NEW PRODUCT – UP501 Breadboard-friendly 66 channel GPS module w/10 Hz updates. When we saw this breadboard-friendly module used in the Coobro Geo kit, we were excited to carry it as a separate product. It’s a no-nonsense, high-quality GPS module that can track up to 22 satellites on 66 channels, has an excellent high-sensitivity receiver (-165 dB tracking!), and a built in antenna. The chipset is the latest MTK3329 which can do up to 10 location updates a second for high speed, high sensitivity logging or tracking. Of course the icing on the cake is the use of 6 x 0.1″ spaced holes on the side which make it trivial to add to any breadboard or perf-board project. This has the same chipset as what we’re using for the FLORA GPS module.
The only thing you’ll need to watch for is that the module is designed to run at about 3.3V, and shouldn’t be powered by 5.0V. If you’re using an Arduino, simply connect the GPS power pin to the 3.3V pin. If you want to configure the module, you’ll want to put a 10K resistor divider on the RX pin so you don’t put 5V on the data pin. We include these resistors, as well as a 6 pin header you can solder to the module in order to plug it into a breadboard.
Because the sensor signal is digital, you don’t get any signal degradation even over long distances! These 1-wire digital temperature sensors are fairly precise (±0.5°C over much of the range) and can give up to 12 bits of precision from the onboard digital-to-analog converter. They work great with any microcontroller using a single digital pin, and you can even connect multiple ones to the same pin, each one has a unique 64-bit ID burned in at the factory to differentiate them. Usable with 3.0-5.0V systems.
The only downside is they use the Dallas 1-Wire protocol, which is somewhat complex, and requires a bunch of code to parse out the communication. If you want something really simple, and you have an analog input pin, the TMP36 is trivial to get going.
We toss in a 4.7k resistor, which is required as a pullup from the DATA to VCC line when using the sensor. We don’t have a detailed tutorial up yet but you can get started by using the Dallas Temperature Control Arduino library which requires also the OneWire Library.
Cable specs:
Stainless steel #306 tube 6mm diameter by 40mm long
Cable is 5 ft long / 150cm long
Contains DS18B20 temperature sensor
Three wires – Brown connects to 3-5V, Black connects to ground and Blue is data.
DS18B20 Technical specs:
Usable temperature range: -55 to 125°C (-67°F to +257°F)
9 to 12 bit selectable resolution
Uses 1-Wire interface- requires only one digital pin for communication
I’ve written up a description with pictures of the Adafruit translucent arcade buttons. I wanted to see if I could mount an LED inside of them for a project, but I couldn’t really find any good resources or examples of how that might work out (except for the music keyboard project on the Adafruit blog). So after buying them I made sure to write up some hopefully useful information. Thanks!
Arcade Buttons- 30mm Translucent Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Pink and Clear. A button is a button, and a switch is a switch, but these translucent arcade buttons are in a class of their own. They’re the same size as common arcade controls (often referred to as 30mm diameter) but have some nice things going for them that justify the extra dollar.
First, they look fantastic, all 6 colors have a crystal translucent glossy look. Although they do not have LEDs built in, we’re confident that sticking a diffused LED into the body would make it light up very nicely. They are also shorter than cheap arcade controls, and snap into place, so you only need 1.5″ of depth (1.25″ if you bend the contacts over). The button action is smooth, without a strong click, yet you can definitely feel when the button is pressed. A tiny micro-switch is pre-installed, with gold plated contacts.
This camera was designed to be used in security systems and does two main things – it outputs NTSC video and can take snapshots of that video and transmit them over the TTL serial link. You can snap pictures at 640×480, 320×240 or 160×120 and they’re pre-compressed JPEG images which makes them nice and small and easy to store on an SD card. Perfect for a data-logging, security, or photography project.
One nice thing about this particular camera is all the ‘extras’ that come with it. For example it has manually adjustable focus, auto-white-balance, auto-brightness and auto-contrast taken care of for you as well as motion detection built in! That means you can have it alert your project when something moved in the frame.
If you’re a data journalist or a community activist and you haven’t heard of Pachube (pronounced “PATCH bay”), you should look them up. They’re trying to answer a question that no environmental group or government agency can answer right now: at any given time, how clean is the air in my neighborhood?
Pachube is about to pilot citizen-led air quality sensor networks in New York and Amsterdam. Pachube’s business is to become a data hub for the “internet of things” — internet connected objects and ambient sensors — allowing citizens to share meaningful data and learn from one another. Civic engagement is part of their mission.
The granular air quality data they’re attempting to capture doesn’t exist anywhere– you candownload a snapshot of air quality data from the U.S. EPA, but there’s no real-time stream and the closest EPA sensor is likely miles from your home. Or at least much farther than a DIY sensor you can mount outside your window.
