It’s not very complex – using a Boarduino (Arduino) running a little sketch that has a few modes – static text, alternating text describing what I’m working on, plus a mode that cycles through a bunch of “Burma Shave” four-liners just for silliness. The modes and backlight color are controlled from my PC via the other X-Bee. People seem to like it, so I’ll probably commit it to a perf-board and get rid of all those ugly wires.

RGB backlight positive LCD 20×4 + extras [black on RGB]. To match our popular 16×2 RGB Character LCDs (http://www.adafruit.com/products/399 & http://www.adafruit.com/products/398) we’ve now added 20×4 LCDs! Get more text, with an RGB backlight. Both positive and negative type! This is a fancy upgrade to standard 20×4 LCDs, instead of just having blue and white, or red and black, this LCD has black characters on a full color RGB background! That means you can change the display background color to anything you want – red, green, blue, pink, white, purple yellow, teal, salmon, chartreuse. This LCD looks strikingly good in person. This LCD is the most daylight readable character LCD we have and is very beautiful and easy to read no matter what color/brightness you have for the backlight.

One nice thing about these LCDs is that they are an elegant upgrade, but you can use them in existing LCD projects and they’ll still work – just that only the red LED will be used (so it will appear black-on-red). The extra two pins (17 and 18) are for the green and blue LEDs. The LCD has resistors on board already so that you can drive it with 5V logic and the current draw will be ~40mA per LED (there are two LEDs, 20mA each). There’s a single LED backlight for the entire display, the image above showing 3 colors at once is a composite!

Comes with a single 20×4 RGB backlight LCD, 10K necessary contrast potentiometer and strip of header. Our tutorials and diagrams will have you up and running in no time!

In stock and shipping now.

BACK IN STOCK – Atmega32u4 Breakout Board. Toss out those FTDI cables and go USB-native with the ATmega32u4. After many months of back-orders, we finally received a shipment of these little guys and are excited to offer our breakout board. The little dev board keeps it simple, with just the bare essentials:

• Atmega32u4 – AVR core with USB capability. 32K flash, 2.5K RAM running at 16MHz
• Standard AVR 6-pin ISP connector for direct programming (when you need the extra space)
• Big Bootload/Reset button
• 500mA fuse on the USB power line
• Power LED and ‘user’ LED (also indicates when the bootloader is active)
• Fits nicely in any breadboard
• 4 mounting holes

This breakout board is best for those who have familiarity with some microcontrollers and are comfortable with writing code in C. This board doesn’t come with any ‘learn to program’ tutorials! If this is your first time with a microcontroller, we suggest going with an Arduino which is easier. Then when you want to upgrade, check this out.

Plug it in, connect a mini-B USB cable and you can start writing code immediately. With the built-in bootloader you don’t even need an AVR programmer. We suggest checking out the LUFA library to get started with the USB core as nearly every kind of device has an example already.

In stock and shipping now!

Weekend Project: Learning Ins and Outs of Arduino @ Linux.com.

Arduino is an open embedded hardware and software platform designed for rapid creativity. It’s both a great introduction to embedded programming and a fast track to building all kinds of cool devices like animatronics, robots, fabulous blinky things, animated clothing, games, your own little fabs… you can build what you imagine. Follow along as we learn both embedded programming and basic electronics.

Good starter at Linux.com!

LED screen teardown, driving LEDs with video, mikeselectricstuff writes -

I just took apart a piece of the commercial outdoor LED screen that used to be in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Also included is a detailed analysis of the drive waveforms etc. which may be of interest to people trying to seriously use the 32×16 RGB modules

We carry 32×16 and 32×32 LED wall sections in the shop! Complete with Arduino wiring diagrams and libraries.

32×32 RGB LED matrix panel! Bring a little bit of Times Square into your home with this totally adorable 5 inch square 32 x 32 RGB LED matrix panel. These panels are normally used to make video walls, here in New York we see them on the sides of busses and bus stops, to display animations or short video clips. We thought they looked really cool so we picked up a few boxes of them from a factory. They have 1024 bright RGB LEDs arranged in a 32×32 grid on the front. On the back there is a PCB with two sets of dual IDC connectors (two input, two output: in theory you can chain these together) and 12 16-bit latches that allow you to drive the display with a 1:16 scan rate.

