One of my favorite shooting techniques is focus stacking. Many pictures on Circuits@Home site are made using this technique. I use Helicon Focus for post processing and even though this program has camera control built-in, it obviously requires a computer close to the object of shooting. In order to be able to control my camera in the field, I wanted to replace a laptop with simple lightweight controller able to move focus of camera lens and take pictures between steps. In this article, I will show how to build one from Arduino, USB Host Shield and several small parts.
Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when the devices you’ve built start to talk to each other, things really get interesting. With 33 easy-to-build projects, Making Things Talk shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest.
Maybe you’re a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor the weather in several locations at once. Or a sculptor looking to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands.
Call your home thermostat with a smartphone and change the temperature.
Create your own game controllers that communicate over a network.
Use ZigBee, Bluetooth, Infrared, and plain old radio to transmit sensor data wirelessly.
Work with Arduino 1.0, Processing, and PHP—three easy-to-use, open source environments.
Write programs to send data across the Internet, based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard.
Whether you want to connect simple home sensors to the Internet, or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other gadgets, this book explains exactly what you need.
I have always loved making things. This came fairly naturally since my parents are both supreme makers in their own right. Afer all they taught themselves how to do lost-wax casting so they could make their own wedding rings! Over the last decade though, I’ve done most of my creating with 1s and 0s – lots of software and some generative art, but not many physical objects. That started to change when I got my hands on Issue #1 of Make magazine.
In the years since then I’ve aquired the makings of a halfway decent wood shop and electronics bench, but mostly I’ve just tinkered. I’ve learned a lot and had quite a bit of fun, but haven’t produced many finished projects. I was aquiring the skills, but hadn’t found that proverbial “itch” to scratch.
That changed in 2011 when my wife and I decided to celebrate our 10th anniversary by attending Burning Man. Being that it’s held in the middle of the desert, it gets really dark out there at night. Because of this it’s very important to be lit up so that you’re visible to the other people, cyclists and vehicles. So there was my muse – I wanted to make something for my wife that lit up, was easy to wear, and looked cool. How about some EL wire wings?
EL wire starter pack – Aqua 2.5 meter (8.2 ft). We bumped up the EL to 2.5 meters (the max that the EL inverter is designed for) and now it comes with one end pre-soldered so you can plug it in immediately. Of course, we still include the copper tape and heatshrink so you can work with the EL wire and mod it for your project. All at the same price as before!
NEW PRODUCT – Discover Electronics Kit – 2.0. Discover Electronics Kit contains everything you need to learn the basics of electronics and make your own projects. It contains the most common electronics components as well as a prototyping breadboard for you to get started right away. Easy full color diagrams teach you how to bring your own ideas to life.The Discover electronics kit uses standard components. All of these parts can be used by the beginner or the advanced user. As you grow and learn all of the parts in the kit are still useful in more advanced projects and can be expanded on by using additional parts.
Requires 4 AA batteries. NOT INCLUDED
The kit comes with clear, solderless breadboard and a simple battery pack. Clearly labeled parts and simple directions means you can have your first circuit up and running in minutes.
The manual explains whats going on inside. Illustrations aid in understanding.
Not just an electronics kit; online resources turn the kit into a video course pack.
You can double check your work against the photographs.
Sparkle Labs is made up of designers and teachers. The Discover Electronics Kit is designed to make learning electronics easy and fun. It is a curated selection of the basic parts to get started and learning right away. They are standard components and are still useful when you are ready to build your own projects. More then just a kit, it is an online, video course which you can access here: Discover Electronics Course.
NEW PRODUCT – Geiger Counter Kit – Radiation Sensor. Detect particles and/or make a cool random number generator with this handsome Geiger counter kit. This easy-to-make pack of parts turns a simple Geiger-Muller tube (included) into a portable blink, beeping radiation detector. You can also connect an FTDI friend to the header, to get serial output for datalogging on your computer.
We put this kit together in a couple of hours and hand lots of fun bringing it around and listening for ticking sounds near our smoke detectors, bananas, countertops, Brazil nuts, chunks of Uranium, etc. It includes all components (PCB, tube, & parts) but you will need basic soldering tools and two AAA batteries to complete it.
We had an “Electronic Halloween” contest last week and announced the winner on “Ask an Engineer” last night – and here it is! Congrats M Leone! You won $150 in the Adafruit store!
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! If you entered the contest we’re giving you a gift too, we’ll be emailing everyone this week. Thank you to everyone who entered! After the jump, the rest of the awesome entries!
Do you remember which women have influenced you over the years?
Perhaps your maths teacher, one of your university lecturers, or a colleague?
This Ada Lovelace Day on October 7, share your story about a woman — whether an engineer, a scientist, a technologist or mathematician — who has inspired you to become who you are today. Write a blog post, record a podcast, film a video, draw a comic, or pick any other way to talk about the women who have been guiding lights in your life. Give your heroine the credit she deserves!
