Whoa! Check the new look for that Adafruit G+ Community “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers“! There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 51,229 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Don’t miss the chance to catch up with great pieces from the community from this past week! Click the link below!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Mark Miller shared: “I have made my scraps of acrylic and lexan(3/8″) into torque amplifiers(aka pulleys) and bushings by rough cutting them into circles on the band saw then spinning them down in the lathe to whatever size and bore I need for the project. I make a small hub for each one, drill it for a setscrew and fuse it to the pulley itself. You can make simple or compound pulleys this way. Combine that with a 2$ bag of rubber bands and you can have a party!(making stuff that is) It only takes a few minutes to make a pulley this way, and you get exactly what you want/need. I currently made a bunch in various ratios to produce the clock shown(in progress, still have to paint and finish) all from scraps of plexi, added a stepper motor and calibrated for correct time(now called the DAM clock, for digital and mechanical). It has hour and minute hands so far. I am thinking on clever ways to finish it up.” (read more)

Jay Doscher shared: “Check out my project that uses a Raspberry Pi and PiFace board to turn a PC on and off remotely. The PiFace is very powerful, and leaves rooms for even more mods in the future. Gotta love the +Raspberry Pi” (read more)

Erik Kringen shared: “The ATTINY84 and L298N both fit nicely on this 4X3 PCB board. I even had room for a switch and a programming header.” (read more)

Kris Kortright shared Deidre’s latest project: “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 Ask An Engineer show!” (read more) Awesome!

Jeremy Veleber shared 3D renderings of his first PCB project in progress: “So far, so good… so what! How did Megadeth get in here? Just some 3D models of my current project.” (read more)

Oleg Mazurov shared an experiment: “Experimenting with reflow soldering in inert atmosphere. Got incredibly good results – wetting is again as good as in old days of leaded solder and there is no real need to heat up higher than 215C. The joints look like they were hand-soldered. On the down side, the process eats quite a bit of CO2 and the setup is not very convenient. Will try with N2 as well to compare.” (read more)

phenoptix shared a couple of awesome hybrid case he designed from Adafruit projects he had enjoyed: “Spent some time this afternoon combining two +Phillip Burgess designs from the Adafruit catalogue to create a clip together +BeagleBoard.org Beagle Bone Black case http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:88197 Think it still needs a little tinkering to get the port entries right since I don’t currently have access to a Black to test them out on but I’m pretty pleased with the work so far.” And check out his RasPi + Camera case here! (read more)

Matt Morgan shared: “My first arm” (read more)

Matt Heilman shared a number of projects, including: “My custom Wheelbarrow (the art of combining 2 broken things)” (read more)

Robert Svec shared: “Check out my rover. You can control it via Livebots.cc and use it to find points by driving close to the RFID tags in the arena! (Since it’s Mother’s Day the bot will not be live until tomorrow but check out the video)” (read more)

Nick Johnson shared: “Just finished building my Objective2 headphone amp. It’ll have to wait until I get to work with my decent headphones to give any sort of proper assessment, but based on my listening so far, it seems pretty good!” (read more)

Ross Potts shared a quick PSU mod project: “My power supply: from desktop to benchtop. Mocking up the Final shape: not soldered up, though, and the terminal on the left will be painted Yellow or Blue and will be higher than 12v. *I CAN just combine a 12v and 5v for 17v total, right? * I liked Someone’s idea to paint it that “Danger!” yellow and black stripe scheme, but that can wait for when I do one up with a voltmeter.” (read more)

Jaidyn Edwards shared a new robot: “So many people know me as the thrifty robot maker, turning anything into a robot if I can, this time the box that Ferrero Rocher chocolates come in. Hope you like it! Arduino – ‘Ferrero’ obstacle avoiding robot” (read more)

Jon Sanford shared a project in progress: “I have been working on a new project. It is turning out to be more difficult than it should be. Ha Ha what else is new! This just a short howdy then.” (read more)

Bruce Lowther shared a project in progress: “I finally got my thermometer / humidifier mobile. It probably doesn’t look like much, but it is working. The receiver side is in my basement. Just using serial AT mode for now. Next step is to see if I can do this in API mode with the #xbee and drop the #Arduino.” (read more)

Sam Harrison shared several stages of his BO design: track upgrade parts, technical drawings, and 3D renders. (read more)

Matthew Arlauckas pulled apart an old effects pedal and shared photos: “Just found this old project in a box. Simple distortion stompbox built around an LM833 (circa 1991). Going to have to reverse-engineer the board on this one. #goodtimes” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared some first experiences working with the open source parametric 3d design tool OpenSCAD, from a CNC router perspective: ”
Thought this program was pretty neat” (read more)

Saikat Basak shared an experiment with opencv: “Moving mouse using computer vision.” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Check out the winners and many participants from our community challenge: #adafruit6sec Electronics Film Festival! (read more)

Eric and Bret shared: “We took a metal pie late and connected it to MaKey MaKey so that when you touch it, it triggers a hi-hat sound. Then we added masking tape, so that as you slide your finger around it, it plays a rhythm. We also added some copper tape on top of the masking tape, to trigger a bass drum and a clap sound.” (read more)

Check out Pedro J. Arroyo’s ‘LED belt on steroids’ project video. Double-wide LED belt kit with Arduino Esplora. Shared on the Adafruit Forums! “Finally got some spare time to put this together and I got it to work like a charm. Got the sample code to run 64 LEDs. So Stoked! Now I just need to figure out how to address the LEDs with the Esploras varied sensors. Thanks for the help, and for providing such neat things to tinker with!” (read more)

Here’s a great Internet Radio project: “How cool would it be take a vintage 1940′s or 1950′s wooden radio and rebuild it as a modern Internet Radio? That’s the premise I had in mind when I started out on my first Raspberry Pi project. I used the Adafruit Occidentalis Linux distribution and Adafruit python class for the 32×2 LCD display. I found a great YouTube tutorial by MeisterVision that covered the basics of the MPC/MPD Linux Music Player really well.” (read more)

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=64457 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/12/community-corner-this-week-in-adafruits-community-4/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/12/community-corner-this-week-in-adafruits-community-4/#comments Sun, 12 May 2013 19:00:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=63354

The Adafruit Google+ Community sailed past the 50k mark this week!

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 50466 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Don’t miss the chance to catch up with great pieces from the community from this past week! Click the link below!

HIGHLIGHT: Adafruit 6 Second Electronics Film Festival!

This past week wrapped up the #adafruit6sec Electronics Film Festival — with more entries pouring in than ever before. Here are a selection of those that we haven’t shared here before, and check out the #adafruit6sec hashtag on Twitter for even more.

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Mark Miller shared a mobile robotics project: “Small pneumatics system for mobile robotics with regulated air pressure, air logic valves and driver board. The compressor tank is just 5 inches long and can store 4-9 lbs of air to run small cylinders(presetable). The compressor needs 12 volt at 128 Ma, while the valves are 12 volt at 280 Ma. I made the tank from plastics and solvent welded together. The valves were automotive surplus and very inexpensive(49 cents each). The compressors are 5$ each and available surplus also. I am RC controlling these, but easy to run system from a micro. Fun and useful.” (read more)

Michael Mueller shared a 3D project: “A while ago, I saw a guy clamping an old plastic bottle between the seat stays of his bike, to use it as a fender. It doesn’t look very stable but it was a great idea anyway! This 3d printed mount works with most plastic bottles, like Coke, Evian ect. You can just clip it on your bike – no glue or screws needed! I’ve used a bottle which I’ve cut before. Technical, there is no need to halve it but it looks better this way and it’s done easily.” (read more)

Alan McNeil built his Adafruit Internet of Things printer! “It fetches the info about 30m before I usually get up. Helps get me back in sync with the planet after dreamtime.” (read more)

Thomas Asmuth shared: “The UWF FabLab has a Reflow oven! yeah I am cool like that. The Rocketscream shield works awesomely. http://www.rocketscream.com/shop/reflow-oven-controller-shield-arduino-compatible I will be running some more tests tomorrow.” (read more)

phenoptix shared a helpful techniques: “Putting together something for a special request (from a Storm Trooper) came across this method of using shift registers to drive RGB LEDs (along with code)” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared a music video project that created: “Stop motion animation + light graffiti + natural edge wooden mushrooms = this “Mushroom Cult” video” (read more)

RaizzieN shared an update on his quadcopter project: “Thank you everyone for watching my videos. Today, let me introduce the second video about my new transformable quadocopter robot from my YouTube Channel. The new-born robot toddles about, changes the shape, and flies continuously.” (read more)

Oleg Mazurov showed photos of his new pick-and-place machine: “My first ever pick and place machine arrived in the morning. 12 hours later a panel was stuffed – nice!” (read more)

Andrew Pritykin shared: “Check out my latest maker project! BlueTrack Lock System (Unlock Door via Smart Device)” (read more)

Charles Klug shared a quick tutorial for how to “find the center of a circle using a drafting compass. I used this every time I make new wheels for my robot. Enjoy!”(read more)

Liz Quilty and her daughter Elle-Mae created a great conductive paint flower project! (read more)

Leslie Ubeda shared his “Automatic Night Light Project – PCB made using a homemade CNC machine.” (read more)

Ross Potts shared his power supply mods: “For my first how-to, I will be modding an ATX power supply to be a benchtop power supply. So, lets get started! … ” (read more)

Matt Heilman shared a number of projects including a Li-Ion Battery Pack for Arduino, photos of his electronics benches over the years, and a project to charge his motorcycle from a solar panel. Here is his first PCB project: “My first PCB (converts 12vdc to 500vdc) It was for a gauss gun. The only IC used was a 555 timer.” (read more)

Pierre-Luc Despres shared his biomes project: “Here the result of my 3D print” (read more)

Carrie Anne Philbin shared a project: “I made a geeky fortunes box using a Raspberry Pi and a thermal printer!” (read more)

Ernie Nelson shared: “I have to finish wiring in the USB interface and program it, but here is my first arduino board.” (read more)

Joe Bobula shared a new project: “Several firsts for me. My first time using ICs. My first project from scratch. My first PCB. An over complicated night light.” (read more)

Andreas Backx got some help sorting out control of the GPIO from his RasPi via the Community: “It’s working, finally. Thanks everyone.” (read more)

Chris Young wrote some more routines for Mike Barela’s Bob the Robot as shared on Adafruit’s Show and Tell. (read more)

Daniel Would shared some more CNC cutting: “Today I tried a more complex CNC cut, with time lapse from a point minted on the machine. Sadly things went badly, trying to push to fast. The pattern screwed up after the x axis bound up. I also think I burned out the power supply I was using. Some days things just don’t go according to plan.” (read more)

