“If innovation was required, it would have to be created.”
I’m guessing the intended audience for this piece was prospective developers and enterprise clients, because it goes into far more technical detail than a mere consumer ad. It’s a neat snapshot of history with a good deal of information, and the music is just begging for a Glitch Mob remix.
NEW PRODUCT – 3×8 Male Header – 4 pack. Three rows!? Yes! These chunks of 0.1″ header has yet-another-row – handy for when you want to connect cables that come in sets of three, like perhaps sensors, or servos. These plug into any standard 0.1″ spacing perf-boards or other PCBs and work nicely with our female-ended wire sets. Comes in a set of four pieces, each piece is 3 rows by 8 rows. You can stack these next to each other in any direction.
NEW PRODUCT – Breadboard-friendly SPDT Slide Switch. These nice switches are perfect for use with breadboard and perfboard projects. They have 0.1″ spacing and snap in nicely into a solderless breadboard. They’re easy to switch no matter what size fingers you have, but not so easy that they’ll get flipped by accident. Work great as on/off switches or selector switches, the middle pin is connected to either the left or right pin depending on which way the slider is pushed.
NEW PRODUCT – PS/2 Wired Connector – Panel Mount MiniDIN. Although you may not see PS/2 keyboards & mice as often on desktop computers, there’s still tons of them out there, and they’re really easy to interface to a microcontroller. PS/2 devices are powered by 5V and use two data pins to communicate back and forth. There’s tons of example code out there for every kind of microcontoller (including Arduinos) for keyboard and mouse interfacing.
So all you need to do is connect from the PS/2 plug to your breadboard. Unfortunately, these plugs are not breadboard friendly. That’s why we really dig this connector. It’s sturdy and easy to panel mount, and has pre-soldered wires connected to the 6 contacts (of which 4 are used). We thought it very nice and easy to use!
For PS/2 devices:
Green wire is +5V
Black wire is Ground
Brown wire is Data
Yellow wire is Clock
White wire is sometimes Mouse Data for 2-in-1 splitter cables
Red wire is sometimes Mouse Clock for 2-in-1 splitter cables
NEW PRODUCT – Netduino Go! Starter Pack (Modular .NET microcontroller)This starter pack comes with all the stuff you’ll want to hit the ground runing with Netduino Go! Included is the Go! mainboard, the Shield Base, a Button module, a Potentiometer module, an RGB LED module, 4 Go! cables and 3′ microUSB cable to connect to your computer for programming and power.
You asked for a Netduino with more speed, more flash, and more RAM.
You asked for a Netduino with more GPIOs, more serial ports, more analog inputs, and more PWMs.
Some of you aren’t yet comfortable picking up a soldering iron, or you don’t want to spend your time calculating resistor band colors. You want a plug-and-play Netduino.
We’ve been listening. And together with several members of the Netduino community, we’ve been crafting radical new hardware.
Today, we introduce a Netduino with more speed, flash, and RAM. And a Netduino with support for more GPIOs, serial ports, analog inputs, and PWMs. And today, we introduce a plug-and-play Netduino. Best of all, these are all the same board!
Netduino Go has four times the speed (168MHz), six times the code space (384KB), and twice the available RAM (100KB+) of Netduino Plus.
And with Netduino Go, we’ve virtualized all the peripherals. So you simply pick what you need and plug it in. Each module has a small microchip which works together with the mainboard.
Want to use a relay? Just plug it in. Need six RGB LEDs? No problem. How about a touchscreen? One cable, plug and play.
Alongside Netduino Go, we’re introducing a very cool accessory. We call it the Shield Base. You plug it into your Netduino Go and it provides you with the latest Arduino pinout, 6 PWMs, 6 ADCs, and a handful of GPIOs. To use it, you just create InputPorts, AnalogInputs, etc. using the standard NETMF classes.
All Netduino Go hardware is production hardware. We’re shipping the production Shield Base hardware with early beta firmware so that we can get wide feedback on this new virtualization technology. And to say thank you for beta testing the Shield Base, we’ve temporarily upgraded its 128KB-flash MCU to a full-blown 512KB-flash 120MHz Cortex-M3 microcontroller. You can connect it to power and a USB-TTL serial cable and use it as a traditional Netduino if you’d like as well–while enjoying its 3 serial ports and other new enhancements. Both the Netduino Go and the Shield Base run production versions of .NET MF 4.2 QFE1 (RTM).
Kiss Controller is a game input device that controls the direction and speed of a bowling ball while users are kissing.
Recently, with the improvement of camera capabilities and related tracking systems, game input systems such as Nintendo Wii controllers or Microsoft Kinect games are incorporating more body positions and movements. Kiss Controller is an experimental project that allows users to control a bowling game by moving their tongues while kissing. Unlike existing game input devices, Kiss Controller seeks to generate the emotional experience of a kinetic act while users play the game rather than control games with their body.
The Kiss Controller interface has two components: a customized headset that functions as a sensor receiver and a magnet that provides sensor input. The user affixes a magnet to his/ her tongue with Fixodent. Magnetic field sensors are attached to the end of the headset and positioned in front of the mouth. As the user moves her tongue, this creates varying magnetic fields that are used to control games.