Coming soon! Adafruit Motorshield on TV “How Hard Can It Be?” and it’s on the National Geographic Channel…. Vince writes in!
Some of you may know me from my projects in Popular Science magazine, or the videos that I make for Tango Echo, but recently I got the chance to do something even more fun. I hosted a three part special on National Geographic Channel in which we did our DIY best at some big engineering challenges – Flying a house with balloons, exploring the deep ocean with a DIY remotely operated vehicle, and flying a home made rocket to over 50,000 ft.
It has the potential to be a great show for the Maker community. We, the hosts, are actually doing all of the work on these projects and you’re watching our successes and failures as they happen. There’s also enough fun and TV magic thrown in to (hopefully) save it from being incredibly boring. We’re pulling for this to get picked up for a season – if you watch it and like it, please let them know at comments@natgeochannel.com.
The balloon house, which was intended to recreate the animated film Up, was an unexpected sensation around the world, even getting the lead off story on Good Morning America the day after we flew.
The ROV wasn’t as successful a project, but it was at least a nail biter until the bitter end. I was soldering in the parking lot until literally the last second and I did my best to break up the tension on the boat by vomiting over the side, constantly.
The rocket was just flat out, full power, AWESOME. As my co-host Gocke put it, imagine a telephone pole taking off – calculations show that it was doing Mach 1 by the time it had eclipsed it’s own length. We had to get approval from the FAA and all branches of the military to even attempt this.
On the ROV episode, I used a number of parts from Adafruit. I controlled the relays that drove the trolling motors with the motor shield and I used two Arduinos – one down on the sub and one on the boat in a control box – that communicated via a serial connection over about 2 miles of fiber optic cable. You’ll actually see some of those parts being assembled in my Hawaiian hotel room on the show tonight – 7pm EST / PST on the National Geographic Channel.
The first two episodes have already premiered, but there will be encore presentations:
Up House – Wed October 12 at 7pm ET/PT
Homemade Rocket – Wed October 19 at 7pm ET/PT
DIY Robo-Sub – Wed October 26 at 7pm ET/PT
NEW PRODUCT – Adalight – DIY Ambient Monitor Lighting Project Pack. Build your own ambient-light addition for a monitor or media PC television with the Adalight project pack! This project pack is for our “Adalight” project tutorial. By running the Processing code on your computer, the halo of LEDs will follow the screen colors to provide an awesome ambient light display that adds pop to TV shows, movies or games!
I thought I would write a quick tribute to Adafruit. This is one of those sites that I wasn’t aware of when I got started, but only found when searching for general tutorials on the internet. Adafruit is a supplier of some really cool kits, and some great parts. In fact, I may have to revise my previous posting to include this one.
While their parts selection may not be nearly as wide as say, RobotShop, and is by no means intended to compete with the likes of Mouser or Digi-Key (their business is geared to the hobbyist exclusively), they do a fine job. Where they do score a home run is in the support and clear level of care when it comes to the products that they do sell. Interested in buying an LED strip? Cool, you’re going to get a clear tutorial with that. That goes for most of the things they sell, with all the support you need in the forums, which are frequented by layada herself.
For these reasons, I strongly recommend that you check them out, and if you aren’t ready to buy just yet (but you will be), at the very least do yourself the favour they’ve done for you (still with me?) and check out their tutorials.
The problem
If you want to host an open source hardware project today, you have to cobble together wikis, forums, online polls, blogs, and online file storage to share your materials. Then you have to send the link (or links) to your “system” to the people you already know who might be interested in participating. For a person who just wants to start designing and building cool stuff all that pre-work is a giant pain in the you-know-what.
So is it any wonder that most makers interested in open sourcing their designs tend to skip that step, do all the work themselves and then just release the final designs on the web when they get around to it?
There has to be a better way.
In order for open source hardware to become as prevelant and infulential in the hardware community as FOSS is in the software community we need a way to integrate the required services into a single system, as well as provide a destination for users looking for open source hardware projects to build or to extend to get involved in the community.
Enter Open Design Engine.
The solution
If it takes a forge to develop open source software, then you need an engine to develop open source hardware. Introducing Open Design Engine (ODE). ODE is a web based engineering project management system created to facilitate the design and development of openly licensed hardware projects. ODE provides a critical service to the growing open source hardware community, similar to the role Source Forge played in the early growth of open source software.
ODE is based on the open source software Redmine and is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL). ODE is being distributed in a similar manner to WordPress. Which means there will be a version available for download that users can install on their own servers (like http://wordpress.org) and a hosted version where users can register accounts and host projects (like http://wordpress.com).
Version 0.1 of the site is up and running at https://opendesignengine.net, but before user accounts can be made available to the public, V0.2 must be completed.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
“How Hard Can It Be?” and it’s on the National Geographic Channel…. Vince writes in!
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