Firewood record passenger space »Arduino + X = ArduinoPhone – Moderator: Ye Xiaobo.

Arduino is a widely used, easy to expand, develop a simple open-source hardware platform. Arduino is not only artists, designers, enthusiasts, “plaything”, or an engineer’s first DIY platform.

When the Arduino GPRS encounter what? Yes, give me a platform Arduino Phone!

We have developed ArduinoPhone 1.0, which is the first individual of DIY with telephone, text messaging capabilities ArduinoPhone prototypes.

But …… Yes, life is the most powerful, the most exciting thing is this, we have to change, but also more thoroughly subversive! Our ArduinoPhone also need to add the music player functions, add the WIFI function, add NFC capabilities, yes, but also have an appearance make you never forget.
That …… let us come to a creative storm ArduinoPhone 2.0 bar.

Adam Wolf from Wayne & Layne will be teaching a LEGO Mindstorms + Arduino class for young adults age 14-18 at Leonardo’s Basement in Minneapolis.

Combine two of the best and fastest ways to create new things with this introduction to LEGO Mindstorms + Arduino.  After a brief introduction, we’ll get some code running on the Arduinos and plug in LEGO Mindstorms motors and sensors. Use the Bricktronics Shield that Adam and his business partner [Matthew Beckler] invented.

Sign up for the class here.  Don’t live in Minneapolis?  Pick up the book at Adafruit!

Guitarduino – Arduino/MaxMSP Midi Control System

It uses a midi control system based on the Arduino Uno and MaxMSP. The Arduino has various inputs which are combined with the audio played from the guitar to create midi. These are processed through MaxMSP to produce the awesome effects you hear in the video.

Theres an interesting use of touch pads on the body and the neck. These are integrating support directly onto the guitar for things like filters and pitch shifters, whilst also being able to change there function on-the-fly.

Sous-vide controller powered by Arduino – The SousViduino! @ The Adafruit Learning System. Turn an Arduino + inexpensive rice cooker into a precision instrument for molecular gastronomy!

“…far from being some passing high-tech fad, sous vide is a lasting contribution to fine cooking, a technique that makes it possible to cook foods more consistently and delicately than ever before.” (from “Under Pressure” by Thomas Keller)

Want to make delicious, perfectly-cooked food using a robot? Who doesn’t!? This project will show you how to build your own “Sous viduino”, an automated cooking pot that makes perfect eggs, succulent steaks and tender fish without the whole “slaving over a stove.” All this is possible due to a recent advancement in cooking technology – instead of using a pan or pot, a “sous vide” (pronounced suu veed) machine heats the food in sort of a cross between a jacuuzi and a crock pot.

Sous vide is rapidly becoming an important cooking technique in many of the very best restaurants in the world. Sous vide combines principles of molecular gastronomy with industrial temperature controls to precisely manage the chemical reactions of cooking.

We love good food as much as we love science and technology, so of course we had to build our own sous vide controller. This project turns an inexpensive rice cooker into a precision cooking instrument capable of maintaining cooking temperatures within +/-0.1 C.

By precisely controlling the temperature, you can ensure that foods are cooked exactly to the desired level of doneness and no-more. This makes sous vide the preferred cooking method for everything from the ‘perfect’ soft-boiled egg to the steak that is medium-rare from edge-to-edge.

Learn more!

Blinken-braces! Add color-changing LEDs to a pair of suspenders and hold your pants up in style. 30 NeoPixels are sewn to these suspenders, powered by a FLORA main board running a dazzling Pac Man-inspired animation. The battery pack goes in your pocket! Read the full tutorial to make your own pixel suspenders. Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo. 

Project made with wearables assistant Risa Rose! Thanks to Shelly Lynch-Sparks and Johngineer for modeling.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Teensy and Teensy++ Schematic Diagrams.

As part of optimization work to support large-scale LED projects, PJRC developed three simple USB virtual serial receive speed benchmarks. The complete source code is available below. Here are the benchmark results for boards that currently support native USB virtual serial for Arduino sketches.

FAST!

