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!
Simply flex your forearm muscle and hear the repulsor charge up, then relax your forearm to fire (lighting up the LEDs on your palm and playing explosion sound effects). As an added flair for realism, when you turn on the system, J.A.R.V.I.S.’s voice takes you through the boot up and calibration sequence.
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!
Over the last couple weeks I’ve been working on a automated test system for Teensyduino, which someday will verify nearly all the Arduino functionality on every board and also test most of the Arduino libraries. Here’s what my first try looks like.
The Teensy 2.0 is a complete USB-based microcontoller development system, in a very small footprint! All programming is done via the USB port. No special programmer is needed, only a standard “Mini-B” USB cable and a PC or Macintosh with a USB port.
A friend of mine, Alex, is building his own Tardis, and needed a hand with the light on top. I cobbled this together in a couple of hours and thought I’d share it.
Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 32 LED – (1m) – These LED strips are fun and glowy. There are 32 RGB LEDs per meter, and you can control each LED individually! Yes, that’s right, this is the digitally-addressable type of LED strip. You can set the color of each LED’s red, green and blue component with 7-bit PWM precision (so 21-bit color per pixel). The LEDs are controlled by shift-registers that are chained up down the strip so you can shorten or lengthen the strip. Only 2 digital output pins are required to send data down. The PWM is built into each chip so once you set the color you can stop talking to the strip and it will continue to PWM all the LEDs for you. (read more)
There are so many great platforms for creating digitally enabled devices that its gotten hard to figure out which one to use. For example, we are currently building a hydroponic garden project and had to choose a controller to run the pumps, read the sensors etc. We were surprised at the number of choices that were available to us. It can be a little confusing for the beginner. To help, we’ve taken three of the popular models and compared them so that you can choose the right tool for your next project. Spoiler: we recommend all three.
The three models (all of which we use here at Digital Diner) are the Arduino,Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone. We chose these three because they are all readily available, affordable, about the same size (just larger than 2″ x 3″) and can all be used for creating wonderful digital gadgets. Before we get to the comparison, here is a brief introduction to each one.
Here’s a brief book report from the Adafruit forums covering the recently published Ham Radio for Arduino and PICAXE edited by Leigh L. Klotz, Jr, WA5ZNU, a book featuring a number of projects, and in many places pointing back to resources at Adafruit.
“Ham Radio for Arduino and Picaxe” Edited by Leigh Klotz WA5ZNU ISBN: 978-0-87259-324-4. Available from http://www.arrl.org.
Frankly I did not have high hopes for this book as the ARRL seems to mostly favour projects using PIC processors and I am an Arduino person. But received my copy in the mail today and my first browse through has left me very impressed. There are four PicAXE projects, two ATTiny projects, and 14 Arduino projects, serious, useable, real world projects. Anyone who thinks microcontrollers are toys should be made to read this.
The book opens with letters from Dave Sumner, K1ZZ, the head of the ARRL, Dave Dougherty from MAKE magazine, and the editor. That’s followed by a discussion of Amateur radio, and the history of Hams and microcontrollers. Each project is then presented in separate chapters. Theory, Construction, and source code are all discussed in great detail. I only wish we had software this well documented at my job. Each chapter ends with a long list of related URLs, (many of which point to Adafruit) and links to appropriate source code.
k6rtm tweets: “#Adafruit RGB #neopixels with photocell for sensing ambient light levels”
Flora RGB Smart Neo Pixel version 2 – Pack of 4 – What’s a wearable project without LEDs? Our favorite part of the Flora platform is these tiny smart pixels. Designed specifically for wearables, these updated Flora NeoPixels have ultra-cool technology: these ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like. They’re easy to sew, and the chainable design means no crossed threads.
Inspired by sitcoms and cartoons. I thought it would be fun to be able to add sound effects to my own life. So I made a sound effects suit jacket. The sound samples are triggered by a control panel with 4 buttons (3 for samples, 1 for changing sound banks). And then being played from an Arduino + Wave Shield through a portable speaker. All the hardware is kept within the inner jacket pockets while in use.
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.
Check out these inspiring Arduino pin-out diagrams from “pighixxx” member of our community in the Adafruit Forums, the MEGA (above) and Leonardo (below)
You would not believe how much Fn stuff you can put inside one of these things Although, it’s fun to hang out at the customer loading area to see how people will try to jam a couch into the backseat of a convertible and drive it home.
Made of a nearly indestructible woven polypropylene fabric, this reusable tote is totally awesomesauce amazeballs. And in a pinch, can transport you through time and space.
And once you schlep your stuff to your homeworld, fend off a few Daleks, you can put your things away in the TARDIS bookcase cupboard.
It has handy side pouches for storage of small items like keys and lights up as if it were ready to dematerialise.
DISCLAIMER: The TARDDYS BJAG is a modification of an actual IKEA product. You will not find it in their stores or in the catalog. Don’t ask. Well, maybe at the Torchwood Soho branch store.
Created by Lucien Langton at ECAL, FireWriter is a graphic butane/propane torch printer built with Processing & Arduino. The hardware consists of a hacked inkjet printer controlled with an Arduino Uno, a Dremel torch loaded with a butane/propane mix that burns up to a temperature of 1200C, and an added calibration module built with an optical sensor.
NEW PRODUCT – Arduino Micro without Headers – 5V 16MHz ATmega32u4 – Assembled – Squee! It’s the cutest, tiniest little Arduino yet! The Arduino Micro packs all of the power of the Arduino Leonardo in a 1.9″ x 0.7″ (48mm x 18mm) size. Although it may look like a stick of gum, its actually a USB-native 8-bit microcontroller, with 32K of flash, and 2.5K of RAM. You can program it directly via the USB micro connector on one end (or for the advanced users, the 6-pin ISP header). The Arduino Micro is a microcontroller board based on the ATmega32u4 (datasheet), developed in conjunction with Arduino.cc and Adafruit.
Onboard is the processor, crystal, micro USB connection with fuse, Reset button, ISP low-level reprogramming header, ON LED, TX and RX LEDs, a extra user pin #13 LED, and a 3.3V regulator. You’ll probably also want to pick up a micro-B USB cable to connect this board to your computer.
You can use it for basic Arduino sketches as well as USB client projects like making it appear as a mouse or keyboard to your computer! Although it is not shield compatible – it does have all the same pins as a Leonardo. Its best for when you want to shrink your project down or use it on a breadboard.
This version of the Micro comes without headers pre-soldered on and runs at 5V logic with a 16MHz crystal.
WK recently allowed me some time to tackle a problem that plagues workers everywhere whether they are working in advertising or some other job that involves a lot of email typing. I’m talking about the problem of not being able to devote enough time practicing shredding the guitar. The solution of hooking a guitar up so that you could use it like a computer keyboard had been in my head for a few years and it was a real joy to get to follow through on it.
Printable catalog (PDF)
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!
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