Ricardo Lagos shared a watch strap he made: “Seeing all the cool things people make from this community, made me go out and learn how to make my own watch straps. Here is the first one that i finished (buckle is still in the mail)” (read more)

jorge orta used some Adafruit gear to create a solar battery charger: “Hope it will run for ever.” (read more)

Emil Niclas shared a project: “creating a control system for an R/C car. By now it can parallel park, has a simple cruise controller and can be operated from a computer via XBee. It sure was a great way of getting to know some of the potential of the Arduino combined with sensors. I’ll post more of the setup and code once I’m finished with my exams for this semester…” (read more)

Matthew Garsteck got help identifying the board (pictured) on top of his Mega 2560. (read more)

Erik Kringen shared a desktop robot with infrared tracking: “The goal of this project was to create a desktop robot that can track or follow nearby objects. The design had to be compact yet rugged enough to withstand the curiosity of my kids.” (read more)

Rifle Creek experimented with the Sketchup plugin called “grow”: “I made this air cart looking thingy by manipulating the scaling and rotating commands in the grow menu, starting with a basic shape.” (read more)

Jochen Hebeler shared an impressively executed tiny-footprint PCB project: “I build a 3A constant current source based upon a LM3409. The total size of this PCB does not exceed 50mm*30mm and is working. I have to say, it is pretty damn hard to solder such a MSOP-10 chip ” (read more)

Mark Heckler shared an article he wrote about: “how to quickly determine which digital in/out pins may be dead on an Arduino, code & board info included.” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

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!” (read more)

Thanks to ElectricSlim / Andrew Maxwell-Parish sharing the Booty Box: “We’ve all wanted it. Now you can build it. Instant dance parties. Personal theme music. Motion activated music. Booty Box.” (read more)

brayer shared the Liquid Lifebar Arduino project: video and photo documentation here! (read more)

Caleb Kraft and Staci Elaan shared a Thor’s Hammer that delivers an 80,000 volt electric arc from the top: “I wanted Thor’s hammer (Mjolnir), but I wasn’t going to accept any old boring plastic prop. I needed something with a little more POP. I worked with Staci Elaan to build this hammer that has a solid state tesla coil inside. When you push the button, 80,000 volts of electricity arc from the top. It will light up any flourescent bulbs around, scare children, and leave the smell of ozone behind. It is super fun!” (read more)

Over the past couple of weeks, Adafruit staffers Tony Sherwood and I put together something we could give back to the Adafruit community. We seized on the idea of an RGB color picker, the “Koloric Konfabulator” and then featured “Ladyada’s E is for Electronics” — Adafruit awesome Creative Commons coloring book — as the material for participants to color. Check out our video showing how it works! (read more)

Rich Olson on Nothing Labs shared a technique for PCB etching with a a laser cutter: “After a few failures – I came up with the process documented in the video. It works pretty well! I suspect if streamlined a bit – you could go from Eagle to working board in under 90 minutes.” (read more)

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)

Rick Winscot shared the following tips for using Adafruit Neo Pixels for Robot Eyes: “#ROBO1010 upgrade #1 #NeoPixels from @adafruit for the eyes… seriously bright!” (read more)

Jonathan Bobrow shared with us his 3D project KeyBit that provides a simple metal keychain attachment for a MagSafe adapter for Mac computers — a project that puts the “rapid” back into rapid prototyping in an interesting way. (read more)

Check out this tutorial from the talented Colleen Jordan, creator of cute planter necklaces and other projects, who shows her step-by-step method and discusses how this practice extends to using Shapeways and Ponoko nylon materials printed using a range of methods. (read more)

William Wnekowicz shared his Color My Desk: “Hey everyone! I’ve installed a set of colored lights behind my desk and this site lets you (yes, you!) control the color. I know, crazy, right? Learn more about how I did this at Will Makes Things. But first, pick a day, pick a color, and tell me why you picked it!” (read more)

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=63354 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/07/adafruit-coloring-book-featured-in-koloric-konfabulator-by-the-difference-engines/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/05/07/adafruit-coloring-book-featured-in-koloric-konfabulator-by-the-difference-engines/#comments Tue, 07 May 2013 05:30:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=62772

Over the past couple of weeks, Adafruit staffers Tony Sherwood and I carved out some of our free time to put together a “A Red Bull Creation 2013 Qualifier Entry” working from the fun LED strips and “turbull encabulator” shield the Red Bull Creation team had sent us to play around with.

Our goal from early on was to create something cute and actually engaging to play with that we could eventually give back to the Adafruit community. We seized on the idea of an RGB color picker, the “Koloric Konfabulator” and then featured “Ladyada’s E is for Electronics” — Adafruit awesome Creative Commons coloring book — as the material for participants to color. Check out our video showing how it works!

Koloric Konfabulator by The Difference Engines

• created by tony sherwood and matt griffin
• special thanks to michael curry, peter yee, leia & alex, risa, and adafruit
• knob design by michael curry
• music by bartlebeats

To learn more about ladyada’s “e is for electronics” coloring book, shared under Creative Commons, visit here: http://adafruit.com/coloringbook

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Project!

Ladyada’s “E is for Electronics”: Ladyada’s “E is for Electronics” is a coloring book adventure with electronic components and their inventors. Makers of all ages can learn, color, and share common parts and historical figures throughout history. Explore the world of electronics with Ladyada as your guide! (read more)

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.

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 49838 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Don’t miss the chance to catch up with great pieces from the community from this week! Click the link below!

Featured on Adafruit’s Weekly Electronics Show and Tell!

Ham Radio enthusiast Mike stopped in to share about a bunch of new electronics projects in progress for the upcoming Maker Faire Bay Area, and also shared a book, Ham Radio for Arduino and Picaxe edited by Leigh L. Klotz, to which he had contributed two chapters. Another member of the community shared a postive book review of the book in the Adafruit forums a few weeks ago, so we had already shared about the book here! (read more) Featured: 4/27/2013!

Martin Atkins made this fun #adafruit6secs video to show off more of his “radiant mural” project he shared on Show and Tell a few months ago. And here is a longer video of it in action: “Chasing the LED Matrix.” (read more)

From Adafruit 6 Second Electronics Film Festival!

#adafruit6secs electronics film festival deadline May 6th!

Call For Entries: The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival! Share your cool project in 6 seconds of video and win up to $600 at the Adafruit store, with six runners up winning $60 store credit each. In a 6 second video, we want you to share the best project you’ve made. Be sure not to use any copyrighted music, video, etc. This should be all your project, all by you. The Adafruit team will be looking on Twitter, G+/youtube and beyond for Vines, 6 second videos and more tagged with #adafruit6secs. The deadline is 6pm ET, 5/6/13. The Adafruit team of judges will pick their favorites and announce the winner on May, 12th at 6pm ET.

tl;dr – Post a 6 second video of your electronic project(s) using Vine on Twitter and tag it #adafruit6secs! (read more)

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Jochen Hebeler shared: “I build a 3A constant current source based upon a LM3409. The total size of this PCB does not exceed 50mm*30mm and is working. I have to say, it is pretty damn hard to solder such a MSOP-10 chip ” (read more)

Phenoptix raises a glass: “The third office brew but first with me (+Ben Gray) as brewmeister. Gray’s Scarlett – Ruby Ale. Very pleased with the result, yeast bed is a bit active but it’s got great natural carbonation and a nice sweet foretaste and good bitter aftertaste.”
(read more)

Alexis Wiasmitinow shared his electronics lab and projects! (read more)

Luciano Santa Brigida shared his first Kinect hack: “using Kinect SDK for Windows and different Photosphere techniques, including Android’s Photosphere.” (read more)

Hippy Nerd shared a cool animated schematic: “because its kinda hard to explain with words. It came out kinda neat. (sorry about image quality, the web version isnt as clean as the original.” (read more)

From RaizzieN: “I’m making transform-type quadcopter combined with quadruped robot.”(read more)

Kevion McGinley shared: “This is a compact (3k including resources) SSD1306 tile pseudo-graphics library I’ve been working on for the last week or so. It’s more or less feature complete and stable…ish at this point, so I figure it may be useful for others working with lower-end micros.” (read more)

Shared by William Foster: “i finished my 240v 10 amp relay box.” (read more)

Craig “builttospec” shared a new BeagleBone Black Enclosure on Thingiverse: “for those that want to give their new embedded computer a good home.” (read more)

Roberto Marquez shared scrolling text on a 32×32 RGB LED matrix with fonts: “This is done with an Android IOIO, controlled via Bluetooth from a PC, driving a PIXEL.” (read more)

Samuel Williams shared about progress with a games project: “The main reason to keep track of connectivity is efficient edge removal when shield balls are destroyed. When the ball is destroyed, simply find all connected balls, then destroy all edges for each pair of balls. I was thinking it might be interesting to write a dual-key hash table, where it is possible to have multiple keys pointing to the same value, along with the ability to query the hash table with either key to get a sub-set of edges, or both objects to get a unique edge. However, while it might save space and perhaps have a better constant factor speed, it would be the same O(1) operations per edge.” (read more)

Cart V Wood followed our tutorial to put together a Pi Wifi Radio — and then wanted to keep hacking: “I wanted to make mine portable, so I used a VAAS 5000mah battery pack (got two off Yugster last week), a Model A Pi, a Tenda PICO wifi adapter and a super short Belkin USB to Micro USB cord I had sitting around from another project.” (read more)

Pierre-Luc Despres pulled apart an old UPS to change the battery: “Look at that transformer”
(read more)

Shared by Aaron Eiche: “Our first steps in getting our 32×16 led panel working with a Teensy 3.” (read more)

Chris Osborn milled up a back plate for a RasPi case: “The d-sub connectors are for whatever random I/O that I might need. I already plan to use the 15-pin connector as a floppy disk drive interface for my Atari 800 and Commodore 64.The power supply was scavenged from a dead Netgear switch. It outputs 5V at 3A, more than enough for the Pi and any accessories.” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared what he believes may be the smallest “Useless Machine” so far! “Posted a video of this little useless machine a few days ago. Here’s the full build log with code and details of what I used.” (read more)

Nick Shvelidze shared his “Simple distance measurement project.” (read more)

Baka Chan shared his awesome Millennium Falcon N64 Mod: “I finally decided where to put all of the switches, plugs and ports on the falcon, so I started hacking. More specifically I started melting. I used my rotary tool to cut out the controller ports in the last post and that seemed to make a god-awful mess and was extremely hard to control precisely It was well enough on the controller port because it is shadowed well enough to not see the half-stick of hot glue holding it together… (it is very sturdy though lol).” (read more)

Rafiq Anas shared tips for modifying a 3D model before sending it to be produced by a service that charges by volume of material: “As you can see here the model is hollowed this helps a lot to reduce the price of printing since the printer will be using less materials,the wall thickness should be respected carefully depending on the material that will be used,it is very important so the model won’t break in the process or printing and also in the process of finishing.” (read more)