Farm Geeks: Learning to Love the Circuit Board

Steve Spence, an amateur organic farmer in Andrew, South Carolina, has a smart way of irrigating his vegetables. He uses water from his pond and the fish waste to fertilize his plants, a technique known as aquaponics. But the critical balance between the makeup of the water and soil means Spence has to know exactly what’s going on in both. Real-time information about the pond’s make up is imperative to know he’s giving his veggies the best drink of water.

Sensors are commercially available, but Spence found them too expensive and not nearly as flexible as he needed — ”they can only do the function you purchased them for.” So he decided to customize his own. Now he monitors the water’s pH, temperature and ammonia levels, along with soil temperature, moisture levels and barometric pressure, all from a system he built himself — on the cheap.

This is what happens when maker culture — specifically, projects made using the popular, flexible Arduino boards — comes to the farm and garden. From aquaponics to weather stations, farmers are starting to embrace the modern trends of DIY tech.

Sylvia’s Super Awesome Mini Maker Show: Make a Heartbeat Pendant

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

We’ve been busy in the wearables department at Adafruit lately, building FLORA projects nonstop! What is FLORA? Adafruit’s Arduino-Compatible Wearables Platform! Check out the FLORA section of the Adafruit Learning System and subscribe to our YouTube channel for new wearable electronics tutorials every week. Here are some of the projects we’ve built with FLORA recently:

Sparkle Skirt

LED Ampli-Tie

Brake Light Backpack

Plush Game Controller

Chameleon Scarf

FLORA TV-B-Gone

GPS Jacket

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

To raise awareness for experiential education programs, MINDDRIVE students built an electric car that converts social media into social fuel for a road trip from Kansas City, Mo. to Washington D.C., where they hope to drive change in education. Watch, like and share this video to help fuel their journey.

The HypnoLamp Project

Many factors helped birth the HypnoLamp: At Toorcamp 2012, I learned to program microcontrollers. Jeff of Olympia Circuits blessed me with addressable LED strips, at the aforementioned event. Jeff was also at the Portland Mini Maker Faire, showcasing (among other things) glass Ikea lamps with LEDs inside. I decided to build my own version!

From the project creator:

Q: Why didn’t you use [insert other microcontroller here]? It’s better!

A: I used the Adafruit DC Boarduino. At the time, I felt this was the best choice, because:

1. I had prior experience with it,
2. Adafruit provides an Arduino library for interfacing with the LED strips, and
3. The beautiful algorithms use floating point arithmetic (which is more conducive to creative coding than using integers), in HSV color space, which is converted to RGB and pushed to the LED strips at 60 updates per second (effectively 60 FPS), and it runs great, with no performance issues, and we can all go home early.

Programming the lamp was a joy. Each animation was tweaked until it was hypnotic, yet subtle enough to accent the room.

In Stock and Shipping Now!

Besties sweater lights up when you are hugged:

Next we cut out a little circle of conductive fabric and split it in two and sewed them onto the left shoulder blade. We took conductive thread, sewed it into the VBATT hole, and connected it to one of the conductive fabric circle halves. We then sewed a new piece of conductive thread from the unused half circle, and connected it through all of the positive ends of the LED lights.

By interrupting the circuit using the conductive fabric half circles, when someone wearing conductive thread on their right wrist, the circuit will complete when they put their arm around the person wearing the sweater.

This project would be a great candidate for capacitive touch sensing with conductive fabric!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Ever wish your clothes could change color to match each other? Make a chameleon scarf to match every outfit using the Flora color sensor and 12 color-changing LED pixels diffused by a ruffly knit scarf. Check out the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo, and make your own with the full tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System.

Flora Color Sensor – TCS34725 – Your electronics can now see in dazzling color with this lovely color light sensor. We found the best color sensor on the market, the TCS34725, which has RGB and Clear light sensing elements. An IR blocking filter, integrated on-chip and localized to the color sensing photodiodes, minimizes the IR spectral component of the incoming light and allows color measurements to be made accurately. The filter means you’ll get much truer color than most sensors, since humans don’t see IR. The sensor also has an incredible 3,800,000:1 dynamic range with adjustable integration time and gain so it is suited for use behind darkened glass or fabric.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

A Minimal Punched Tape Reader

The rig is composed of a Teensy++ 2.0, eighteen red LEDs, eighteen resistors, and a few bits of laser-cut plastic. LEDs are used to both illuminate the paper and sense the holes. The sensor design is based on the classic Arduino LED sensing code. It’s not very reliable, but it’s a fun afternoon proof-of-concept.