If we look at a cross-section of EL wire you see that is core is made of copper:
According to Dan Ports Electroluminescent Wire paper, the core of his double core wire was ~22 gauge, or 0.64mm. If we look at a comparison of standard steel and nylon guitar string sizes, we can deduce if the tensile strength of the el wire could withstand tuning:
Steel (Regular Light):
E – 0.254mm
B – 0.3302mm
G – 0.4318mm
D – 0.6604mm (wound)
A – 0.9144mm (wound)
E – 1.1684mm (wound)
Acoustic (Light):
E – 0.3048mm
B – 0.5334mm
G – 0.635mm (wound)
D – 0.8128mm (wound)
A – 1.0668mm (wound)
E – 1.3462mm (wound)
Now we need to figure out what the tension exerted on the strings during tuning is. Liutaio Mottola has a great string tension calculator that should get us in the ballpark.
Using Liutaio’s calculator and D’Addario’s string tension guide, it looks like for a steel stringed guitar you will have a max of 19.5 lbs and 7.08 lbs for the nylon acoustic.
Now if we look at the copper, with an approximate UTS of 220 MPa or ~32000 PSI, and use Liutaio’s calculator stating S = UTS * Pi * (D/2)^2, we get a breaking stregth of:
S = 32000PSI * 3.14 * (0.0253in/2)^2
S = ~16.10 lbs
So from our deduction, it looks like you could use EL wire to string an acoustic guitar, and certainly warrants further testing. Some of the hurdles you are going to run into is dealing with the elasticity and spring properties of copper. There is a reason copper is onto used for modern guitar strings. Also, winding on the tuning posts, which could be overcome by soldering the ends to piano wire, and stringing the piano wire through the post. Finally, electronic interference with the pickups. But this shouldn’t be a big problem if you are using a raw acoustic
I am going to try and pick up some as well for my acoustic and give it a try. If the copper can maintain tune, you certainly would have a wicked looking guitar, or at least great show piece!
Alternatively, Dr. Strings has black light active strings which give the same effect with less hackery, but where’s the fun in that?
I hope this answers you question, and good luck with the idea!
Don’t forget, everyone is invited to ask a question!
“Ask an Educator” questions are answered by Adam Kemp, a high school teacher who has been teaching courses in Energy Systems, Systems Engineering, Robotics and Prototyping since 2005.
We’re making a series of videos we’re sending to our customers and posting in the support sections to make using the Adafruit site even easier. This first video is how to track your order, print a new invoice, and get support for your order with Adafruit.com.
This week on the NewsHour, we examine why women lag behind in some areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics(also known as STEM) and what we lose by losing women in the hard sciences. Join us for a live chat at noon ET Friday, April 27, with Judy Woodruff on what can be done to encourage more young women to pursue careers in STEM fields. Submit your questions below or tweet them to@NewsHour using the hashtag #WomenInSTEM.
From the first time I saw the D-Pad on the RGB LCD shield, I knew I wanted to play a game on the Arduino. After a bit of thinking, I settled on Hunt the Wumpus as a good fit:
Different screens can have different backlight colors
The LCD is large enough for selecting caves to move to or shoot into
The Wumpus, bat, and pit can all have custom characters
While coding Hunt the Wumpus, I ran into a problem with one of my functions. I wanted to use an enum to represent different hazards (bats, pits, Wumpus) and have a common function to check a given cave for hazards and return the enum of the first one found. This helps with showing hazards in neighboring caves as well as checking a cave before the player moves into it.
I started by declaring a function which returns an enum:
Unfortunately, this resulted in the following error message:
Hunt_The_Wumpus:-1: error: 'HazardType' does not name a type
It turns out that this is a known issue with a documented workaround and the fix was as simple as adding a header file to my project which contains the enum declaration and a function prototype:
This week we’re happy to update that list of toolkits with a suite of materials focused on connecting any Android device (mobile or tablet) with the Arduino ADK microcontroller, with the Processing language to tie them together. The materials – a combination of “how-to” installation guides, working Arduino and Processing sample code, and educational exercises – walk through the set-up process and provide some basic starters for making a functional application or game. The 25 samples include modules such as the code you need to create a “color picker” on the Android and have it drive the color of an LED attached to the Arduino, or to send an RFID number from a scanner to the phone, or to create a basic oscilloscope by graphing the output of a potentiometer on the Android screen. It’s tailored to get beginners going, or to give more experienced coders a quick leg up in using the three (Android, Processing, and Arduino) together.
I’ve been playing with Arduinos for a wee while now. These are small microprocessors you can build things with. They use the idea of shields which are small daughter boards that connect to the Arduino to provide extra hardware to do useful things with. One shield I have been playing with the the Adafruit Waveshield. This little board allows you to hook an SD card up to the Arduino and play .wav files from it. These are in mono, 22kHz format. Not HiFi but good enough for little projects. I decided to use one in my old phone to make it play music.
This is about the phone in my old Austin 7 garage where I am building an Austin 7 special. I don’t actually like phones (horrible, nasty things) so this one never actually did anything useful. I used an Arduino and a Adafruit Waveshield to make it into a musical phone playing suitably period songs.
I’ve been reading about this idea through your site and make. It seems my very own Wyoming is going to take up the gauntlet and create a 50% project based curriculum. Watch how many robotics and electronics tech is in the accompanying video. It’s obvious kids like this stuff, and some of us are listening.
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