Matt Heilman shared: “a short video containing random 2 tricks you may find useful or weird.” (read more)

Charles Klug shared his Instructable for modding servos for continuous rotation: “My improved method to modify servos for continuous rotation. I know this has been hit to death but take a look at my method!” (read more)

Kris Kortright shared his MakerBot Replicator 1 setup before Show & Tell: “I have my Replicator 1 dual in a closet in my room across from me, with a custom acrylic top, front door and side panels I made.”(read more)

Projects from the #3DThursday Blog Series

3D artist Fred Kahl shared photos from Westport Maker Faire. He has been doing a great job optimizing how he scans and prints massive numbers of people in one sequence, and even built his own custom lazy-susan “people mover” platform (shared on Thingiverse) to allow him to easily grab full body scans, and all using affordable tools and software! Check out these scans from the event from The Great Fredini’s Cabinet of Curiosities. (read more)

Boris Landoni shared an introduction to Kinect for 3D Scannings: “Now, we have a cheap dedicated hardware that is ready to provide a 3D representation of what’s in front of it. Microsoft Kinect, hacked thanks to some tenacious developers, is now emerging as a simple and effective tool to acquire three-dimensional models. From desktop size stuff up to furniture or the whole person, Kinect can be miraculous on its own.” (read more)

Raspberry Pi Projects from the #Piday Blog Series

Jed Parsons made a RasPi My Little Pony Lunchbox: “I think this is going to work.” Awesome! (read more)

An update from the Milwaukee Makerspace traveling mascot RasPi hackerspace project! “I’ve figured out how to connect the GPS unit, and configure the software on the Pi to read the data.” (read more)

Mike Cook shared a great project from his Raspberry Pi from Dummies book. (read more)

Check out the Hymas Wood Kegerface! (read more)

And last, but certainly not least, this awesome wall-box Pi mod: “I used a Raspberry Pi to re-invent my old 1960’s wall box as a controller for my wireless home media system (SONOS). It looks wonderful in my kitchen with its chrome and warm lights. Everyone loves dropping in a quarter, seeing the credits light up, and hearing it clunk and whirr as it selects a song. The RPi is housed inside the wall box and runs a program that polls the GPIO for pulses from the wallbox. It decodes the pulses into a song selection and using UPnP protocols over my home wi-fi, adds the song to the SONOS queue.”
(read more)

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=62171 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/26/community-corner-this-week-in-adafruits-community-2/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/26/community-corner-this-week-in-adafruits-community-2/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 21:00:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=61664

So many projects this week, the Adafruit community is nearly visible from space! (Well, the LEDs might have something to do with this.)

Check out a whole slew of new entries from the Adafruit 6 Second Electronics Film Festival as well as great projects from the Google+ Community, the Adafruit blog, and all of the places where our community congregates.

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 49,198 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Featured on Adafruit’s Weekly Electronics Show and Tell!

After a wee bit of tweaking, Dustin Evans from Wichita, Kansas demoed his RGB Spectrum Analyzer project last week on Adafruit Electronics Show and Tell. “One side reads the left channel and the other side reads the right channel. I have another strip of LEDs coming in the mail. I want to get at least five channels working.” (read more) Featured: 4/20/2013

Adafruit 6 Second Electronics Film Festival!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Eric Cox shared this cool proof of concept: “Implementation of Least Mean Squares Filtered-X (FxLMS) control algorithm. Control structure built in Simulink and transferred to the Arduino Mega using Target.” (read more)

Robin Fordham shared his cube MK1 LED project. “This is a practice project before I build an 8x8x8 cube.” (read more)

Lucas Martín Treser shared photos from the meeting of “Educational Robotica” (read more)

MakeIt shared photos from his SMT/PCB class that he taught at the Zahn Center recently: “Students learned how to create schematics, layout PCBs, and then hand assembled their creations (which were Duemilanove clones without the FTDI chip).” (read more)

Shared by Jorge Orta: “It’s been one week with the system running on a 850mha lipo battery sleeping and waking up.” (read more)

Matthew W shared an extended video showing off his Programmable Logic Controller Trainer Panel project. “I wasn’t satisfied with that really short clip so I decided to make one with more shots of the different components. Check it out: http://youtu.be/DMxnQGmZJ6c Has anyone here built their own? (read more)

James Shyrigh shared a portable speaker system he built for his phone: “I ordered a small amplifier and 4″ speakers. Made the speaker box from the box they were shipped in. Covered it with some scrap material that I had laying around. Turned out a little better than I expected and sounds good too.” (read more)

Shared by Daniel Would: “Used my nexus 4 to do this time lapse. Working to produce parts for an improved z axis carriage.” (read more)

Lon Koenig shared photos of a work in progress project for comic and game conventions. “The 2 inch illuminated buttons from +Adafruit Industries are very tall “behind the panel” and require almost 2 inches. I found these Sterilite 3 cup bowls at Target. Without the lid, they still clear the switch. They even have a mold line in the base the exact size of the hole for the switch assembly.” (read more)

Gene Jordan shared photos from the latest 3D Printing Meet Up at Arch Reactor Hackerspace in St. Louis, Missouri. “At least eight 3D printers on hand belonging to members and visitors. About 30 people present.” (read more)

Ken Olsen shared his latest Furby hacking with Arduino progress:
“The 2005 Furby includes two motors, an upper one for the eye/ears/mouth and a lower one for the legs to rock the body back and forth. Both motors have cams with position indicator switches to help determine their home position. The upper motor also includes includes an optical rotary encoder to help determine where you are in the rotation. We need to handle these signals expediently, so need to use interrupts.” (read more)

Jurie Weidemann shared: “Progress photo on my line follower robot.” (read more)

Jeremy Cook shared his “Light Graphiti” laser trace project. ”
…if you want to know how light-graffiti works in general, here’s my intro. Basically, one opens up the camera’s shutter, records all light coming in, and merges it into an image as if it happened at one time. Because of this, a servo putting little light dots on a screen can appear to be a coherent image as if it was all there at one time.” (read more)

William Garrido shared another update in his twitter/scrolling text wedding preparations: experiments with a WiFly Shield and Arduino Due, and adventures sorting out a library for running it. (read more)

Thomas Edwards has finished the mechanical arm of his AWS Mechanical Turk powered chess playing Mechanical Turk. “I chose the Lynxmotion AL5D robotic arm to provide a reasonable reach at an affordable price. Moving plastic chess pieces does not require much torque, so I was able to avoid using the very capable but very expensive Dynamixel servos and instead used standard cheap RC servos.” (read more)

Willem Ellis Jr. has put together an altimeter for his quadcopter. “It uses a PIC12F675 to read a Motorola MPX4115A pressure sensor. It then transmits that data serially to an Arduino through a bit banging routine. I should cite this page as the source for the circuit. I wrote my own code in C, instead of using his.” (read more)

Andy Fundinger shared the project he has been putting together for an upcoming “Raspberry Python Call Mom Button” class at MakerBar in Hoboken, NJ: “I finally got time to hack together the prototype for the class project for my class this weekend. We’re going to be using the RaspberryPi to connect to Plivo and make phone calls, nominally to our Mom’s. I thought one button was boring so our call Mom Button class will actually have 4 buttons suggested as:”

• Call Mom
• Call Dad
• Text Mom “I love you”
• Mother’s day special

(read more)

d

Matt Heilman has been very active in the community this week, sharing the above Solar powered Insect Electrocutor project in progress as well as a few more interesting videos: how to repair a Samsung LED monitor, testing a solar panel with a number of types of light sources, and a forehead mounted light project.
(read more)

Kris Kortright shared his latest 3D printed RiderScan case. “I’ve uploaded some screenshots of the prototype RiderScan casings, fresh off the MakerBot. I’ve modeled a case for Adafruit Industries’s RFID Breakout Board that has mounts for 3 LEDs (changing these to flat types) and uses two of Adafruit’s waterproof cable-connectors. I plan to upload a ton more screenshots this weekend of the final RiderScan case and RFID units connected and working together. ”
(read more)

Projects from the #3DThursday Blog Series

We shared about Cymon’s tutorials about how to make the lithophanes that keep appearing on Thingiverse: “I have been having a blast figuring out lithophanes and working out how to best make them. I think I’m going to start offering custom lithophane services in the store, which technically means I shouldn’t give away how I’m making them… but that’s not the sort of guy I am.” (read more)

Zach “Hoeken” Smith updated his BotQueue project with majorly exciting updates: “Webcams, Pausing, and More!” (read more)

Raspberry Pi Projects from the #Piday Blog Series

Justin Hayes shared what he believes may be: “The most ridiculously over-built clock ever?” (read more)

Adrian Bevan setup a RasPi project to remotely control his Canon DSLR: “Having made a DIY shutter release for my Canon1000D camera the obvious next step was to build a remote release and the device most suited to this task was of course my RaspberryPi…..” (read more)

Mark shared his balancing Pi-based robot: “When I saw my first two wheel balancing robot I was very fascinated. And after receiving my Raspberry Pi, I decided to build one myself. PiBBOT (Pi Balancing roBOT) is my first successful balancing robot. And it has room for improvement and extra functionality.” (read more)

Giles Booth shared his RasPi thermal printer project: “I love the idea of the Berg Little Printer, but it’s expensive: a self-contained box that lets you rip & read internetty stuff such as weather, messages, diary events, travel news, whatever anyone can think of. I already have a thermal printer I used for my Little Box of Poems, so I decided to make an open source GoFreeRange internet printer instead. The GoFreeRange printer normally uses an Arduino, but as I have the wrong kind of Arduino, I wanted to use a Raspberry Pi instead.” (read more)

Scott Gustafson shared photos of his Raspberry Pi Arduino GSM phone project. (read more)

Bunch of great RasPi projects from the community at the monthly NYC Raspberry Jam meetup. Check out Trammell’s Tandy TRS-80 (above), Stuart’s time-lapse rig-in-progress (above), Tom’s quadcopter, and Tori’s RC PiCar. (read more)

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=61664 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/26/raspberry-pi-project-demo-night-at-nyc-raspberry-jam-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/26/raspberry-pi-project-demo-night-at-nyc-raspberry-jam-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/#comments Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:30:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=61734

I stopped by the NYC Raspberry Jam meetup on Wednesday night with a box full of goodies — ten of our brand new Adafruit Pi Cases to share around to those who brought Raspberry Pi projects. There were some really lovely projects so here are some quick snapshots of them!

Here was the event annoucement @ Meetup.com:

Last month was lots of fun, so let’s do it again!

This month we’ll have some neat projects on display including a Pi powered RC car and a thirty year old retro Pi.  Bring yours to show off or get ideas from the ones on display.