Arduino Blog – The Mood Lamp recognizes your facial expressions and turns them into light.

The Mood Lamp project by Vittorio Cuculo, is a system using interactions to communicate an emotional state to a physical object and receive back  a coherent response. In particular, through your facial expression you communicate your emotional state to an RGB color lamp . The lamp, at this point, will respond to the interaction by changing the color of the light emitted in accordance with the emotional state inferred.

The aim of the systems is to remove the mediation between human and machine typical of classic interfaces. Among the modes of natural interaction we usually have gestures, gaze tracking and facial expressions. The latter are particularly relevant because they play a fundamental role in nonverbal communication between human beings.

How I Used C and PHP to Make a Fully-Functional Arduino Weather Station @ Toptal.

What is this all about?

Kitesurfing is one of the most addictive sports in the world. All it requires is a kiteboard, a body of water, and a few accessories. It’s a great way to get in touch with nature, free up your mind, and exercise. Plus, you can really go crazy with it.

So what’s the problem?

Oh, I forgot one essential requirement: wind. And that’s where we have our problem: you never know whether or not there will be wind unless you live right by your favorite kitesurfing spot.
I live in Córdoba, Argentina, approximately 130 kilometers (~80 miles) away from the lake where I kitesurf. That’s roughly a two-hour drive, which I can deal with. But I can’t deal with the fact that weather forecasts are inaccurate. And where I live, good wind conditions last just a couple of hours. The last thing you want to do is clear up your Monday schedule to go kitesurfing and find yourself cursing the gods on a windless lake after two hours of driving.

I needed to know the wind conditions of my favorite kitesurfing spot—in real time. So I decided to build my own weather station.

I ran into MakerBlock and his family in the Expo hall near where I presented my “Getting Started With 3D Printing” talks, and he was eager to share his open source PlotterBot – Arduino Drawing Robot display, which is chock full of Adafruit goodness. (Check out his project documentation here — make your own PlotterBot!)

I loved his simple, elegant fishing line PlotterBot — that made expressive illustrations of the Tardis from Doctor Who, Nikola Tesla, and other images — and also loved that his daughter, TinkerGirl, had her own booth display of Spinning Robot Drawings at the table next to him.

While it might be true that I’m obsessed with pen plotters and drawbots of all kinds so they had me from the get-go, spending time chatting with the two of them back and forth about their passion for creating robots to create art with them — and watching the excitement TinkerGirl communicated to visitors to her part of the display — touched my heart and was one of my favorite authentic maker experiences at the Faire this year.

From the booth description for PlotterBot – Arduino Drawing Robot:

A PlotterBot or DrawBot is a robot that can draw really large mural sized images. It is easy and cheap to build using very common parts and tools. (Read more about PlotterBot.)

And from TinkerGirl’s table:

Small spinning drawing robots made with motors and markers. (Read more about Spinning Robot Drawings.)

Thomas Clauser writes:

The LighTouch (http://wolfebaine.blogspot.com/2013/03/lightouch.html) is a ‘touchless’ music player based on Arduino that is controlled by ultrasonic sensor. The distance of your hand determines pause/play, volume control, or next track.

From the project page:

LighTouch was an idea I had as I was just diving into Arduino. Like anyone getting started, I bought an Uno and three random shields just to play with (music shield, bluetooth, and ultrasonic range finder). To that end, I got each of them up and running in record time and got bored. So what was the next logical step? Right… figure out how many of these shields can I use at the same time. In this case, a music shield and ultrasonic range finder made the cut.

The idea is pretty simple; an mp3 player that you never have to touch. Simply hold your hand over the device to adjust volume, pause, and move to the next track. All the commands basically key on the distance of your hand from the sensor.