These displays are ‘chainable’ – connect one output to the next input – but our Arduino example code does not support this (yet). It requires a high speed processor and more RAM than the Arduino has!

These panels require 13 digital pins (6 bit data, 7 bit control) and a good 5V supply, up to 2A per panel. We suggest our 2A regulated 5V adapter and then connecting a 2.1mm jack Please check out our tutorial for more details!

Comes with: a single 32×32 RGB panel, two IDC cables, a power cable, 4 mounting screws and mini-magnets (it appears these are often mounted on a magnetic base)

Keep in mind that these displays are designed to be driven by FPGAs or other high speed processors: they do not have built in PWM control of any kind. Instead, you’re supposed to redraw the screen over and over to ‘manually’ PWM the whole thing. On a 16 MHz arduino, we managed to squeeze 12-bit color (4096 colors) with 40% CPU usage but this display would really shine if driven by any FPGA, CPLD, Propeller, XMOS or other high speed multi-core controller. The good news is that the display is pre-white balanced with nice uniformity so if you turn on all the LEDs its not a particularly tinted white.

Of course, we wouldn’t leave you with a datasheet and a “good luck!” We have a full wiring diagrams and working Arduino library code with examples from drawing pixels, lines, rectangles, circles and text. You’ll get your color blasting within the hour! On an Arduino, you’ll need 13 digital pins, and about 1600 bytes of RAM to buffer the 12-bit color image. At this time we do not have wiring documentation for the MEGA.

In stock and shipping now!

A beautifully done camera motion controller project:

Andreas Böhler and Anja Hartig, two fellow students and I, are currently working on ‘A Game of Choices’, an interactive claymation flash-game. We built different clay-sets, that the stop motion animated character will later walk through. In order to achieve a smooth walk-through experience, we photographed the 100 cm wide set in 200 highly precise steps. When it comes to precision photography, one can find dozens of systems available. However, professional systems are expensive and therefore out of reach for this project.

As I had recently begun playing with the open-source hardware-platform Arduino, I decided to take it a step further and build a single axis motion control myself. The basic configuration was quickly developed and assembled, however, it presented some severe issues. For example, the shafts were too weak to handle heavy lenses, as the platform would lean to one side. I had to reinforce the system with a second set of shafts that now allows it to handle up to 3 kg of mounted weight.

…
If you don’t have great knowledge about electronics, you might want to look into some basics or you’re most probably going to blow up some chips and LEDs – at least that’s what I did… After all, this project was fun and very interesting as it was my first step into the world of physical computing. The possibilities are exciting and I can’t wait to start my next Arduino project – right now, I’m just spoiled for choice.

No project details yet, though it’s still a nice proof-of-concept for this kind of thing.

Ladyada, Kevin and PT did a tour of the Arduino factory in beautiful Torino, Italy. We took many photos, some videos and more. On this weekend’s ASK AN ENGINEER we will go photo by photo (and video) and talk about all the wonderful machines, tools and people that make the Arduino. Tune in TONIGHT at 10pm ET 1/14/12.

We’d like to also thank everyone at the Arduino team and supporting company’s for being so kind and generous during our stay.

Phil even got to visit his ancestral hometown, home of “TORRONE”.

For now, feel free to enjoy the slideshow (and photo set). Ciao!

Arduino-Based Curtain Automation. jwz doing hardware, and of course – he publishes a how-to and code…

I built a controller so that I can open and close my curtains from the command line! My apartment has a 16′ wide floor-to-ceiling window, and a correspondingly-huge curtain. I wanted to put the curtain under software control so I could do things like, for example, have it automatically open in the morning to help me get out of bed.

Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X PRIZE is a $10 million global competition to stimulate innovation and integration of precision diagnostic technologies, making reliable health diagnoses available directly to “health consumers” in their homes.