Check out the Meetup site if you want to join next time!

Jam organizer, Trammell Hudson, brought his Tandy TRS-80 running on a RasPi — and let a few of us play a little bit of Minizork on it before taking it apart to show us how how this classic portable functions and handles screen refreshes.

Here Tom shares his a quadcopter in progress — not yet hooked up, but a viable rig for him to hack on while considering the differences between this, his first RasPi quadcopter, and the Arduino quadcopter he made before.

Tory shared his work-in-progress LEGO PiCar. He has been taking a look at some mechanical suggestions for how to build and optimize LEGO cars — and is already having better luck with the front steering responsiveness compared to where he started from existing example projects.

Stuart is a photographer and has quite an array of modular add-on kits (many of them from Adafruit!) he’s bringing to his Pi to setup a handy time-lapse rig that he is looking to build — one that will give him more options for controlling when it triggers, how it handles exposure, and some tracking and panning options.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

White House Science Fair Roundup @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

 We’ve gotten to see Super-Awesome Sylvia and her WaterColorBot in a variety of news sources following her journey to the White House Science Fair on Monday.

Check out all the links and more, including the New York Times!

Buckle up, strap in — our makers, hackers, artists and engineers are going to take you on a wild journey to all of the corners of Adafruit’s fantastically creative community!

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 48,638 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Featured on Adafruit’s Weekly Electronics Show and Tell!

A Scrolling Twitter Display for a Wedding Using LED Matrix Link: Will Garrido shared more about his LED Matrix Link Tindie project. “The main driving force to develop the LED Matrix Link was to display messages at my wedding in May. The idea was to have guests be able to send messages to it during the reception. I decided to use Twitter since most people use it and there are plenty of code examples to get me started.” (read more) Featured: 4/13/2013

Adafruit Products Out In the Wild!

Joe (“Fwonkas“) wrote in to share with us: “Here’s something I made that I wanted to share… I made an Atari arcade joystick using some parts purchased from Adafruit. It was a very easy project, but I definitely prefer it to the original joysticks. I also put up a step-by-step on instructables: Make Your Own Atari Joystick.” (read more)

Adafruit’s Circuit Playground!

Printing some of these pages to hang in our space – Ladyada’s E is for Electronics coloring book @adafruit buff.ly/TaqXKp

— DIYgirls (@DIYGirls) April 14, 2013

Shared via Twitter, @DIYGirls are printing pages of our coloring book! (read more)

Adafruit 6 Second Electronics Film Festival!

The Adafruit 6 second electronics film festival is ON! #adafruit6secs (more details here). The first entries are showing up with the tag, make sure to enter your 6 second entry and win up to $600 in the Adafruit store!

Wow RT @darylrobot My robot sculpture: OvoMetrix wp.me/p2Kv9b-5RD Arduino & Adafruit vine.co/v/bU6uPIgK0Ve #adafruit6secs @adafruit

— ChiefRobot (@ChiefRobot) April 19, 2013

Oh there’s more, check out the Tyopmatic!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Shared by David Would: “Today I tried engraving metal with my home built CNC router for the first time. I’m very pleased with the results. This is the logo from my blog (makergeek.co.uk)”(read more)

David Buhler shared his CRA Wireless Launch System: “Starting to get near completion of a wireless launch system for high power rocketry, A point to multi-point system (1 launch controller to multiple range boxes) with each range box designed with four ignition ports plus the ability to control up to four hybrid solenoids (Nitrous Oxide).” (read more)

Here’s an update shared from maker Ben Krasnow, hard at work on his Cookie Machine project! (read more)

Dave Pentecost shared some photos from the process of “construction and hanging of the dome for our planetarium. 30 feet in diameter, 6 years in the planning, 3 years since building construction began. The long hack.” (read more)

And a day later…

Matt Heilman shared a video focused on his tricks to “Soldering tabs to a battery.” (read more)

He also shared a video demonstrating a 24v solenoid!

Oleg Mazurov shared his v2 revision of his LED grow light electronics. “It will be water-cooled and use 10W Chinese emitters.” (read more)

William Foster shared his Arduino robot collision detection and avoidance robot: “i’m thinking about replacing the ping sensor with two light sensors, and making a light seeking robot … any advice on the programming to do that?” (read more)

Baka Chan shared a project that is a few “firsts”:

1 my first avr programming nightmare
2 my first all from scratch build
3 my first arduino experience, which was a mostly pleasant one once I figured out what the heck I was doing

(read more)

Jeremy Veleber shared a video of his heavy metal drum lighting project: “Here is what I have so far for my drum enclosure lighting system, code name: Citadel.” (read more)

Rafiq Anas showed off a sculptural piece he made: “A 3d printed statuette from I.materialise factory machines ,i’m very satisfied with the material look.” (read more)

Peter Wobacz created a “Switch mode bench power supply made of atx computer psu.” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Building a Tardis-Light: maker “The Mechatronics Guy” grabbed some Digital RGB LED Weatherproof Strip 32 LED and example code and used it to rig up a light for a very special box: “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.” (read more)

Pebble Smart Watch Class/Hackathon at NYC Resistor: Trammell Hudson let us know he will be offering a class on how to “write custom watch faces that work with the official Pebble SDK.” Tickets for the class are on sale for $125. The hackathon afterwards is free! (read more)

Our Geeky Wedding – Wedding Circuit Ceremony: Bill Porter shared about some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can really get behind: soldering a project together that lights up to say “I DO” as a metaphor for the marriage contract. “Yes, we really did solder some wires together in the middle of our wedding, with a Weller soldering iron Mara bought me for a past birthday no less.” (read more)

Projects from the #3DThursday Blog Series

Replicating a 19th Century Statue with 21st Century Tech: art hacker David Huerta shared about using stereophotogrammetry for the Brooklyn Museum’s efforts to hack for accessibility, to offer scaled, touchable versions of items from their collection — and some of the challenges he faced. (read more)

3D printing store turns your ideas into real objects: Chicago makers Mike Moceri and Tom Burtonwood alerted us that they are opening a very unusual type of store centered around 3D printing. “The end goal is to have people develop projects independently, then come work with us to print them,” Moceri said, adding that creating a collaborative learning space is more important to the store’s founders than making any sales. (read more)

Raspberry Pi Projects from the #Piday Blog Series

Measuring Lobbyists With a Custom RasPi Meter:
Tom Lee from the Sunlight Foundation used Adafruit gear and tutorials to help him create an unusual sort of meter: “Every few minutes a Python script running on the Pi fills out a form on the Senate Office of Public Records website, and counts how many new registrations have shown up this week.” (read more)

A tweet from Jed Parsons (@drainmice): “Sweet! USB microscope works great with Raspberry Pi on bus power. Here through luvcview. /cc @adafruit” (read more)

Deimos: Pi Remote Rover: Doug Roberts shared his RasPi remote rover project, Deimos. He said: “I thought I would share my project, as most of the components come from Adafruit… My project is almost finished, just waiting for the Pi’s Camera Module.” Really cool mod project, thanks for sharing! (read more)

The Cloud Lamp Project:
Thomas Mardis shared his RasPi circular LED display project tutorial — The Cloud Lamp Project: “After getting my home somewhat automated with a z-wave network and a few other custom devices, I thought I’d like to have a simple way to see the status of my home, the weather, surf report, etc, easily visible from my bed.” (read more)

End robocaller, solicitation, and hangup calls with Asterisk & Raspberry Pi: Bill Bishop sent in a link to his well-documented Asterisk + Raspberry Pi project tutorial to help you build a tool with your RasPi to eliminate unwanted calls. (read more)

Turn your Raspberry Pi into a Scan-To-Cloud Device: Frederik Granna expanded upon a scan-to-cloud RasPi project created by Eduardo Luís to add an Adafruit Blue&White 16×2 LCD+Keypad Kit for display. (read more)

Raspberry Pi E-Mail + LCD Tutorial Mashup: user “bfesser” from the the Adafruit Forums read two tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System to create a handy RasPi project. “I combined the 16×2 LCD tutorial with the email LED tutorial to get the LCD to display the RasPi’s IP (I was running headless) and how many unread emails I had in my Gmail inbox.” (read more)

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=60946 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/17/our-geeky-wedding-wedding-circuit-ceremony/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/04/17/our-geeky-wedding-wedding-circuit-ceremony/#comments Thu, 18 Apr 2013 01:00:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=60632

Now here are some wedding vows that the Adafruit crowd can get behind — soldering a project together that lights up to say “I DO” as a metaphor for the marriage contract. Fascinating! From Bill Porter’s blog:

When it came time for Mara and I to draft our wedding ceremony we pondered how we could incorporate an element from our theme. We had 4 days to go and only some vague ideas. Mara bought some wood letters to spell out ‘I Do’ and wanted to use them in the ceremony. We also joked about using a soldering iron during the ceremony; but how could we do it tastefully? Then it hit us, a common wedding ceremony know as the “Fishermen’s Knot” could be reworded for something a little more geeky. Yes, we really did solder some wires together in the middle of our wedding, with a Weller soldering iron Mara bought me for a past birthday no less. And you won’t believe what PCBs came in handy for the build…

Ok, this post will be short because this project was thrown together 4 days before the wedding and we didn’t have time to stop and document the steps. We were set to get married and still had a lot to do, as evident by the mini-maker space we created in my parents house (see below).

Mara bought the letters at a local hobby store. I sketched out a rough outline of evenly spaced LEDs and went to work creating the holes with a drill press. A coat of blank paint and then my best man Dan went to work soldering wires to all those LEDs. Next we had to figured out a way to control those LEDs. In a pleasant case of coincidence, the boards I hijacked to ask my bride to marry me 2 years ago were designed to control large numbers of LEDs. Yes, the boards that asked “Mara Will You Marry Me?” were used to run letters that said ‘I Do’ during our wedding ceremony.

Read more.

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.

There is a dedicated forum developing at: http://www.hamradioprojects.com

Here is a partial list of projects:

• Timber: An APRS Data Logger
• APRS Messenger
• Airgate: A Receive-Only, Low-Power APRS iGate
• Marinus: An APRS Display
• Nanokeyer
• Multimode Transmitter Shield
• Thermic: a High Voltage, High Frequency, and High Temperature Data Logger
• Dozen: A DMTF Controlled SSTV Camera
• Buddy: A Rover’s Best Friend
• Sweeper: An Arduino SWR Scanner
• Cascata: An Arduino Waterfall
• Swamper: A Cypress Waterfall for 2.4 GHz

Picaxe Projects

• Axekey: A Simple PICAXE Keyer
• Pharos: A PICAXE CW Beacon Keyer
• Sunflower Solar Tracker

ATTiny Projects

• QRSS: Very Slow Sending
• Time Out: A Handheld Radio Talk Timer

…

Read more.