Photos and more here!

Massimo Banzi announced it some minutes ago during his annual “The state of Arduino” presentation at Maker Faire Bay Area:  Arduino Yún  is the first of a revolutionary family of wifi products combining Arduino with Linux.

Yún means “cloud” in chinese language,  as the purpose of this board to make it simple to connect to complex web services directly from Arduino.

Arduino IDE 1.0.5 is released!.

We’re happy to announce the release of a new version of the Arduino software, version 1.0.5. Barring any unexpected bugfixes, this is the final planned release of the 1.0 series of the IDE. Future releases will be from the 1.5 branch that has been in beta since last summer.

With that excitement out of the way, let’s get to the new features :

•  New library import functionality to install libraries directly from a .zip file in the IDE. You can see more information about this on the installing 3rd party libraries page.
• A Windows installer, which will hopefully streamline the process of setting up the IDE and drivers.
• Windows signed drivers. This means Windows 8 will no longer prevent you from installing Arduino drivers.
• The application is signed for OSX 10.8 (this was part of 1.0.4, but we thought it was so nice it deserved another mention).
• Updated WiFi library with UDP support.
• Support for the Arduino Robot and TFT screen. The TFT library is based on a number of Adafruit libraries, and the Robot library relies on many 3rd party libraries.
• Various bugfixes and optimizations, look at the release notes for a complete description.

Special thanks to everyone who contributed on this release. You rock.

Future releases of the IDE will support multiple architectures (like the ARM used in the Due). There is also a new library and 3rd party board implementation being introduced. You can read more about these on the 1.5 library specification and 3rd party hardware support pages

You can download Arduino 1.0.5 from the software page.

This is a great release.

What happens with Arduino at Maker Faire Bay Area?.

Arduino is ready for Maker Faire Bay Area, the world’s most diverse showcase of creativity and innovation in technology, craft and science.

On 18th and 19th May 2013 at San Mateo County Events Center, in California, Arduino will present a lot of novelties, proving more and more to be one of the benchmark in the maker movement.

A new product – Arduino Robot brings you into the world of robotics. Designed with Complubot, the 4-times world champions in Robocup Junior robotics soccer, the robot allows for endless hours of experimentation and play. It is a self-contained platform allowing you to build interactive machines to explore the world. You can use it as it is, modify its software and even add your own hardware on top of it. You can learn as you go: the Arduino Robot is perfect for the novice but also for those looking for their next challenge.

As always with Arduino, every element of the platform – hardware, software and documentation – is freely available and open-source. This means you can learn exactly how it’s made and use its design as the starting point for your own robots. 

A new software – Arduino has released the new version of the Arduino IDE and the new TFT screen. TCT LCD library relies on the Adafruit GFX and ST7735 libraries. Adafruit was founded in 2005 by MIT engineer Limor ‘Ladyada’, Enterpreneur of the year 2012. The Arduino specific library, named TFT, extends the Adafruit libraries to support more Processing-like methods. You can write text, draw shapes, and show bitmap images on the screen in a way that should be familiar to users of Processing.

Read more.

Kris Kortright writes:

Deirdre’s new Lioness/Cat costume using Adafruit FLORA electronics to light it up! We’re still in testing, the whiskers and eyes will be aligned and have additional electronics to make the eyes and ears move, and the whiskers twitch. Only so many hours after work to put into it, hoping we’re 100% done for the next Show & Tell!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

MAKE’s new column from Arduino’s Massimo Banzi.

Ask any maker what the hottest subjects are in DIY electronics these days, and odds are the first answer will be Arduino. Since the earliest boards were built in 2005 to enable students to run interactive design projects with open-source tools, the platform has become a world-wide phenomenon, igniting the imaginations of makers, hackers, and artists all over. Simply speaking, Arduino is huge in the maker and MAKE communities.

Read more.