The dire need for improvements in health and healthcare in the U.S. has captured the attention of government, industry, and private citizens for years. But a viable solution has yet evaded one of the most technologically advanced, educated and prosperous nations on the globe. Integrated diagnostic technology, once available on a consumer mobile device that is easy to use, will allow individuals to incorporate health knowledge and decision-making into their daily lives.

Advances in fields such as artificial intelligence, wireless sensing, imaging diagnostics, lab-on-a-chip, and molecular biology will enable better choices in when, where, and how individuals receive care, thus making healthcare more convenient, affordable, and accessible. The winner will be the team whose technology most accurately diagnoses a set of diseases independent of a healthcare professional or facility, and that provides the best consumer user experience with their device.

It will be Arduino based

Joe writes…

Built the adafruit data logger. Then stuck it in the freezer.

Adafruit Data logging shield for Arduino – v1.0 – Here’s a handy Arduino shield: we’ve had a lot of people looking for a dedicated and well-designed data logging shield. We worked hard to engineer an inexpensive but well-rounded design. Not only is it easy to assemble and customize, it also comes with great documentation and libraries.

You can get going quickly – saving data to files on any FAT16 or FAT32 formatted SD card, to be read by any plotting, spreadsheet or analysis program. We even have a tutorial on how to use two free software programs to plot your data The included Real Time Clock timestamps all your data with the current time, so that you know precisely what happened when!

Please note that this item does not come with an Arduino (you’ll need one to use with the shield), or an SD card. It does come with the RTC battery, however. The kit is un-assembled, You’ll need some basic soldering skills to put it together, but even if you don’t have much experience you can get it done in under 1 hour.

• SD card interface works with FAT16 or FAT32 formatted cards. 3.3v level shifter circuitry prevents damage to your SD card
• Real time clock (RTC) keeps the time going even when the Arduino is unplugged. The battery backup lasts for years
• Included libraries and example code for both SD and RTC mean you can get going quickly
• Prototyping area for soldering connectors, circuitry or sensors.
• Onboard 3.3v regulator is both a reliable reference voltage and also reliably runs SD cards that require a lot of power to run
• An Arduino with a ’328 chip is pretty much required, you can get an upgrade chip from us if you have an older Arduino (such as NG/Diecimila)

For more information, including libraries, schematics and examples see the data logger shield webpage

therainbowmachine.com via Hack a Day.

The display consists of addressable RGB LED strips and an Arduino from Adafruit, along with the associated support mechanisms for moving the LEDs. The real magic is carried out by the LPD8806 light painting library, also from Adafruit, which enables the RainBroz to create all sorts of images with little fuss.

Check out the videos below for all the inside and out details.

More information can be found on osPID.com.

via Brett Beauregard and RocketScream

Pololu – How an idea becomes a product via Mike.

The Wixel Shield for Arduino that we released… represents a personal milestone because of what I did not do on it: the shield is the first electronic product made by Pololu that I did not design. That’s not to say I did not have some input on it or that other engineers here did not have substantial contributions to other products, but the Wixel Shield is a first because the basic product concept, the circuit design, and physical implementation (i.e. the PCB layout) were all done by someone else. We also just finished a big facility expansion that was taking up a lot of my attention this year, so I have some more time now to think about our design process and what it takes to go from a new idea to a finished product.

In the Interest of Future Flying Objects: XBypass @ equals zero.

…I wanted to satisfy one of my persistent self-stabilizing-flying-thing itches: how to pass control inputs from a handheld  radio to the flying thing in question without having it process several consecutive servo pulse lengths. For the most common & simplest Arduino-compatible balancing algorithms, this limits the maximum control update frequency to 50hz, since the microcontroller has to actually measure 10 milliseconds of pulse commands (for, say, up to 5 or 6 channels) out of every 20 milliseconds. The remaining time is often taken up by software floating point multiplication and division.