» What Keeps Hacker and Maker Spaces Going? @ transfabric. Great article from 2012 -

Hackerspaces are place-based collectives where individuals learn through socialization, tinker with technology, develop skills and pool technical resources. But what’s holding them together and moving them forward? Here are a few central themes drawn from my research in a western context that I am exploring, and would be particularly curious to explore internationally…

Read more.

Check out the the launch of this year’s RedBull Creation contest — and read about this year’s custom hardware over at Hackaday.

In previous years, RedBull has sent out some custom hardware for people to use. Last year it was basically an Arduino on a custom PCB with some cool touch sensors. This year, they’ve sent out this multi purpose LED controller shield that looks pretty impressive.

From JoeJoe, the creator of the board:

Basically, it is kind of an LED lighting multi-tool with some extra sensors and output devices on-board.  The board is controlled over I2C using an Arduino Uno R3, or you can air-wire pretty much any device that supports 400KHz (fast mode) I2C to the breakout pads.  We’ve tested it with some of custom networked devices and with Raspberry Pi, for example.  The I2C addresses of each device are written on the silkscreen of the board, though some peripherals (on PIC microcontrollers for example) expect you to use that address shifted one bit to the left (they don’t automatically add in the low read/write bit).
Onboard you will find the following …

Check out the teardown at Hackaday.

Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire: Signup Deadline, April 16th:

Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire is a day of family friendly making, learning, crafting, inventing and tinkering in the heart of London.

Be inspired by arts, crafts, engineering, science and technology from the Makers of the capital.

Best of all entry is free and there will be many opportunities to get hands on!

Elephant & Castle Mini Maker Faire

• Date: Saturday, 6th July 2013 10:00–18:00
• Call for Makers: Deadline: Sunday, 14th April 2013
• Follow us on Twitter: @MakerFaireEC
• Web page: http://makerfaireelephantandcastle.com/

Read more.

Sign up now to attend New Frontiers in Robotics: Extending Human Reach event on the evening of April 9th in New York City!

New York City is home to a vibrant tech community researching and developing cutting-edge systems.

Join us for an evening of thought-provoking presentations and exciting live demonstrations in celebration of National Robotics Week 2013!

National Robotics Week is a week-long series of events and activities aimed at increasing public awareness of the growing importance of “robo-technology” and the tremendous social and cultural impact that it will have on the future of the United States.

National Robotics Week is organized by an Advisory Council (see our Partners) which recognizes robotics technology as a pillar of 21st century American innovation, highlights its growing importance in a wide variety of application areas, and emphasizes its ability to inspire technology education. Robotics is positioned to fuel a broad array of next-generation products and applications in fields as diverse as manufacturing, health-care, national defense and security, agriculture and transportation. At the same time, robotics is proving to be uniquely adept at enabling students of all ages to learn important science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) concepts and at inspiring them to pursue careers in STEM-related fields. Robotics Week is a week-long series of events and activities aimed at increasing public awareness of the growing importance of “robo-technology” and the tremendous social and cultural impact that it will have on the future of the United States.

In May 2009, leading universities and companies appealed to the Congressional Caucus on Robotics to create a “national road-map” for robotics technology. On March 9, 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives passed resolution H.Res. 1055, officially designating the second full week in April as National Robotics Week. This resolution was submitted by U.S. Representative Mike Doyle (PA-14), co-chair of the Caucus, and other members.

Initiated in 2010, the inaugural National Robotics Week included 50 affiliated events around the country. National Robotics Week 2011 built on that success to include more than 100 events in 22 states, District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. And in 2012, National Robotics Week included over 160 events in all 50 of the United States.

We welcome all collaborators from industry and academia who would like to join us. Get involved by hosting a National Robotics Week event next year or help us spread the word on Facebook and Twitter!

Read more.

Check out this awesome waterproof MintyBoost enclosure project built by Adafruit community member “IthinkIunderstand” on the Adafruit Forums!

Just thought i would share my first MintyBoost kit. I do a lot of biking and hiking and wanted something a little more rugged than the standard metal case. So i dug out the plumbing fittings and made a nice little waterproof version. Of course, we always realize a better way to build something AFTER we’ve built the first one. If i were to do this again, i would have a cable directly soldered to the board and coming out of a waterproof grommet somewhere on the cylinder. I would leave enough of the cable inside so that changing the batteries would simply mean unscrewing the cap and sliding out the unit, batteries first, and switching out the double A’s. That way you could just plug it in without opening it up.

This thing is made with 1 1/2 inch plumbing pieces which is common in any hardware store. The pictures are deceiving, but the length is roughly 135mm or 5 1/4 inches. If i had changed the size of the Lexan the batteries and board are sitting on i might have been able to add a set of spare batteries inside as a backup. This thing could be made to fit inside a 1 1/4inch pipe also, but it would be tight.

Another version of this would be to put it inside a plastic case for outdoor electrical. There would be room for a lipo battery and the charging circuit, including something solar. Look in the section where they keep all that gray plastic electrical conduit stuff.

If you have any questions, just ask.

Read more.

Really awesome project!

Apparently a big project brewing for Lucas Ainsworth and Alyssa Hamel of Kinetic Creatures — check out this post over at MAKE for more details!

Despite having just submitted their application for Maker Faire Bay Area, Lucas Ainsworth and Alyssa Hamel of Kinetic Creatures are already hard at work on the project they have planned for their second appearance at the fair: an enormous, bike-powered, cardboard “Rory the Rhino.” At last year’s Bay Area fair, the couple had just launched a Kickstarter campaign to jumpstart the production of their Kinetic Creatures, a set of three cardboard animal kits that cleverly fold and slot together to yield Rory the Rhino, Gino the Giraffe, and Elly the Elephant.

The introduction of a handcrank or simple gear box mechanism allows the animals to move. Lucas, an industrial designer and researcher at Intel, and Alyssa, an art teacher and artist, had been toying around with the designs for a few years, and they finally decided it was time to make them a reality. The Kickstarter campaign was successful, netting double their initial goal of $22,000, and soon Kinetic Creatures were making their way around the world. For this year’s fair, though, they wanted to go bigger by literally enlarging the design of Rory. They plan to build a roughly human-sized version of the rhino, still out of cardboard, and attach a bike in front of the rhino as the gear mechanism, allowing fair visitors to pedal the bike to make the rhino move…

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Products

Rory the Rhino – Kinetic Creatures: Rory the Rhino is a walking cardboard animal sculpture that you assemble from pre-cut and scored cardboard pieces. Rory walks when you turn the included wire handle, or Rory can walk with mechanical and electrical additions, such as Lego motors or the Kinetic Creatures Motor Kit. (read more)

We shared a Raspberry Pi care package with the folks over at Metalab (thanks to Marius Kintel for the suggestion!), which is timely because they are right now doing a number of exciting projects with RasPi, including a prototype for an authentication system for their “lazzor,” and a 24×24 RGB matrix with the RasPi as the network interface (strip controlled by a teensy). And the talented Wizard23 created an exciting project that he worked with Overflo to turn into a product for their Hackerspaceshop store! Here’s the beginning of the project documentation over at the Metalab wiki. (And here is the code.)

The WS2801 Bridge for Raspberry Pi is a project developed by wizard23 and produced by overflo.

The metalab received a Raspberry Pi care package from Adafruit, and because we really dig blinky things we made a WS2801 controller for the Raspberry Pi.

It’s a simple shield that you can attach to your Raspberry Pi that functions as a bridge from Raspberry Pi to control a wide variety of WS2801 based LED strips and Pixelmodules at different voltage levels.

You can make your things go blinky from python or C/C++ without the need of a separate microcontroller.

It uses the internal /dev/spi0.0 provided by the Linux Kernel to talk to the Bridgemodule.

And because this is awesome, we made a kit out of it that you can purchase for 10,- on the hackerspaceshop.com

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

We sent the Twin Cities Maker hackerspace a Raspberry Pi care package a couple of months ago, and they have started a number of interesting projects, including an “…automated cat food feeder (the hopper is from the Container Store), stumbling on getting gears printed to actuate the food hopper/dispenser.” TCMaker are also offering excellent RasPi classes at the Hack Factory worth checking out if you are in the area. Here’s their latest listing:

We have two upcoming Raspberry Pi Classes posted!

Classes start April 2nd, and April 20th.

So you want to play with a Raspberry Pi?  But maybe you haven’t been able to get one yet.  Well you’re in luck!  This class includes a Raspberry Pi, Wifi, Power, Cables, LEDs, SD Card!  This is everything you need to get the Pi going.  Don’t know what a Raspberry Pi is? Check out this article from the NYTimes.  The ticket includes $120 worth of hardware for you and the class tutorials.

Class Kit Includes:

• Adafruit Raspberry Pi Starter Kit
• Raspberry Pi w/512MB of RAM
• WiFi Card
• 4GB SD Card
• Power Supply + USB
• GPIO breakout board, bread board and jumpers.
• Misc LED, buttons, resistors, etc for the lessons.

This will be a two-day class.  A laptop computer with at least 4 Gigs of space for the SD card image will be required.

Day 1) Bootstrapping your Raspberry PI (~2 hours)

• Install Linux on your SD Card
• Start the Pi: Boot and config process
• How to run programs on your Pi & basic Linux intro

Day 2) Doing fun things, like Python and GPIO programing (~2 hours)

• Setup the WiFi device
• Python Basics, and functions.
• Blink an LED
• Get switch input
• Use a photo-resistor to read light levels
• Read data from a temperature sensor
• Read analog inputs

BYOPI Option

If you have a Raspberry Pi board already, it must be the version that was released December 2012 with 512MB of Memory on board.  The older boards have different PIN layouts that are inconsistent with the material that I’m teaching in class, and makes for a bit of a stumbling block when doing lessons.  Additionally, all of the kits are pre-buldled with a Raspberry Pi by default, and are pre-ordered well before the class begins so we have enough stock for all students.  This means that we may have extra Pis for sale at the start/end of the class.

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

We shared a Raspberry Pi care package with the Milwaukee Makerspace and they decided to ask their members to propose a cool project for the space to create out of the Pi booty. Here are the details about the project that the selected member has been working on — and the photos are the latest update to his progress. Great project!

Eric joined Milwaukee Makerspace last summer, and rumor has it he’s a pretty skilled software guy, so hopefully the challenge of writing code for the Raspberry Pi won’t be too difficult for him. He’s also done a bit of metalwork, woodworking, and a few electronics projects. But wait, we should explain what he plans to do!