Existential Emergency Phone how-to by Randy Sarafan:

The Existential Emergency Phone is a multipurpose tool for handling all of life’s uncertainties. It can be used for both dialing out and calling in. The way that it works is that when you pick up the handset, the telephone makes a call using a custom cellular module to a list of predefined phone numbers. Whether the phone calls a list of people you know, a list of people you don’t know, or randomly dials strangers in your area code, is really up to you. Alternately, the number can be distributed to people with existential emergencies and they can dial in for others to answer. The many manners in which the phone can be used makes it well suited for processing existential emergencies both outgoing and incoming.

Instructables user aaronthomen shows us how to make this neat DIY Robotic Hand with an Arduino.  Click the link for another video showing how to make the hand, as well as step by step directions and a full parts list.

via Arduino Blog

This is a test of the robot basic movement made by A. Martino at the factory where the Arduino Robot will be manufactured.

Ryan Longo and Michael Vogt created this crazy-looking light-up helmet!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

J4MES posted in the forums:

Thanks to Adafruit for getting me started with Arduino and WS2801 LEDs,

Though my laptop got stolen before the event,

My installation Geodesic! was at it’s first music and arts festival, Lucidity!

Read more:

Learn to make a finger bend sensor with LEDs on Kobakant:

This project uses the open design for gLove Mono by Zoe Romano and integrates a felt & velostat bend sensor on the middle finger. A lilypad arduino is programmed to read the analog sensor value of the fabric bend sensor, and trigger 1, 2 or 3 LED lights to light up depending on how much the finger is bent. This example project was made for the codemotion workshop titled Arduino meets Wearables.

This is a very simple FLORA project with no soldering– a single NeoPixel lights up on an embroidered angler fish on a pair of shorts. The main board is stitched on the front of the design, in the belly of the fish. A snap is used on the fin as a digital switch, triggering a color change in the pixel in the angler’s lure. Follow the circuit diagram to stitch up this circuit, and tuck the battery in the pocket.

Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) or Vimeo, and catch the complete angler fish embroidery guide on the Adafruit Learning System.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Clyde’s a bright lamp and an expressive, tricolor ambient light. Sensor modules and Arduino compatibility make him easy to customize. Learn more at fabule.com

See more Liquid Lifebar project info and photo documentation by bfayer!

Booty Box: Instant Dance Parties.

We’ve all wanted it. Now you can build it. 
Instant dance parties.
Personal theme music. 
Motion activated music.
Booty Box.

Uses an Adafruit Wave Shield! 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.

For a couple of weeks now, maker “bob500000″ has been developing and tuning a project with the help of the Adafruit Technical Support engineers over at the Adafruit Forums — and now the project appears to be up and running, with a posted image called “Complete!” Check out the long journey and what we can all learn about how to tackle these sort of challenges. (Thanks, Mike, Rick and Bill for the detailed responses to help all of us, your colleagues included!)

Here’s where it all started back in mid April:

Is it possible to link 4 shift registers via one arduino board, I am either looking at using just 4 pins on the board, I have all the code that I want to run, just the linking of the shift registers.

Read more.

This is an Arduino porting of the excellent work by Markus Frejek.
The final aim is to create an economic component tester using Arduino and a few passive components;

You can see more about ArduTester in our Arduino Forum.

John Biggs tries on the LED Ampli-Tie at TechCrunch Disrupt!

LED Ampli-Tie with Flora

Open Clock Project

The Open Clock Project is…

• An intuitive, adaptive, and delightful touchscreen alarm clock.
• Easy to see with uncorrected vision, and easy to set with confidence, even when tired.
• An open hardware work-in-progress.
• Powered by Arduino, curiosity, and ignorance.

This is a journal of the design and prototyping process, starting with a February 2012 rant about what I dislike about every alarm clock I’ve met. I didn’t know much about electronics, but that hasn’t stopped me yet!

My discoveries are recorded here, for the benefit of present and future Citizens of the Makerverse.

Lots of Adafruit products in this project, including the Adafruit Proto Shield, Chronodot, Wave Shield, and Arduino UNO, and more!

NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Esplora – The Arduino Esplora is a fun new game controller-shaped microcontroller board derived from the popular Arduino Leonardo. What makes the Esplora cool (and a great starter board) is that it has a number of built-in, ready-to-use sensors already on the board, for easy interaction. It’s designed for people who want to get up and running with Arduino without having to learn about the electronics wiring first. For a step-by-step introduction to the Esplora, check out the Getting Started with Esplora guide.