The reason it takes so much of the loop time is because the abomination that is Arduino’s pulseIn() command. It’s a “busy wait” loop that sits and increments a counter while the pulse is being detected. It’s neither interrupt based nor uses the hardware timers (the loop is timed empirically). So while taking in a servo pulsewidth, the microcontroller can literally do nothing else. A little inefficient, in my mind.

Kitty Twitty Cat Toy @ Make: Projects. Marc writes -

About 2 months ago, after years of begging and pleading from my family, I reluctantly agreed to get another cat from the local shelter. We already have a menagerie of beasts that share our home, but for some reason they felt we needed another.

I admit, I do like our new addition to the family. Chester is a spunky little stray who’s always looking for fun. Even if it means knocking a few things off my desk as I write this article. The only problem is, when my wife goes in to work, she misses her new cat and always wants to know his whereabouts.

She used to ask me for updates, but after a while I realized that I needed to make something that would take me out of the loop, and let the cat communicate with my wife directly via twitter.com. I needed a Twittering cat toy. And that’s how Kitty Twitty came to fruition, after some basic soldering and crafting with just a few parts.

Use an Arduino with with USB HID support to control a project in Git…

The project provides a device that allows for a user configurable Git hub repository to be interacted with via a series buttons, switch, and many other I/O electronics. This is very similar to the alias process in Unix.

You’ll be able to press buttons:
1. Clone reposity
2. Goto Project
3. Get Changes
4. Find New
5. Merge New
6. Show Branches
7. Diff
8. Commit
9. Push

In the future yes/no, and enter buttons could be added. Lot’s of fun options.

Solar PV Monitoring System / OpenEnergyMonitor. Glyn writes -

Here is the documentation for a solar PV monitoring system that’s been developed as part of the OpenEnergyMonitor project. It’s based on Arduino and is fully open-source; hardware, firmware and web application.

The system monitors both generation and consumption and gives the user a clear indication of when their household electricity demands are being met by their solar PV array (green light) or when their not (red light). The wireless display also shows how much electricity is currently being exported or imported. Monitoring data is also posted on-line by a wireless
web-connected base-station to our powerful open-source web-application emoncms.

This development is part of the actively on-going OpenEnergyMonitor project to design and build open-source tools for the monitoring, visualization and control of energy.

sowbug/TribeDuino – GitHub via HaD.

TribeDuino is a proof of concept that uses an Arduino to read a Korg Monotribe audio-encoded firmware file. It doesn’t do anything with the data except calculate a checksum to prove that it read it correctly. The program works by connecting an Arduino to an MP3 player of some kind via an audio patch cable, and then playing the firmware audio file so that the Arduino can hear it.

See also – AUDIOINO, the Arduino with audio bootloader.

Why spend time in a crowded and cold times square when you can make your OWN Times Square LED ball? Perfect for new years eve, disco parties, weddings, raves, bar mitzvahs, or just a romantic night in. This DIY LED Disco Ball is made using Adafruit’s 12mm LED pixels, an Arduino and two 2.4GHz XBee’s (for wireless disco control!). The LED pattern is controlled by the open source graphics language, Processing so it works on Windows, Mac or Linux computers. The ball pattern is made of a dozen laser cut acrylic panels that are ziptied together and the hanging cord is also the power supply cable (HD video here).

We’ll have a full tutorial after the new year so stay tuned and get your leisure suit to the cleaners!

Contains:
12mm Diffused Digital RGB LED Pixels (Strand of 25) – WS2801
Arduino Uno R3 (Atmega328 – assembled)
XBee Module – Series 01 – XB24-AWI-001
XBee Adapter kit – v1.1
USB XBee Adapter

Github:
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-X2-Time-Ball

Visualizing the logistic map with a microcontroller. utku writes -

The logistic map is one of the simplest nonlinear dynamical systems that clearly exhibit the route to chaos. In this paper, we explored the evolution of the logistic map using an open-source microcontroller connected to an array of light emitting diodes (LEDs). We divided the one dimensional interval [0, 1] into ten equal parts, and associated and LED to each segment. Every time an iteration took place a corresponding LED turned on indicating the value returned by the logistic map. By changing some initial conditions of the system, we observed the transition from order to chaos exhibited by the map.