Here’s the project that Eric proposed:

As an outgrowth of the Traveling Gnome Prank, many groups have adopted their own traveling mascot, where a statue, doll, gnome, or action figure voluntarily travels with various group members to far off places. The group documenting the travels of the mascot collects photos and travel reports

I propose that a Milwaukee Makerspace traveling mascot be equipped to report on its own travels. Built around a Raspberry Pi, with the addition of a battery, GPS unit, and a camera sensor, the traveling mascot could take its own photos and report its own location.

I believe that with this kit, a few additions, and the tools at the Milwaukee Makerspace, I could pull off making a working self-reporting traveling mascot. With the help and input of artists, designers, developers, and makers of any kind, we could make this thing great.

This project can help build the Milwaukee Makerspace community by keeping the space in our member’s minds as they travel, sharing with our community. Also, the traveling mascot will encourage frequent additions to our website.

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Check out this great hackerspace monitoring project from the Tokyo Hackerspace created by Taylan Ayken with a Raspberry Pi care package that we sent their way:

We discussed many projects: GPS data logger, weather display, radiation measurement server and so on. All was nice but I wanted a couple of things to try with this project: WiFi access to a hidden network (our HackerSpace has a hidden network), using a webcam, reading sensors and displaying them. That gave me an idea to have a HackerSpace status display so that we can see if anybody is in so that people without keycards can drop by. While we are at it, why not add a webcam feed to it and a temperature&humidity sensor to see if it’s a good idea to leave home (In Tokyo, summers are really hot and humid so you usually don’t wander off the regular path between home and work). That is how HackerSpace Monitor was formed…

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Check out this cool game project created using the Adafruit TIMESQUARE watch kit and shared on the Adafruit Support Forums:

The Timesquare watch is a great little project. Just to experiment with it, I made a simple bat and ball game that runs on the watch.

Here’s the code, forked from the Adafruit Timesquare repo.

The specific file for the game screen can be found here.

And here’s a YouTube video of the game.

This was mostly just to see what I could do, but hopefully somebody finds it useful/fun.

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Product!

TIMESQUARE DIY Watch Kit – Tangerine Display Matrix: Show up stylish AND on time to any event with this awesome looking DIY watch. We have a few watch kits here at Adafruit but we finally have one that looks good and fits well, even for ladies and kids and others with smaller wrists and hands. Its got a 8×8 bit matrix display and a repurposed silicone watch band for a professional look. (read more)

Check out these awesome highlights from the Hot Pop Factory’s 3D Printing Kissing booth, via 3ders.org:

Just like a photobooth, you can memorialize silly faces, candid moments or fabulous poses of you and your crew. But instead of a flat picture of yourself, we put together the contemporary predecessor to the photobooth where participants can get a 3-dimensional replica of their poses from all angles! Add a little Valentines spirit, and the 3D Printing Kissing Booth was born.

We set up the 3-day pop-up event at the fun and fashionable Untitled & Co storefront on Toronto’s Queen Street West, and collaborated with Draft Print 3D for the 3D printing 3D scanning extravaganza! With the same equipment used for our Candy Hacking Project, we brought something that was done with our custom projects to the public for the first time. Participants got a chance to check out some 3D printers in action, get scanned for free, and choose to get their scans 3D printed as a statuette, bobble head, necklace or ring! …

Read more.

For those of you who picked up the new Uzebox Starter Kit this is a great challenge for you!

Uzebox Coding Challenge 2013

UPDATE: 13 registered participants so far and still plenty of time to register! (see the list at the end of this post)

The Uzebox community is officially launching its first game coding contest! We aim to stir interest in peoples to realize games and ideas sleeping idle in a corner of their brain! The contest will offer prizes and eternal gratification by having their names all over the place on the Uzebox site. Here’s the details:

RULES

• The contest will launch February 1st 2013 and close June 1st 2013 at midnight GMT-5.
• Participant *must* register to participate.
• The registration date limit is April 1st. To register, send the administrator a personal message on the forums with a rough idea of the game you are planning to present (if possible). It will remain secret but if someone had registered the same idea before you will be advised.
• Participants will be listed at the end of this post
• More than 1 entry can be submitted per participant but only one can win a prize
• You can share the progress of your game at any time during the compo as long as you registered it
• Existing WIP games never completed can enter the contest…perfect occasion to finish em up
• More than one person can work on an entry but only one prize will be attributed to the entry
• Source code will need to be submitted along the binary and we must be able to compile it
• Projects must be made to run at least on the uzem emulator. If you tweak the kernel files, it must run on the real hardware (Uze6666 will help validate this).
• Projects must be games or other useful and interactive programs (like Uzeamp). No demos will be accepted (demos in the traditional sense, i.e: Second Reality by Future Crew).
• Projects must not be a simple update of an existing Uzebox game.
• Projects must be at most 61440 bytes long to be compatible with the Gameloader.
• Any video mode can be used
• Any kernel version can be used
• Custom kernels and video mode can be developed and used as long as it runs correctly on the real hardware and the emulator.
• Jury will be made of a panel select by Uze
• Rules may be subject to change
• If money prizes are given, they will be payed out exclusively via Paypal.
• Judging will be made by summing the rating from 1(lowest) to 10(highest) several criterions:
• Game Play: How the game plays and reacts, AI level, game dynamics, etc
• Originality: Bonus point for an original game concept (i.e. not a port of an existing game)
• Graphics: Quality and richness of the in game graphics
• Sound & music: Quality and quantity of sound effects and in-game music. Bonus points for original effects and music.
• Completeness: Bonus point for things like many game levels, main menu, high score panel, attract mode, etc.
• Technical prowess: custom video modes, complex effects, etc will be awarded bonus points
• Prizes will be allocated as following (first proposal, to discuss). Note that the prizes may be subject to change for the better if we find sponsors.
• 1st: A E/Uzebox ultra deluxe kit: Kit(PCB+all parts)+2 controllers+AVRISP MKII programmer+SD CARD preloaded+power supply+all cables + 200$ + a 7″ TV monitor sponsored by Adafruit.com.
• 2nd: A E/Uzebox standard kit + 100$
• 3rd: A E/Uzebox base kit + 50$
• 4,5,6th places: 1 Uzebox t-shirt

Read more.

Uzebox Starter Kit – v1.0: The Uzebox is a fully open-source, DIY 8-bit game console. It is designed specifically for people who know a little bit of programming to expand into designing and creating their own video games and demos. A full-featured core runs in the background and does all the video and audio processing so that your code stays clean and easy to understand. (read more)

And here’s my favorite story of #3dthursday this week! 83 year old retiree inventor competed in the Desktop Factory Competition come up with a machine to offer an incredibly inexpensive solution for at-home filament manufacture from pellets, winning a $40,000 bounty happily presented by Inventables CEO Zach Kaplan.

Here’s an excerpt from TIME Tech — the entire article is worth a read!

It’s not startling that someone successfully met the challenge posed by the contest; 3D printing enthusiasts are, almost by definition, enterprising and inventive. And the $40,000 bounty was certainly alluring. But it’s unlikely that anyone involved in the competition would have guessed that its winner would be an enterprising inventor who happened to have been born during the Hoover administration.

That inventor is 83-year-old Hugh Lyman, who lives near Enumclaw, Wash., 35 miles southeast of Seattle. Until he retired 17 years ago, Lyman ran Ly Line Products, a manufacturer of scientific cabinetry and related items such as fume hoods. He’s been a forward-thinking technologist for a long time: in 1976, Computerworld magazine wrote about Ly Line’s use of the IBM 5100, an early “portable computer” which weighed 55 pounds.

Today, he engages in his share of classic golden-years pursuits: He is, for instance, an avid fisherman and golfer. But he’s also a passionate participant in the maker movement.

“After I retired in 1996, I started doing some inventing,” says Lyman, whose creations include a table-top gizmo which binds stacks of loose paper into pads. “I designed a few products, and I had them made on a 3D printer….and then I forgot about it.” Years later, he learned about kits for building low-cost desktop 3D printers. He built one, and then another and then another. And he’s used them to print everything from bracelets for his wife to statues of Aphrodite for friends to parts for his inventions.

When Lyman heard about the Desktop Factory Competition, he was instantly intrigued, in part because he’d benefit if the problem it set out to address was solved. “Every time I buy a couple of pounds of filament, it costs me forty to fifty bucks,” he explains. “I was burning through it pretty fast.” He also shared the contest organizers’ vision of pervasive, democratized manufacturing: “I would think that at least half the homes in the world will eventually have a 3D printer.”

Lyman describes himself as an “undergraduate engineer” — he studied engineering from 1948-1953 at the University of Utah, but didn’t earn a degree. Though he holds eight patents, he says he’s “not educated enough to be able to do calculations of torque and so forth.” So implementing his contest entry “was trial and error. I tinkered with it and used common sense.”

His first entry, the Lyman Filament Extruder, could indeed turn inexpensive plastic pellets into filament. But when Lyman entered the device in the contest in August of 2012, it was disqualified on the grounds that it failed to come in under the $250 limit for parts; he hadn’t accounted for the cost of a few parts he’d fabricated himself.

So he returned to his drawing board and came up with the Lyman Filament Extruder II. “It’s my first machine with a few little parts changed,” he says. “I resubmitted it, and it worked. It worked great.” The judges agreed and declared him as the winner.

With either Lyman Extruder, you fill a hopper with plastic pellets, then flip a switch to turn on a heater. The contraption melts the pellets, then squeezes the resulting molten plastic into filament which emerges from a nozzle and coils on the floor….

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Here’s a great story from the Thingiverse world. Whosawhatsis’ Minimalist MK7 Replacement mod has been a favorite for almost three years on Thingiverse given the widespread use of the MK7 toolhead for the still active MakerBot Cupcake, Thing-O-Matics, and in custom desktop 3D printers. His mod uses minimal additional “vitamin” hardware and printed parts to replace the delrin filament plunger with a spring tensioner, an approach which helps for printing a range of slightly fluctuating filament diameters among other things, opening up users to more filament vendors.

Emmett’s popular MK8 edition, based on Whosawhatsis’ mod, is in extensive use throughout the Replicator 1 community. And now whpthomas, “Wingcommander,” has a great version of the mod for the Rep2/2x community.

Sharing and improving on each others’ design is in the spirit of the desktop 3D printing community — and now MakerBot has taken note of these techniques and designed a derivative “official” version themselves that pays tribute to the hard work of the community. A great community story from the MakerBot Blog:

There are certain issues that the wrong amount of plunger tension can cause. For example, too much tension can cause a clicking sound when the end of the filament isn’t able to move past the drive gear. Too little tension can cause the filament to stop feeding altogether.

There should be a design that makes the process much easier.

Enter Thingiverse user whpthomas who came up with an improvement that has really seen some traction. It’s a great mod that makes the machine more reliable over the long haul.

Genius. We love this.