We use a $7 wireless remote to turn on our hot spring pump. The remote has been melting away in the New Mexico sun for nearly two years. At this point the buttons and batteries have also failed. I decided to tear out the circuit board from our failed remote and give it a new bling bling home. I used a $8 outdoor electrical box and a pair of Adafruits blue LED buttons. I also used my CNC to cut some text into the cover plate and make a little circuit board to reduce the number of connections. It took about three hours to make everything.
Waterproof Metal Pushbutton with Blue LED Ring [16mm Blue Momentary]. These chrome-plated metal buttons are rugged and waterproof and look real good while doing it! Simply drill a 16mm hole into any material up to 1/2″ thick and you can fit these in place, there’s even a rubber gasket to keep any water out of the enclosure. On the front of the button is a flat metal actuator, surrounded by a blue plastic LED ring. On the back there are 3 contacts for the button (common, normally-open and normally-closed) and 2 for the blue LED ring (+ and -). Connect 3 to 6V to the LED to have it light up nicely, there’s a built in resistor! If you want to use this with a higher voltage, say 12V or 24V, simply add a 470 ohm resistor in series with the LED connection to keep the LED current at around 20mA.
This button is a momentary push button, when you press it the ‘normally-open’ contact shorts to the common contact. When you release it, the contacts open up again.
We’ve added 3 more metal pushbuttons, in red, white and green to complement the blue metal button we have. These are beautiful waterproof buttons, with a built in LED ring. A perfect mix of form and function!
These chrome-plated metal buttons are rugged and waterproof and look real good while doing it! Simply drill a 16mm hole into any material up to 1/2″ thick and you can fit these in place, there’s even a rubber gasket to keep any water out of the enclosure. On the front of the button is a flat metal actuator, surrounded by a plastic LED ring. On the back there are 3 contacts for the button (common, normally-open and normally-closed) and 2 for the LED ring (+ and -). Connect 3 to 6V to the LED to have it light up nicely, there’s a built in resistor! If you want to use this with a higher voltage, say 12V or 24V, simply add a 470 ohm resistor in series with the LED connection to keep the LED current at around 20mA.
This button is a momentary push button, when you press it the ‘normally-open’ contact shorts to the common contact. When you release it, the contacts open up again.
The switch and LED are separated, so you could wire it to turn on when pressed or vice versa or whatever you wish! Check the tech details for information!
This is man-computer symbiosis at its best, where the computer program learns from the activity of human teachers, and its sensors notice and remember things the humans themselves would not. This is the future: massive amounts of data created by people, stored in cloud applications that use smart algorithms to extract meaning from it, feeding back results to those people on mobile devices, gradually giving way to applications that emulate what they have learned from the feedback loops between those people and their devices.
NEW PRODUCT – Geiger Counter Kit Case. Protect your Geiger counter kit and keep accidental fingers from touching the high voltages with this handsome acrylic laser-cut case. Once you’ve assembled and tested the Geiger kit, you can easily install these two cover plates on using the included screws and standoffs.
This is just for the case parts, batteries and Geiger counter kit are not included!
Geiger Counter Kit – Radiation Sensor. Detect particles and/or make a cool random number generator with this handsome Geiger counter kit. This easy-to-make pack of parts turns a simple Geiger-Muller tube (included) into a portable blink, beeping radiation detector. You can also connect an FTDI friend to the header, to get serial output for datalogging on your computer.
We put this kit together in a couple of hours and hand lots of fun bringing it around and listening for ticking sounds near our smoke detectors, bananas, countertops, Brazil nuts, chunks of Uranium, etc. It includes all components (PCB, tube, & parts) but you will need basic soldering tools and two AAA batteries to complete it.
RoboBrrd is an robot / animatronic character whose purpose morphs to mirror that of the virtual world. It is designed to be used as a tangible real world interface to virtual world learning applications. As a standalone robot, RoboBrrd is an entertaining platform that can be used to learn about robotics, Arduino, circuits, and programming.
This Instructable will guide you through creating a RoboBrrd- all the way from the circuits to programming to the felt decorations. We will also include reasoning behind our design choices to further enlighten the Instructable.
This is a great robot project for kids and parents to build together — it’s low-cost and doesn’t require any special tools. Having seen it in person, I can also attest to how charming it is.
You can also check out this mini-interview I did with RobotGrrl at the Open Hardware Summit, in which she talks about Learning Pet, a smaller version of RoboBrrd:
This video is an original composition and performance (Steven Maupin) using the Rainboard. The Rainboard is a DIY dynamic isomorphic keyboard. It can interface the Musix iOS app in order to change layouts and adjust settings. As well, it can be played on its own after a layout is set. More details can be found at http://rainboard.shiverware.com
As I get more serious into my electronics hobby, I need to work with more SMD components. Some component packages are very difficult or impossible to solder with a traditional soldering iron. To solve this problem, I decided to hack a toaster oven to become a reflow soldering oven.