Master Control Project @ Transmissions from Planet Stephanie.

Last weekend I finally mostly-finished the project I’ve been working on, on and off, for the last several months. My Master Control Project, or MCP*, was designed to be a central controller and information display that would sit on my desk in my livingroom, and give me all sorts of useful information while allowing me to control various things.

The idea grew out of my DIY thermostat project – after getting a taste of what could be done with an Arduino and an ethernet connection, I wanted more!

This is so cool, check out the entire project post!

NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Mega 2560 R3 (Atmega2560 – assembled). This is the new Arduino Mega R3. NEW VERSION! This is the Arduino Mega R3. The Arduino Mega 2560 is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega2560. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs (hardware serial ports), a 16 MHz crystal oscillator, a USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; simply connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it with a AC-to-DC adapter or battery to get started. The Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.

In stock and shipping now.

A quiet holiday provided some much-needed time for making progress on the New Year’s disco ball — officially now titled the “X2 Time Ball.”

The discosohedron Time Ball will have 120 RGB LED pixels on its surface…that’s nearly as many as the Adavison video wall, and faced similar problems of feeding power to than many hungry LEDs (nearly 7 Amps worth!). Adavision used an ATX computer power supply…an excellent frugality hack because these power supplies are plentiful and cheap (sometimes reclaimed from old equipment). But as a “fashion item,” the Time Ball would benefit from clean cabling…not to mention that the loud fans in some ATX power supplies can be like working next to a jet engine.

Since ample power is going to be a recurring need as customers’ LED projects grow in scope and sophistication, we’ve been evaluating different options, such as this laptop-style power brick:

The brick is compact, fanless, provides 5 Volts at up to 10 Amps, uses the same 5.5/2.1mm power connector as the smaller 2 Amp supply and is compatible with the screw terminal adapter. Looks like a winner all around, so expect to see this in the store some time in the weeks ahead! (Until then, Ask an Engineer viewers know the drill: “It’s not out yet, so don’t ask.”)

A lot of devices use this same plug, including our 9V and 12V power supplies. In order to avoid expensive blue smoke and heartbreak, I’ve gotten into the habit of immediately labeling all power supplies near the tip so they don’t get mixed up with the wrong equipment. Over-voltage will kill your LEDs!

For distributing power, Adavision required soldering pairs of power wires to ATX power cables. Wanting something that could be more easily dismantled and reconfigured in future projects, I’ve been examining alternatives such as these barrier strips and jumpers:

The barrier strips are fairly common and can be found at Radio Shack, the electrical department in better-stocked hardware stores, or various online sources. Meanwhile, the 8-position jumper (which converts the barrier strip into a single “bus bar”) is seemingly milled from a single block of unobtanium or something. The only place I’ve located this elusive item so far is…drumroll for irony…Radio Shack!

Two six-position barrier strips are used, one each for +5V and ground. Terminal spades have been crimped onto the power leads for five LED strands, as well as leads for the microcontroller and heavy-gauge wire to the screw terminal adapter for the power supply. The jumper strips are cut down to size with beefy wire cutters. Plastic covers will later be added to avoid electrical shorts:

The project provided an opportunity to test something out that I’ve been eager to try. If you’ve worked with longer LED strands powered from one end, you may have observed a phenomenon where the furthest LEDs become progressively discolored, due to the voltage drop along the length of the wire. This is why I’ve been adamant about limiting strands to about 25 LEDs (or 1 meter with the LPD8806 strips) before adding additional power taps. The voltage drop on shorter strands is less noticeable.

A common work-around is to power longer strands from both ends. Generally speaking, this probably works well enough in most situations, but it does leave the door open to possible gremlins later when you least expect it. Ground loops — multiple paths to ground — could make the data signals more susceptible to interference. Everything works fine on your desk, then you set it up elsewhere — perhaps there’s an unseen microwave oven on the other side of the wall — and are up ’til 3am looking for the bug you think is in the software.