The Esplora has onboard sound and light outputs, and several input sensors, including a joystick, a slider, a temperature sensor, an accelerometer, a microphone, and a light sensor. It also has the potential to expand its capabilities with two Tinkerkit input and output connectors, and a socket for a color TFT LCD screen (coming soon!).

Like the Leonardo board, the Esplora uses an Atmega32U4 AVR microcontroller with 16 MHz crystal oscillator and a micro USB connection capable of acting as a USB client device. Since the Esplora has built-in USB communication; it can appear to a connected computer as a mouse or keyboard, in addition to a virtual (CDC) serial / COM port. Great for making interactive projects super fast! It even comes with a 5 foot long Micro USB cable so you can plug in and go.

Technical Details:

• Weight: 115g
• PCB Dimensions: 59.7mm / 2.35″ x 165.1mm / 6.5″
• USB Cable: 1.7m / 67.5″

In stock and shipping now!

Ever think your coat could guide you home? The easiest way to add location information to your wearable electronics project is with the Flora GPS. It’s part of the Adafruit Flora series of wearable electronics, designed specifically for use with the Flora main board. Installed on the PCB is the latest of our Ultimate GPS modules, a small, super-thin, low power GPS module with built in data-logging capability! This module’s easy to use, but extremely powerful. Check out our video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.

• -165 dBm sensitivity, 10 Hz updates, 66 channels
• Designed for wearable use with the Flora system
• Only 20mA current draw
• RTC battery-compatible – sew a battery on to create a atomic-precision real time clock
• Built-in datalogging
• >25Km altitude
• Internal patch antenna + u.FL connector for external active antenna
• Fix status LED

…all for under $40! Comes with a tutorial to get you started, and a more advanced GPS Jacket project tutorial.

The breakout is built around the MTK3339 chipset, a no-nonsense, high-quality GPS module that can track up to 22 satellites on 66 channels, has an excellent high-sensitivity receiver (-165 dB tracking!), and a built in antenna. It can do up to 10 location updates a second for high speed, high sensitivity logging or tracking. Power usage is incredibly low, only 20 mA during navigation.

The module is kept small and simple, we have a ferrite bead, filter capacitor and red fix LED on board. The LED blinks at about 1Hz while it’s searching for satellites and blinks once every 15 seconds when a fix is found to conserve power. If you want to have an LED on all the time, we also provide the FIX signal out on a pin so you can put an external LED on.

Two features that really stand out about the MTK3339-based module is the external antenna functionality and the the built in data-logging capability. The module has a standard ceramic patch antenna that gives it -165 dB sensitivity, but when you want to have a bigger antenna, you can snap on any 3V active GPS antenna via the uFL connector. The module will automatically detect the active antenna and switch over! Most GPS antennas use SMA connectors so you may want to pick up one of our uFL to SMA adapters.

The other cool feature of the new MTK3339-based module (which we have tested with great success) is the built in datalogging ability. Since there is a microcontroller inside the module, with some empty FLASH memory, the newest firmware now allows sending commands to do internal logging to that FLASH. The only thing is that you do need to have the Flora mainboard send the “Start Logging” command. However, after that message is sent, the Flora can go to sleep and does not need to wake up to talk to the GPS anymore to reduce power consumption. The time, date, longitude, latitude, and height is logged every 15 seconds and only when there is a fix. The internal FLASH can store about 16 hours of data, it will automatically append data so you don’t have to worry about accidentally losing data if power is lost. It is not possible to change what is logged and how often, as its hardcoded into the module but we found that this arrangement covers many of the most common GPS datalogging requirements.

Comes with one fully assembled and tested module. If you’d like to back up the RTC for faster fix-recovery, pick up a sewable CR2032 holder & CR2032 battery and sew it so the + side connects to the VBAT pad and the – side connects to ground.  

Also available in our FLORA GPS Starter Pack.