Thing #42250 “Replicator 2 Extruder Upgrade” by whpthomas, is one of these very useful designs. It’s based on an extruder mod from Thingiverse superstar emmett, who based his design on one from another star user, whosawhatsis. The basic idea of this series of designs is to use a spring-loaded arm to squeeze the filament between the drive gear and a bearing.

After extensive testing, we’ve decided that this approach is too good to ignore. We’ve modified this design to reuse the spring we already use for the build plate. We also added in a little bit of extra guidance for the filament where it enters the hot end of the extruder. Take a look on our Thingiverse page to see our adaptation of whpthomas’ great design.

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

For those of you in the Greater New York City Area, at the upcoming March MakeIT NYC Meetup special guest Keith Ozar will feature 3D Systems’ Cube, and NYCEDC will present “something new”:

Special Guest Keith Ozar of 3D Systems is going to introduce the Cube and CubeX 3D printers, talk about 3D Systems’ Cubify offerings, and will stay with us to demo what the Cube and CubeX can do. Better yet? 3D Systems is picking up the tab for pizza. Talk about a Maker’s friend – making both extruded plastic and oozing mozzarella happen at the same time. Thanks, Keith!

NYCEDC, our gracious space sponsor, will be doing something that we’re still working on. Something, maybe, Next Top Maker-ish? The judging and public voting deadlines close a couple of hours before our meeting… hmm. There could be some drama!

We’ll also be featuring member presentations! And presenters are still needed! If you have a favorite tool or technique that you’d like to talk about, or a project that you’d like to show off, and perhaps get some feedback, shoot Jonathan an email right away.

And don’t forget – we’re finishing the big drawing for the Gold Passport to the Inside 3D Printing Conference & Expo! Everyone from the January meeting who filled in a slip, and March attendees who do so will have their name in the hat for the big ticket, and two others will be getting a Networking Pass.

Read more.

And a special thanks to Adafruit’s very own Tom (Bartlebeats) who provided all of the music!

#1 Color organ on the Adafruit Google+ community! #communities:

We’re loving the cool projects makers are sharing on the Google+ community @ Adafruit!. Here’s a color organ made with LEGO Mindstorms!

#2 Making Cheddar in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

Here is a video featuring a recent project from Google+ Adafruit community. We celebrate science, technology, engineering, math and art — and here’s a great food technology how-to! Featuring “Farmhouse Cheddar” by Michael Kirkland.

#3 Cosmic Ray Detector in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

Earlier this week, a curious video was shared in the Adafruit Google+ Community by Robert Hart featuring an intriguing flicker of lights. Following Robert’s link, it was an 81 Pixel Hodoscope, an instrument for detecting cosmic rays (muons)! Here’s a video discovering Robert’s project at the Adafruit Google+ Community — all filled with exciting projects appearing there every single day.

#4 Art Robots in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

Pete Prodoehl posted about his art robots on the Adafruit Google+ Community. Read more about them here!

#5 ULN2803 Driver Chips in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

This week on Community Corner, we used the “search” function within the G+ Community to see all of the recent tutorials our community members have been creating and sharing about the ULN2803. Take a look at some videos and posts from Matt Heilman, Sylvain Leroux, and William Foster — and dive into the conversation yourself!

#6 Dining Room Thrust Test for Printed Propellers in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

This week on Community Corner, we stumbled on a great “dining room thrust test” shared by Ben Harber. He used a custom rig to test the thrust potential for a series of 3D printed propellers he had produced. We enjoyed watching him engage in science — and share his updates as he analyzed his data. We wish him well with his project!

#7 How to Share An Event in the Adafruit Google+ Community:

This week on Community Corner, we show how to create an event listing on the Adafruit Google+ Community. We are starting to put our Ask An Engineer and Show & Tell events announcements up there each week — and will add a bunch of other local, regional, and national events there that our community has been requesting.

#8 An Afternoon Stroll Through the Adafruit Google+ Community:

There is always something exciting going on in the Adafruit Google+ Community. Come visit and share something you are working on!

We’ve been having a lot of fun sharing these experiences with all of you — and look forward to doing more in the future!

Each week on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

Exciting news from the Crash Space “PD Patching Circle” — Pure Data running well on a Raspberry Pi! From Theron at Crash Space:

You wouldn’t necessarily think that a $35 computer was a good choice for running the audio-focused visual programming language Pure Data, but it turns out to work really well. We got a great demonstration of that on Sunday 2/10 at the Pd Patching Circle.

Miller Puckette, creator of Pd, showed us his PdPi powered guitar effects unit.

Note the clever prototyping enclosure (below). He tie wraps all the devices to the top and the power supplies (Raspberry Pi and powered USB hub) to the underside, so there’s just one power cord. He uses an iMic USB audio interface (others will work as well) to hook up his guitar and output audio. Since one of the USB ports is taken, he uses a bluetooth keyboard and mouse from Logitech. The iMic has a line/mic input selector switch. The Raspberry Pi case was 3D printed at CRASH Space.

The only trick is you have to slow the USB speed to 1.1 in order to get audio input and output to work. To do this, edit the file /boot/cmdline.txt and add “dwc_otg.speed=1″. Once you do this, you may find that a USB keyboard will no longer work connected directly to the Pi (and may even crash it).

Because it’s running Pd, it can be made into any kind of effect filter. Miller showed us a few simple examples, such as reverb, wah-wah, and distortion….

Read more, including about the other projects presented!

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Just a quick Valentine’s Message from the community — in the form of Noah Fiedel‘s Valentine’s Day woodworking project he shared with us today.

Have something to share? Join the 41,000+ Makers, hackers, artists and engineers in the Adafruit Google+ community!

From The Deconstruction “manifesto”:

The goal of The Deconstruction is to bring people together from all over the world (physically and digitally) to share ideas, collaborate, create, innovate, and most imporantly have fun.   The event is open to anyone, anywhere, of any age and skill level.   Here’s how you participate:

Step 1. Assemble a group of friends, collaborators, conspirators, co-workers, or just people you like and register your team.  The more eclectic your team, the better.  Fill out the form, create a team name. Deconstruction teams can be 2 or 200 people.

Step 2: Find a place to work.  The more tools of creativity the better.  The more materials to Deconstruct the better. The more access to late night food and coffee the better.  Also, good internet is key.

Teams are *highly* encouraged to live-stream themselves for the entire 48-hour period.  We will supply you with access to a streaming platform and a list of best practices (you need to supply the web-cam). Each team will also be issued a unique Deconstruction Team Site, where you can document your process and collaborate with friends, family, and people you don’t even know yet.

Spend a little time thinking about how to best livestream yourselves. It’s fun, believe us.  If you haven’t done this before don’t be afraid…it’s easy.   Costumes, hyjinks, and all varieties of tomfoolery are highly encouraged!   There is also a special award for “best webcast”.  However, if you can’t webcast you can definitely still participate.

Step 3:  On Feb 22 at 5PM PST The Deconstruction will go live.  We will begin broadcasting our host feed for 48 hours straight.  Teams will also begin their webcasts and the event will begin.  From our studio, we will interview participating teams (you!), and other inspiring guests.

Step 4: (the most important step): Collaborate and create with your team over the 48-hour period.  Webcast and document your process.  The Deconstruction host feed will amplify your signal to show the world what you’re doing and allow others to collaborate with you through comments and social media.

Step 5:  Make and submit a short final video for judging featuring your team, what you made, and most importantly how you did it.  (note: it helps to assign someone on your team to be the documentarian).

Step 6:  Kick back. Check out what everyone else made.  Celebrate what was created and did not exist 48 hours before!

Read more.

There is always something exciting going on in the Adafruit Google+ Community. Come visit and share something you are working on!

Check out our video on YouTube (please subscribe!).

Music by bartlebeats.

Each week on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

Check out this typographical animation rendition of the classic Ira Glass “Ira Glass On Storytelling” video, shared in a busy thread of advice to a young artist on the Adafruit Google+ Community. I had never seen this animated version of Glass’s piece, and am sharing it here in case it inspires anyone who hasn’t heard this piece before.

From the Vimeo video notes:

Thanks for all your kind words guys! It’s quite overwhelming to see this shared and retweeted all over!

All sins typographic in nature have been amended, hopefully. Thanks for bearing with it the whole time.

As always, all credit due to the amazing Ira Glass.

Source audio is from this very seminal video by current.tv.

Made in three days on Illustrator and After Effects, for Day 6 of the #30daysofcreativity.

Read more.

This week on Community Corner, we show how to create an event listing on the Adafruit Google+ Community. We are starting to put our Ask An Engineer and Show & Tell events announcements up there each week — and will add a bunch of other local, regional, and national events there that our community has been requesting. Check out our video on YouTube (please subscribe!) and Vimeo.

Have an upcoming Raspberry Pi Jam, Mini-Maker Faire, science conference, or hackathon?

Share it here!

Watch our latest project videos.
New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System.
Music by bartlebeats.

Each week on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=53480 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/02/01/thing-a-day-2013-what-will-you-make/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/02/01/thing-a-day-2013-what-will-you-make/#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 14:30:17 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=53440

Today, February 1st, launches the 7th Edition of the annual Thing-A-Day activity. Participants post a single project they create, each and every day of the shortest month of the year, of whatever activity they want to share. From an elaborate meal to sophisticated Arduino patches, the range of contributions is most of the fun when checking in on the project stream. (Check out my favorite project, Ranjit’s 5th Annual Musical-Instrument-A-Day Challenge, here!)

Are you going to participate? Wanna shame me into finishing this year? Check out details how to participate this year at the WordPress.com site for ThingADayForever and share what you are looking to try this year by posting a comment below.

2013 is Thing-a-day’s 7 year as an open space that enables people to get together virtually and participate in a creative sprint to make one new thing a day and post it to a collective blog space.

The rules for participation are minimal, everyone is encouraged to select a weekly, monthly or daily challenge and theme for themselves and get to work. You can use ant medium as long as your efforts can be reported back on this blog once a day.

Thing-a-day is a place where everyone can imagine, inspire, create, dream, and present work to a group of peers striving to further their practice. The goal is to make creativity a daily ritual and to help create a digital community of like minded and supporting people.

Everyone is welcome. You’re free to sign-up, watch, and comment on the work of other fellow participants. All you have to do is commit to yourself and try your best.

Read more.

Just sailed past the 40k mark, and with a fun post shared at the same time! Want to meet and share with others who love to make things? Join the 40,000 Makers, hackers, artists and engineers in the Adafruit Google+ community!

Here’s an interesting motion sensitive LED belt project shared in the Adafruit Forums by Marshall Hampton:

Recently, I built a motion sensitive LED belt for a dance performance by my wife. In case it is of interest to others, this post will briefly describe how I made it.

I started with the LED belt kit by Adafruit, for which they supply an excellent tutorial. To this I added a 3-axis accelerometer, the ADXL335 from Adafruit.

