John Coster-Mullen takes a break from trucking to build his own nuke. John Coster-Mullen drives a truck for a living and reverse-engineers America’s early nuclear weapons in his spare time. Last year he published a book on how to build your own atom bomb.
2 connections for 5V ‘hobby’ servos connected to the Arduino’s high-resolution dedicated timer – no jitter!
4 H-Bridges: L293D chipset provides 0.6A per bridge (1.2A peak) with thermal shutdown protection, internal kickback protection diodes. Can run motors on 4.5VDC to 36VDC.
Up to 4 bi-directional DC motors with individual 8-bit speed selection (so, about 0.5% resolution)
Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil or interleaved stepping.
Pull down resistors keep motors disabled during power-up
Big terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (10-22AWG) and power
Arduino reset button brought up top (Diecimila/Duemilanove only)
2-pin terminal block and jumper to connect external power, for seperate logic/motor supplies
Tested compatible with Diecimila/Duemilanove (NG is next!)
Download the easy-to-use Arduino software library, check out the examples and you’re ready to go!
The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.
One thing we noticed here at Adafruit – once we started measuring our power usage with the Tweet-a-watt project we actually decreased power consumption – part of it was because we knew we were measuring it and each month when the power bill came we saw the bill go down.
Tweet-a-Watt is a DIY wireless power monitoring system. The project uses an ‘off the shelf’ power monitor called the Kill-a-Watt and adds wireless reporting. Each plug transmits the power usage at that outlet to a central computer receiver. The receiver can then log, graph and report the data. This pack contains nearly everything* necessary to build a single outlet monitor and receiver. To monitor additional outlets, you will need an add-on transmitter pack. One outlet can monitor up to 1500 Watts.
Triple-axis accelerometer with 3 analog outputs for X, Y and Z axis measurements on a 0.75″x0.75″ breakout board. The ADXL335 is the latest and greatest from Analog Devices. Runs from 1.8-3.6 volts (3.3 is suggested), with ratiometric output. That means that 0g measurement output is always at half of the supply voltage Vdd, -3g is at 0v and 3g is at Vdd with full scaling in between. Fully assembled and tested. Comes with 6 pin 0.1″ standard header in case you want to use it with a breadboard or perfboard. 4 x 0.125″ mounting holes for easy attachment. $20 in the Adafruit store.
We visited the NYC Zine Fest ’09 at the Brooklyn Lyceum – one of the most interesting and “old school” forms of publishing. What zines’ did you grow up with, make or know about? Post up in the comments!
A simple setup built to take timelapse photos on a camera without an intervalometer. It consists of a servo, a arduino, and a HD44780 controlled LCD. For anyone with newer cameras, the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK, Google it) allows intervalometer scripts to be used on cameras, unfortunately this model that I had around does not support this feature.
We’re excited to announce our partnership with the folks at Seeed Studio (home of the excellent Seeeduino) to put the Bus Pirate v2go into production! The pre-order period ends July 3rd. The price is $30 including worldwide shipping. The board pictured above is a hand soldered prototype, but the ones sold by Seeed are completely factory assembled.
This is the first officially produced piece of Hack a Day hardware. Depending on its success, we’ll be able to put many future designs into production. Read more about the Bus Pirate in our latest How-to. Thank you for your support!
We are extremely pleased to welcome BlinkM to the Adafruit store! Have you wanted an LED that can fade from deep red to bright purple? Flash like a police light? Turn on with the subtle fade of an incandescent bulb? Flicker like a candle? That’s BlinkM.
The BlinkM is attached to an ultra bright wide-angle RGB LED to a microcontroller. Using BlinkM Sequencer, our software that fuses a color picker with a drum machine, you program BlinkM to be any color, and blink and fade in virtually any pattern.
When you’ve programmed your BlinkM, you unplug it and pop it into your project. Apply 5 volts, and it does its thing, whether that’s glowing your favorite pinkish purple, or pulse like an old neon light.
Quick Start requirements:
No programming experience!
Arduino I/O board (not included, and you only need one to program any number of BlinkMs)
I have spent the last several weeks building a device to automatically dispense dry food to our two adorable cats. The cats need to be ona diet due to weight issues. So a certain amount of food must be given to them throughout the day.
i learned about the Arduino board soon before starting this project. So this little hobby has given me the perfect opportunity to learn more about this amazing device and its ever-expanding capabilities.
The cat feeder is basically a cylindrical container that has an opening on its side. The cylinder rests on its side and is supported by wooden dowles and rollerblade ballbearings which allow it to rotate with ease.
The rotation is provided by a wheel attached to a small motor. the signal and power is provided by an Arduino Duemilanove.
This was my first kit and my second attempt at soldering and it worked first try so I would consider that a big success. I had already put it all together before realizing that I didn’t have any pix of the underside of the PCB. Just as well, it’s functional but not pretty.
One thing I changed from the instructions was to use a dremel tool to make the hole for the USB port instead of using snips to cut through the top of the case. I think it looks better and it should be more sturdy.
Looking forward to more electronics kits, this one was a breeze. I need to resurrect one of my old laptops and move it out the garage. The kit instructions were online only and I don’t want to take my good laptop out to the garage amid the dirt/metal filings/sawdust. I ended up printing out the main soldering instructions.
Thanks LadyAda and Adafruit Industries for a great starter kit.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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