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Allen writes:

For the compass rose, I stitched the Adafruit neopixels together and hooked them up to the Adafruit Flora. Also connected to the Flora is a magnetometer/accelerometer. The magnetometer probably gave me the most grief. It turns out that if you want to use communications protocols (like I2C) on e-textiles, make sure the connection is SOLID! I became so frustrated with the magnetometer not talking to the Flora that I just soldered some wires instead.

Despite the frustrations, I’m pretty happy with how the bag turned out. This was also the first time using the Flora and I have to say, I love it! I can certainly tell that the folks at Adafruit put A LOT of thought into it. One little detail that made me really happy was strategically placing the SDA, SCL, power and ground pads so that you wouldn’t have to have any thread/wires cross. If you’ve been working with e-textiles for a while, you’ll know exactly what I mean! Seriously, Adafruit…thank you!!!

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!

Tutorial: rePaper eInk Development Board @ The Adafruit Learning System. A lovely starting guide for all three of our eInk displays
including how to wire up to an Arduino Mega for graphical eInk drawing!

The rePaper development boards from Pervasive Displays come with a driver board that is powered from 3V and has level shifting on all the I/O pins so it can be used with 5V microcontrollers such as the Arduino. The PCB also has a lot of driver circuitry required to keep the display running smoothly such a temperature sensor, FLASH memory and ZIF socket. All signals are broken out to a 20 male socket header on the left. A 20 pin socket/socket cable is included to make wiring easier and there’s also some extra-long header so you can plug these wires into Arduino header or a breadboard.

The display is 2″ diagonal and 200 x 96 resolution true eInk graphical display. These are intended for use as small dynamic signage in grocery stores since a barcode displayed on it can be scanned by a laser barcode-reader. The display does not require any power to keep the image and will stay ‘on’ without any power connection for many days before slowly fading. Of course, its also daylight readable and is very high contrast. This makes it excellent for data-logging applications, outdoor displays, or any other ultra-low power usages

RePaper/PDI have provided a suite of example code for Arduino UNO/Leonardo and Mega, as well as a driver compatible with the Adafruit GFX Library. Now you can program this display with the same library as all our TFT LCD and LED matrix displays!

Learn more.

Using Arduino in Bread Making at Home from Mental Masala.

“Let rise at room temperature” is a common instruction in bread recipes, with “room temperature” being about 70 F (21.1 C)*. For various reasons, however, this temperature can be hard to find in my apartment in Berkeley, California, and so my bread doughs sometimes rise far too slowly.

One day, I realized that my Arduino Uno microcontroller could help solve this problem.  I had earlier configured it to measure milk temperature during yogurt making, and realized that would be a short leap to use it to control the air temperature inside a container, thereby creating a stable and warm location for dough fermentation and proofing (a “proofing box”).  My idea was simple: an incandescent light bulb in a clip-on lamp as the heat source, a temperature sensor, a switch that turns the light bulb on and off, and the Arduino to control the switch. Basically, as one person who heard my plan put it, “It’s an Easy-Bake Oven!”

But how would I switch the light bulb on and off using the low voltage, low current digital outputs on the Arduino? A relay could be wired in and the lamp could be hacked, but that would be bothersome and potentially dangerous.  Then I learned about the Powerswitch Tail II. This easy-to-use device allows your Arduino or other controller to switch on and off an A/C powered device, like a lamp, coffee maker, hot plate, and so on. By connecting a digital output line and ground from the Arduino to the + and – inputs of the Powerswitch Tail, the connected device can be switched on and off. No cutting, soldering or taping required, just connect and go…..

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Product!

Powerswitch tail 2: The Power Switch Tail II is a smart alternative to slicing apart power cords to wire up your own relays. Its a compact 120V 3-pronged extension cord, with a relay board embedded in the middle. Connect to the relay using two screw terminals and activate by providing a 3 to 12V signal (3mA current draw at 3V, 30mA at 12V). The relay can switch 15 Amp resistive loads such as heaters, small skillets, lights, etc. An LED indicator above the terminals will help you with debugging. (read more)

The PAN management box outside and inside

From the Adafruit Foru, uberhund writes:

The PANdora Box can send one of 16 messages selected by the brass knob connected to a rotary encoder in the center of the base section. The smoky plex allows the various parts within to be seen, aided by an LED strip light of variable color and intensity, and mirrors on the interior walls. Wacky button sounds are played by the Wav shield as the user rotates the brass knob through each message. Pressing the brass knob instructs an Arduino to send the selected Wav file name across the PAN to the remote listeners which then find and play the Wav file, with, or sometimes without, a preamble. The preamble can be selected from a list appropriate to the message, such as creaky doors, or impersonations. The message itself is usually something useful (but not always) like Kids, please take out the garbage.