Adding the accelerometer is very simple.  The 3V in and ground are soldered with short wires to the corresponding pins on the Atmega32u4 breakout board, and wires from the X,Y, and Z outputs can be soldered to the F4, F5, and F6 pins (see here or here for a good diagram).

After a lot of tweaking, here is the code we actually used for the performance.

Read more.

Featured Adafruit Products

Digital programmable LED belt kit: By popular demand, we now have a project tutorial for how to make your own programmable, ultra-blinky LED belt. Perfect for parties, raves, parades, weddings, funerals, and bar mitzvahs. Wear it with pride, wear it with blinky! Follow our soldering tutorial to build your own heirloom LED belt, and hand it down to your grandkids. (read more)

ADXL335 – 5V ready triple-axis accelerometer: We’ve updated our favorite triple-axis accelerometer to now have an on-board 3.3V regulator – making it a perfect choice for interfacing with a 5V microcontroller such as the Arduino. This breakout comes 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, known for their exceptional quality MEMS devices. (read more)

This past weekend, ITP, NY Digital and NYC DoITT hosted a two-day “Payphone Hack Day” to help encourage participants develop projects and create proposals for the upcoming NYC Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge, deadline February 18th. Over twelve projects were presented during the Sunday wrap-up and many of the sponsoring organizations awarded prizes to help promising groups take their proposal even further.

Adafruit awarded a gift voucher for $212 in the Adafruit store — celebrating one of the best area codes of all time! — to the team Street Beacon (above). This team of grad students from a range of NYC programs — participants in the InSITE fellowship for those focusing on technology entrepreneurship — offered a comprehensive proposal of their concept that reinvents your local pay phone as a kiosk to display and publish to the web hyper-local information, advertising, and resources: offering a compelling reason to love your local pay phone. We wish this group, and all of the other participants, luck with their projects!

From the Payphone Hack Day launch page:

As a lead-up to NYC’s Reinvent Payphone Design Challenge , we are hosting Payphone Hack Day to build physical or virtual payphone prototypes.

What: Payphone Hack Day

When: Saturday, 1/26 10:00 AM – Sunday, 1/27 4:00 PM

More info and registration: http://payphonehackday.com/
Hashtag: #payphonehackday

Sponsored by: 10Gen, Adafruit, Foursquare Grand St, MakerBot, Mashery, NYTimes, Octopart, TokBox, Twilio.

With the excellent support of: ITP, NY Digital and NYC DoITT.

Read more.

Here’s a great project in progress from the Adafruit community. “Pete.M” is looking to create a “universal” AVR ISP shield, as described in the Adafruit Forums:

I ended up using extra-long header pins for the shield mount, and added a row of header pins along each side of the ZIFF socket. I can use female-to-female jumpers to map any Arduino pin to any pin on the socket.

I put some pics on Flickr and added them to the Adafruit pool.

I’ll post results after programming a few different chips.

Read more.

This week on Community Corner, we stumbled on a great “dining room thrust test” shared by Ben Harber. He used a custom rig to test the thrust potential for a series of 3D printed propellers he had produced. We enjoyed watching him engage in science — and share his updates as he analyzed his data. We wish him well with his project!

If you enjoy his 3D Printed Propeller Testing: Shapeways + JavaProp, don’t forget to subscribe to his video channel!

Watch our video on YouTube. (And please subscribe to ours as well!)

Each Wednesday on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=52832 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/25/nyc-raspberry-jam-meetup-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/25/nyc-raspberry-jam-meetup-piday-raspberrypi-raspberry_pi/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 15:00:00 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=52802

All around the world, “Raspberry Jams” have been forming to provide folks experimenting with the Raspberry Pi with a local venue and community where they can share projects-in-progress and learn more about Raspberry Pi and embedded development.

Check out this awesome one at CERN, and others in parts of France!

Well, here’s an upcoming Jam in our neck of the woods, organized by Trammell Hudson: the NYC Raspberry Jam:

Bring your projects, your ideas and see what other hackers are doing with their small Linux boards. There will be a demo of adafruit’s WebIDE, which makes getting started with the Pi as easy as a rocket-powered Arduino.

Read more.

I’m going to be attending this one and bring some resources to help NYC makers get started with the Adafruit WebIDE. Have you found a Raspberry Jam in your area? If not, maybe you should start one! (Please drop us a tip about what you create and share!)

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!

Last week on Electronics Show and Tell we had another visit from the talented Guillermo Amaral who shared with us custom NES controller board he had put together using a bunch of Adafruit components. While this controller is in fact for a NES system, we were excited to hear that this is also part of his ongoing project to use a Raspberry Pi to record NES gameplay, potentially to save and then playback on the NES or a NES emulator. Visit his site to see lots of photos and details from the project in progress!

I recently found myself with a surplus of Adafruit Industries components, I decided to put a few of them to good use by making a custom NES controller.

Objectives

• Use a thru-hole 5-way navigation switch.
• Use some square tactile buttons.
• Create a custom Eagle device for the navigation switch.
• Use a strip of SMD 0603 10k resistors.
• Use a single-sided 65×65 MM square board (since I have a bunch of them).

Design

The design is fairly simple, the only difference between it and a standard controller would be the use of the Center pin on the navigation switch as the Select button….

Read more.

SHOW AND TELL 1/12/2013 (video).

This week on Community Corner, we used the “search” function within the G+ Community to see all of the recent tutorials our community members have been creating and sharing about the ULN2803.

Take a look at some videos and posts from Matt Heilman, Sylvain Leroux, and William Foster — and dive into the conversation yourself!

Check out the video on YouTube.

Featured Adafruit Products

ULN2803: 8 Channel Darlington Driver (Solenoid/Unipolar Stepper) – ULN2803A: Bring in some muscle to your output pins with 8 mighty Darlingtons! This DIP chip contains 8 drivers that can sink 500mA from a 50V supply and has kickback diodes included inside for driving coils. This will let your little microcontroller or microcomputer power solenoids, DC motors (in one direction) and unipolar stepper motors. Please note, this is an ‘open collector’ driver – it can only be used to connect the load to ground and there will be a 1 Volt (or more) ‘drop’ across the internal transistors. The inputs can be driven by 3.3V or 5V logic. Fits nicely in any breadboard or perfboard. (read more)

Each Wednesday on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=52057 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/15/parallax-partners-with-u-s-army-and-carnegie-mellon-university/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/15/parallax-partners-with-u-s-army-and-carnegie-mellon-university/#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 21:02:51 +0000 Parallax http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=51990 Parallax Partners with the U.S. Army and Carnegie Mellon University to host the 2013 National microMedic Contest to Encourage Medical Innovation

Uncle Sam Wants You! Now’s your chance to change the way our country does medical simulation and battlefield care. The 2013 microMedic National Contest is calling the best and brightest, that’s you, to help invent new medical applications using microcontrollers. With over $25,000 in cash and prizes awarded to the winners, what are you waiting for? Contestants may use any microcontroller they desire in their application. Parallax is offering two flavors of the microMedic Application Idea Kit full of tons of sensors and cool parts; one kit has the multi-core Propeller chip, the other includes the Board of Education Shield (for Arduino).

In order to help you in your quest we’ve created a special discussion forum for the microMedic contest, provided a list of project ideas and created a bunch of mini-tutorials to help you get started with the kit sensors. We’re even giving away 100 free kits to the first qualified entries. This contest is open to participants of all ages with special prizes for educational and public division winners.

Hurry, contest ends July 31st, 2013! For all the info on the contest check out http://learn.parallax.com/micromedic. Be sure to visit the Official Rules page for all the details on contest entry, including how to apply for a free kit.

Good luck from Parallax, the U.S. Army and Carnegie Mellon University!

Great project from user “AIW” in the Adafruit forums:

Here’s some pictures of my latest project that couples an Adafruit Ultimate GPS module with my own NOAA Weather Radio/SAME Decoder module. This setup allows me to log signal strength of the radio reception based on GPS position. Right now I don’t have an SD Card implemented. It feeds the lat, lon, and RSSI of the radio to a terminal program for capture. After that I can overlay it on a map using gpsvisualizer.com

Read more.

Pete Prodoehl posted about his art robots on the Adafruit Google+ Community. Read more about them here!

Each Wednesday on Community Corner, we share something we have enjoyed the previous week on the Adafruit Google+ Community site “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers: Learning and sharing with Adafruit!” (Note: Google+ login required.)

If you haven’t joined us at this public community yet, stop on by for a visit. And bring something to share!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=51483 1 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/02/cosmic-ray-detector-in-the-adafruit-google-community-video/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2013/01/02/cosmic-ray-detector-in-the-adafruit-google-community-video/#comments Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:00:32 +0000 Matt http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=50997

Earlier this week, a curious video was shared in the Adafruit Google+ Community by Robert Hart featuring an intriguing flicker of lights. Following Robert’s link, it was an 81 Pixel Hodoscope, an instrument for detecting cosmic rays (muons)!

Here’s a video (on YouTube, on Vimeo) discovering Robert’s project at the Adafruit Google+ Community (over 30,000 members!) — all filled with exciting projects appearing there every single day. We’re looking forward to seeing what’s next, join up now!

Music by Adafruit’s very own Tom (Bartlebeats).

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Here is a video featuring a recent project from Google+ Adafruit community. We celebrate science, technology, engineering, math and art — and here’s a great food technology how-to!

Making Cheddar in the Adafruit Google+ community! Share your projects here.

Featuring “Farmhouse Cheddar” by Michael Kirkland.

The latest community census upon posting this video is 23648 community members!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=49860 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/16/join-the-20000-makers-hackers-artists-and-engineers-in-the-adafruit-google-community/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/16/join-the-20000-makers-hackers-artists-and-engineers-in-the-adafruit-google-community/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:51:42 +0000 adafruit http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=49443
Just sailed past the 20k mark! Want to meet and share with others who love to make things? Join the 20,000 Makers, hackers, artists and engineers in the Adafruit Google+ community!

]]> http://www.adafruit.com/adablog/?feed=rss2&p=49443 0 http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/14/art-in-the-google-adafruit-community-get-your-steam-on/ http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/14/art-in-the-google-adafruit-community-get-your-steam-on/#comments Fri, 14 Dec 2012 12:41:18 +0000 adafruit http://www.adafruit.com/blog/?p=49306
Here is some art from the Google+ Adafruit community. When we made this community on G+’s new community section we wanted to celebrate science, technology, engineering, math and art – so we made sure we had a section that celebrates all the great artists who want to share their work in the new experiment. Above is a video snapshot from just a few moments ago (12/14/2012 6am, 17,457 community members).

Some have said “art is not usually associated with electrical engineering” – we hope to continue to help change that perception

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