To avoid this with Adavision, strands were powered from the middle — 25 pixels to the left, 25 to the right. Limiting the strand length makes the voltage drop less obvious:

If you’ve been to the west coast Maker Faire then you may have met my friend Lindsay and his Electric Giraffe, 17 feet tall and covered head-to-toe in LEDs. Needless to say, he’s had a bit of experience with LEDs and long distances:

A simple trick he showed me is to power the strands from opposite ends: +5V at one end, ground at the other. Because the power to every LED then passes through an equal length of wire, the voltage drop is consistent. There’s still some voltage drop — you can’t change the laws of physics — but it’s uniform along the entire strand and all the LEDs are equally bright. And no ground loop:

Five such strands are used in the Time Ball. The clock and data wires are joined from each strand to the next to form a continuous 125 LED strand with five +5V and five ground wires leading to the power blocks. Only 120 of these LEDs are needed for the ball…the rest could be cut off and used in a small project, but in case a complete strand was needed later I opted to leave them attached, stuffed inside the ball and not addressed by the software.

Updated! We just added the Arduino R3 outline to our EAGLE library for making Arduino shields that use the new pins.

The Audrey Braille Display – LIVE! @ Utopia Mechanicus. David writes -

It’s taken far longer than I wanted, but I am finally looking at a finished prototype for theAudrey Braille Display. Made of 3mm Acrylic laser-cut pieces (via the Victoria Makerspace laser cutter), it uses two stepper motors, connects to an Arduino (and LadyAda Motor Driver board), and displays 5 characters.

Jason writes -

In this Instrutable I will show you how to turn a regular cheap decorative artificial Christmas Tree into an awesome animatronic robot platform for the geek in the family.

In the second installment, I will show you how you can incorporate speech recognition.

It looks inconspicuously like a regular little Christmas tree, but then magically comes to life as a fun lovable talking robot!

Google’s Chromebooks should come with Arduino 1.0 installed and come with an Arduino. We’d like to see this happen for the OLPC as well, last night a show-and-tell presenter was sharing a lot of sensor hardware work for OLPCs he was working on and it occurred to us that there are a few ways to get more Arduinos out there being used for a variety of uses.

Wouldn’t it be great to get (or give) a computer set up with Arduino 1.0, an Arduino, processing, some gEDA/kiCAD/blender/inkscape + fritzing?

the party starter. Uses a Waveshield! Grissini writes -

Another project I threw together using your amazing Wave Shield.  Ready for the New Year before Christmas! Party on. A desktop motorized musical disco ball.  Great for holiday parties, impromptu dance-offs, and Tuesday afternoons.   Bling, Music, Arduino, and glitter covered styrofoam; this Instructable has got what you need to get your boogie on.  Fires need help go get going, so do parties.   I recently moved from Hartford where my boys @HPSU(http://hartfordpartystarters.org/) would get it started every week.  Now I live in boring Indiana, where there are no parties(Save church socials).  With that in mind and the Party Season upon us, Lets make.  

Festivize your bench this holiday season with an oscilloscope Christmas tree:

When I was a little kid, my dad worked at Bell Labs. Every year around Christmas, we’d go visit him at work. One memory which has always stuck with me from my holiday visits was seeing a Christmas tree on an oscilloscope. I was pretty amazed by it. Engineers are a funny bunch — they tend to celebrate holidays in the most uniquely nerdy and wonderful ways, just like kids. When I recently acquired a new ‘scope and wanted to familiarize myself with it, I knew exactly what my test circuit was going to be.

In honor of the nameless BTL engineer whose scope scribbling captivated me as a child, here we are. Maybe the same thing will happen for some other kid. There are a lot of holiday parties coming up. You could put this on one of your scopes at work or at your hackerspace, and some other kid will see it, and it’ll fire their imagination too. It looks pretty neat at any rate, and it’s downright fascinating after a few fortified egg nogs.

Schematics, code and further ramblings over on my blog.

Rob writes in…

My wife demanded Christmas lights on the house this year so I gave her huge, bright nerdiness!