Read More

The manic doorbell, on the left, and the snarky oven on the right with warning label “Caution. Oven can be somewhat condescending”

Tutorial: Affordable HAL 9000 Replica @ The Adafruit Learning System. Why yes, Dave. As a matter of fact I CAN do that.

The Pareto Principle — also known as the 80/20 Rule — is the idea (originally from economics, but now applied in many ways) that 80% of results stem from 20% of the effort.

Devoted film fans will spend countless hours and hundreds of dollars (occasionally even thousands) to create flawless replica props for their personal collections. The iconic eye of HAL 9000 from 2001: a Space Odyssey is one such object of desire…popular enough that detailed (and pricey) licensed reproductions exist. This is cool stuff! But if we relax our criteria just a bit, you or I can turn out a pretty decent, recognizable facsimile in a weekend for just a small fraction of the cost. The 80/20 rule in action!

We’re not selling a prop or even a kit here…that would raise a big licensing stink, so please don’t ask. What follows are some ideas on creating one yourself. Much like our not-a-Back-to-the-Future-clock project, the concept came about when customers noted that a component already in our shop resembled an unrelated film item — in this case, our Massive Red Arcade Button and HAL’s distinctive lens.

Learn more.

Earlier this month, we shared about musician and robotic instrument maker Patrick Flanagan’s “part human, mostly robot, electro band” called Jazari and his EP for “The Human Element” that featured some of his custom-built instruments and robotic performers.

Well, he sent us an update with more behind-the-scenes details, including how he uses our LED Illuminated Pushbuttons in his work:

I just posted my tech talk video that describes how the controller works with the drum machines.

And I did a blog post about some of the problems I encountered while building the controller, gave your awesome square LED arcade buttons a shout, and posted my Arduino code.

Here are more details from his site about the Meganome:

Patrick Flanagan’s fantastic monome inspired, grid-based MIDI controller, the Meganome:

The Meganome is inspired by the monome controller and powered by an Arduino Mega. Like other grid controllers like the Launchpad and Push, it has performance modes for triggering drums, playings synths, and launching clips and effects. I like the feel of arcade buttons and look of exotic hardwoods, so mass-market products just weren’t right for me.

Check out Patrick’s blog post with links to source code and more here!

Featured Adafruit Products

LED Illuminated Pushbutton – 30mm Square – A button is a button, and a switch is a switch, but this LED illuminated arcade buttons is in a class of its own. It’s similar in size to an arcade button (and will fit in holes drilled for ‘standard’ 30mm buttons) but has a built in LED that can be controlled separately from the switch action – either to indicate or just to look good. (read more)

This is a mockup of the matrix and animations for my backpack project. The nice thing is the running light configuration only uses 60ma and the brake lights spike at 400ma for short periods. The turn signal mode stays under 300ma.

LED Animation with Flora

Our latest wearable project is this Sparkle Skirt, which twinkles as you move. This is a sewing (no soldering) Flora project using 12 color-changing NeoPixels and the Flora accelerometer/compass module. Spikes in the sensor readings cause the pixels to flash, and sparkle. The pixels are sewn to the skirt’s lining and are diffused by the outer layer of fabric, whether it be a sheer overlay or a cutout lace design.

If a skirt doesn’t appeal to you, use this circuit and code on a hat, a belt buckle, and even a blinky dog collar.

Watch the video on YouTube (please subscribe!) or Vimeo, and head over to the complete tutorial on the Adafruit Learning System.

photos by John de Cristofaro, modeled by Risa Rose