Basically, to perform reflow soldering, solder paste is placed on a printed circuit board, and the components to be soldered is placed on top of the solder paste. When the oven heats the solder paste past the melting temperature, the solder paste melts and solders the component to the circuit board.
To control the oven’s temperature, I created my own reflow toaster oven controller circuit. This circuit uses an ATmega32U4 microcontroller to monitor the oven’s temperature using a thermocouple and AD595AQ, and then control the oven’s heating element using a solid state relay. The controller features USB logging/debugging, USB bootloading, a graphic LCD display, and 3 buttons. The firmware features tweaking for all settings, manual temperature control, manual heating element control, and automatic temperature profile control (with a nice temperature history graph display). This circuit will plug into a wall outlet, and the oven will plug into this circuit, while the solid state relay basically acts as a switch between the wall outlet and the oven’s heating element. Safety is the main design objective (but some things were limited by cost), and ease of use is the second objective.
Miles O’Brien profiles the crowdsourced Safecast effort on tonight’s Rundown:
We officially launch a new feature today we’re calling “Science Thursday.” Each week, we’ll feature an online-exclusive multimedia piece on a topic in the world of science and technology.
Here’s what’s up first. On Thursday’s NewsHour, science correspondent Miles O’Brien reports on a grassroots group called Safecast that is measuring and mapping data on radiation contamination from locations around Japan after this year’s devastating earthquake.
While in Tokyo, Miles spoke to Hari Sreenivasan about his trip with Safecast workers into the voluntary exclusion zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, where they detected levels reaching the equivalent of six X-rays per day.
He also filled us in on his conversations with Japanese officials working in evacuated areas and Japanese residents eager for more information about the consequences of the nuclear accident.
Nice to see PBS start this “Science Thursday” segment, and even better that they’re kicking it off with a feature on something as cool as Safecast. The segment will air tonight at different times depending on your local station. Check the local listings. I just watched it on NJ’s PBS station, and it airs about 28 minutes into the program.
Autonomous live tracking weather station. It takes (analog/digital) measurements and sends them to a web server over GPRS. Adding a battery and a solar station you can make it fully autonomous. It supports up to 3 inputs Analog or Digital. The main brain is the PIC 16F877A which also drives the SIM900/300 GSM module which is placed in the back of the PCB.
The main purpose of this project is to take wind flow measurements of different locations and store them in a database remotely. By this you know if the locations are appropriate for future installation of wind generators.
The data send from GSM to Web server with GET requests which isn’t the safest and best way but its an easy way to make it work. The example code you can find at the github is a very simple example and has no security responsibility.
digidrench is an interactive video installation in which the user controls video playback by filling and draining three tanks. As the water level rises, the video plays forward; as it lowers, the video reverses. The user gets to interact with the very same materials that are used on screen. As the user pours, liquid falls on screen. There is a direct correlation between the user’s action and the video content, allowing for more playful and meaningful engagement with the project.
Our assignment was to develop a media controller. Early in our brainstorms, we chose water as the project’s theme and instrument of control. After hours of discussion, we settled on using fluid levels to control the video playback. The user can manipulate both the speed and direction of playback. The faster you pour the water into the tank, the faster the video plays. Draining the tank reverses the footage. The tank’s design mirrors the aspect ratio of the video screen. The inspiration for the video clips came from researching slow motion video of fluid.
The digidrench tanks are made from sheets of acrylic, which were bent and affixed with PVC cement. Some pieces were cut manually with a band saw and others were laser cut. Plastic water cooler spigots allow the tanks to drain.
Inside the tanks, fluid level sensors relay water levels to an Arduino, which in turn passes those values along to a computer running Maxwith Jitter. Max uses the data from the Arduino to “scrub” the video playheads back and forth.
8″ eTape Liquid Level Sensor + extras. The eTape Liquid Level Sensor is a solid-state sensor with a resistive output that varies with the level of the fluid. It does away with clunky mechanical floats, and easily interfaces with electronic control systems. The eTape sensor’s envelope is compressed by the hydrostatic pressure of the fluid in which it is immersed. This results in a change in resistance that corresponds to the distance from the top of the sensor to the surface of the fluid. The sensor’s resistive output is inversely proportional to the height of the liquid: the lower the liquid level, the higher the output resistance; the higher the liquid level, the lower the output resistance.
This is a very unique sensor, we haven’t seen anything else that is affordable and accurate for measuring liquid level. This sensor seems like it would be a handy addition to an hydroponics, aquarium, fountain or pool controller, or perhaps measuring a rain tube. This particular sensor is the 8″ model, we also include a 3-pin connector and 470 ohm resistor. The connector is so you don’t have to solder directly to the delicate pins: instead, just solder to the connector and plug it onto the sensor.
Since the sensor is resistive, it is easy to read it using a microcontroller/Arduino ADC pin. Check the tutorials tab for a quick-start pointer.
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