The project concept here is pretty simple — it’s basically a motorized turntable for taking 360-degree photos of objects — but this video is just superb. From Scriblab Studios:

I thought its time to learn something new in my sparetime so the TurnMachine is my first attemp in building usefull machines with the help of the Arduino development plattform. Arduino is an electronics plattform made especially for artists and people who want to learn microcontroller programming the first time without the hassle of studying electronics in depth. I build this as a finger exercise for future projects and ideas for physical computing and art.

Furthermore I would really like to build more physical modells in Fimo/Clay etc. for concept design so I needed a nice and automated way of making a presentation of these. In a nutshell: the machine turns the table in a predefined step length (eg. 25 steps, its capable of a max. of 200 steps per revolution, min. step size 1.9°), sends a signal to the attached camera which then takes a photo and turns to the next step until it has finished the choosen steps. Im a big fan of automation softwarewise, so I love the idea of automate physical things!

Nicely done.

Kevin writes -

Need some sounds for your Adafruit Wave Shield ? Steven at Code in the Attic has a MacOS Classic Sound Pack. Just make sure you visit http://bit.ly/vnlUrJ for the correct file conversion steps.

Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit – v1.1

Adding quality audio to an electronic project is surprisingly difficult. Here is a shield for Arduinos that solves this problem. It can play up to 22KHz,
12bit uncompressed audio files of any length. It’s low cost, available as an easy-to-make kit. It has an onboard DAC, filter and op-amp for high quality output. Audio files are read off of an SD/MMC card, which are available at nearly any store. Volume can be controlled with the onboard thumbwheel potentiometer.

This shield is a kit, and comes with all parts you need to build it. Arduino, SD card, tools, speaker and headphones are not included. It is fairly easy to construct and anyone with a successful soldering project under their belt should be able to build it.

The shield comes with an Arduino library for easy use; simply drag uncompressed wave files onto the SD card and plug it in. Then use the library to play audio when buttons are pressed, or when a sensor goes off, or when serial data is received, etc. Audio is played asynchronously as an interrupt, so the Arduino can perform tasks while the audio is playing.

• Can play any uncompressed 22KHz, 16bit, mono Wave (.wav) files of any size. While it isnt CD quality, it is certainly good enough to play music, have spoken word, or audio effects. Check out the demo video/audio at the webpage
• Output is mono, into L and R channels, standard 3.5mm headphone jack and a connection for a speaker that is switched on when the headphones are unplugged
• Files are read off of a FAT16-formatted SD/MMC card 
• Included library and examples makes playing audio easy
• Please note that the library is rather bulky, requiring 10K of flash and more than 1/2 K of RAM for buffering audio. It works fine using an ATmega168-based

Getting Started- Vacuum Fluorescent Display & Teensyduino | A work in progress….

This is a quick tutorial on getting a VFD working with an Arduino (or Arduino equivalent system). VFDs are beautiful devices with a wonderful hexagonal mesh of wires and this lovely green/blue glow. Operating at around 5V, they offer a nice alternative to high voltage Nixie tubes, while still retaining a lot of the charm.

This tutorial will show you how to connect a Arduino-like device to a VFD display as well as a basic program to display text.

Uses teensy, and VFD display from our shop! Nice looking tutorial w/fritzing

Idea of civilians using drone aircraft may soon fly with FAA @ latimes.com via Twitter.

The Federal Aviation Administration plans to propose new rules for the use of small drones in January, a first step toward clearing the way for police departments, farmers and others to employ the technology.

We’ll have our “educational mini UAV” skill badges in stock soon For purchase and to earn!

Please welcome ArduPilotMega 2.0! – DIY Drones. Jordi writes -

APM 2.0 is the culmination of almost a year of hard work. We wanted to make it perfect and we finally have it, we are pushing the limits of AVR and Arduino. I’m sure you will love it, and it’s designed to cover all the DIY community expectations (including those that are not so DIY and are only interested for something that doesn’t require soldering skills). 

Adafruit has the new Arduino R3s in stock and they will ship in all new orders placed today 12/1/11 (December 1st) in ALL boards, packs and stand-alone units going forward.

What’s new in the Arduino Uno R3? Ladyada put together a guide to help everyone to assist everyone.

There are a few changes in the Uno (R3) here is what they are:

1. The USB controller chip has moved from an atmega8u2 (8K flash) to an atmega16u2 (16K flash). This does not mean that you have more flash or RAM for your sketches this upgrade is for the USB interface chip only. In theory this will mean that it will be easier to have low level USB interfaces such as MIDI/Joystick/Keyboard available. However these are only theoretical at this time, there is no example code or firmware which will actually do this.
2. There are three more breakout pins on the PCB, next to the AREF pin there is are two I2C pins (SDA/SCL) – this is a duplication of the Analog 4 and 5 pins. There is not an extra I2C interface or anything, its just that they made a copy of those pins there for future shields since the I2C pins are in a different place on Mega. There is also an IOREF pin which is next to the Reset pin – this is to let shields know what the running I/O pin voltage is on the board (for the UNO, its 5V). Again, this is a duplication of the power pin, it does not add voltage level shifting to the UNO.
3. The RESET button has moved to be next to the USB connector, this makes it easier to press when a shield is on top.

Here is what didn’t change in the UNO:

1. Processor size and speed – its the same ATMega328P running at 16MHz that we’ve had since the Duemilanove. Your code will not run faster or better on the R3
2. Same number of pins – no extra pins are added EVEN THOUGH THERE ARE MORE BREAKOUTS (see above!)
3. Board size and shape – same size as before
4. Shield compatibility – Every shield that works and plugs into the UNO R1/R2 should be able to work fine with the R3
5. Driver – the driver is the same
6. Upload speed – same upload speed and technique

All of our Adafruit shields work with R3. If you have any questions, post up in the comments – we’ll do our best to get them right away!

If you want to pick up an Arduino R3 now, visit the store!

Adafruit now has the new Arduino Uno R3 in stock AND more good news – Arduino 1.0 now available.. David writes -

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!

Fantastic milestone for an amazing project, from a great group.

Todd writes in!

Here’s a link to a video demo of a Siri controlled Ardunio media remote. Adafruit’s Raw IR decoder sketch was used to help decode the IR protocol of a Comcast remote.

Arduino 1.0 release preview… if you want to check it out!

Getting Started with Parallax. This is a really impressive wiki filled with examples, code and more. Parallax is hands down one of the best “documenters” of learning electronics – they’re also including Arduino code examples too…

Welcome to the Parallax KickStart wiki! Here you’ll find dozens of programming examples to help you jump start your use of Parallax sensors and accessories sold through retail stores such as RadioShack, Microcenter, and Fry’s Electronics.

These KickStarts give you hands-on help for connecting R/C servos, GPS modules, accelerometers, digital compasses, ultrasonic distance sensors, XBee wireless radios, and more to three of the world’s most popular microcontrollers: the BASIC Stamp 2, Parallax Propeller, and Arduino.

KickStarts are basic, no-frills coding samples, made so you can get started, fast. Each example takes no more than a few minutes to set up and try.

Many of the Parallax sensors and accessories offer enhanced features and functionality not covered in the example code. So when you’re ready to move on and explore more, follow the links at the bottom of each KickStart example page for additional info.

KickStarts provide working code and connection diagrams for the Parallax Propeller QuickStart, BASIC Stamp 2 HomeWork Board, and Arduino Uno. 

In most cases, the programming code will also work for variations of these microcontroller development boards, such as the BASIC Stamp Board of Education. Adapt the wiring connections as needed.

Visit.

The Googly Eye Shield For Arduino @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Introducing what is arguably the most important Arduino accessory ever created: the Googly Eye Shield for Arduino. It’s an (extremely simple) open source hardware kit, but we feel that it fills an important niche. We’ve put together a promotional video to explain.

Arduino — Visual Identity preview via Massimo. Bello!

Kevin writes -

Just got this in the mail. Thanks for OSH and thanks to +RadioShack for the support.

Wow!