Community Corner: This Week in Adafruit’s Community – April 11, 2014


Featured Adafruit Community Project

Chris Hall shared a tutorial for his Arduino Model Rocket Launcher for 3D Printed Rockets — featuring the Adafruit 7 Segment LEDs: “When I was a kid, I loved playing with Estes Rockets, so I decided to get back into the hobby but using all of my maker skizzls. So here’s a really cool Arduino Rocket Launcher launching 3D Printed rockets from my MakerBot Rep2! Enjoy! Fully Open Source for anyone to make! Arduino Code on GitHub; Thing Files for 3D Printing on Thingiverse” (read more)

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 78,783 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!


Adafruit’s Weekly Electronics Show and Tell!


From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Davide Candiloro

Davide Candiloro shared: “This project took some long hours hacking at the soldering iron. Inside that cable mess you can see the switching power supply daughter board and the transistor smd breakouts made for anodes and cathodes of the nixies. The little ic on the bottom left is a CD4028: binary to decimal logic. I am thinking of a CD 4017 for the anodes, but the arduino will do for now.” (read more
)


IRR503centraldoverNH shared: “My latest project – pacman-inspired EL wire laptop bag, so cute!” (read more)


James wolf Google Solving an issue in the kitchen with a quick and easy 3D

james wolf shared: “Solving an issue in the kitchen with a quick and easy 3D printed part (with pics). The scrubber in the kitchen makes doing dishes easy, but we were going through a LOT of extra soap because the scrubber sat horizontally on the edge of the sink. The soap leaks out of the sponge, and cheap and easy 3D printed part that hung on the handle of the faucet would be a good way to keep the soap in the scrubber. I first measured out the diameter of the faucet handle, the distance to the sink edge and the diameter of the scrubber before first sketching the design on paper then mocking the shape up in my favorite 3D design tool: Sketchup. After printing and cleaning the part slips easily over the faucet handle and the scrubber drops in nicely. The hole for the scrubber is over-sized on purpose so that the scrubber can easily be removed and used and then dropped back for storage. The thinnest parts are 2mm, and since the ridges stack vertically the ABS material is very strong.” (read more)


Justin Shaw Google Gear Clock

Justin Shaw shared: “Gear clock made from AlaMode, AdaFruit Motor Shield (v1), a single stepper motor, and some laser cut parts. Code and design files on github” (read more)


Miles Flavel Google Norseboard version 1 is finally complete after The

Miles Flavel shared: “3 years of pipe dreams and ideas have come together in an all-in-one keyboard, mouse and gamepad. This keyboard contains a Raspberry Pi with 2.2″ LCD (sounds small, but is ideal for quick terminal access), 9 USB ports and twin joysticks. If a bigger screen is required, just plug connect one via HDMI and startx for a high resolution GUI. The entire case is 3d printed in 8 main pieces and held together with m3 fasteners. Despite being made of many smaller parts, the overall structure is quite rigid as the keyboard matrix (salvaged from a Toshiba Rupo) has a large metal backing which holds the 2 end pieces together tight.” (read more)


Mark Miller Google Update Home made mini CNC mill Got it painted Digital

Mark Miller shared: “Update-Home made mini CNC mill. Got it painted, Digital position readouts are mounted, Electronics are all getting patched together to be tidied up later. I still have to add the joysticks back in and the Pic chip teach programmer. I have most of the controller electronics committed to Gerber files, but need to finish 1 more small board, then I can design a nice small enclosure for everything(future versions will be SO much smaller!). Will have it all finished tom. and start making more parts. I made test cuts after painting to make sure I got all the axis lined up, and everything looks good. This was actually not that hard to build(I can say that now). Making more would be just a matter of cutting parts. I already made a second Lathe and making parts with it also. The DROs on this are 4 digit Led for the Z axis and an 8 digit VFD for the X and Y, as I already have boards made these and parts in stock to stuff them.” (read more)


WilliamFoster

william foster shared: “lego light saber life size replica. finished making this yesterday and it turned out pretty sweet.” (read more)


Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

Daniel Fett shared this tricked out dartboard with tons of cool features: “At our research group at the university, we play a round of darts every day during the lunch break. We used to use an cheap electronic dart board and entered the results manually into our “Dartabase” (“Dartenbank” in german). Obviously, this manual process is not very satisfying for a geek, so I created a Raspberry Pi driven electronic dart board (called, of course, “pidart”). I started out from a standard soft electronic dart board and disassembled it. Then, I connected the sensors in the board and the buttons to an Arduino Mega microcontroller. The Arduino sends the dart hits and button presses on the board to the Raspberry Pi, where the pidart software runs. The Pi shows the current score and other data on a screen connected via HDMI and provides a web interface to control the software. I will provide a bit more technical background below.” (read more)


Shane Snipe shared this cool and useful project to let your pi teach you how to play piano: “My dad and I made the Easy as Pi Piano system to make learning chords faster and easier. This project took about 50 hours to complete due to the fact that we were new to the Python programming language. The Easy as Pi Piano system functions as a piano teacher. Learn to play the chords to your favorite song! The servo motor lasers show you which keys to play. Slow it down or speed it up with the scale. On the monitor, you will see the finger placements, the current chord, and the lyrics to the whole song. We hope that our hard work makes learning how to play piano easy as pie.” (read more)


PatricioGonzalezVivo shared: “Skyline 02 on #RaspberryPi & adafruit ‘s TFT display and thermal printer. #openframeworks” (read more)


Jordan B. shared a mini pi controlled robot that has the potential to wreck havoc on your co-workers! “Meet Raspberry Jolt, my mini nerf-dart-shooting robot with WIFI control and remote video recording. It’s powered by the first gen Romo by Romotive and a raspberry pi. I used the Adafruit 16 Channel 12-bit PWM/Servo Driver tutorial with this circuit and Adafruit’s Python Library to hook up the servo to the Pi. After I had the circuit working on a breadboard I used the male header pins and female jumper wires to slim down the bot. Getting the Raspberry Pi to auto-connect to WIFI and run headless took some work; I used wpa_supplicant.conf to do it, and installed vncserver and SSH to control it remotely. I installed Avahi, which is the same as Apple’s Bonjour, so that I could always connect to the pi via http://raspberrypi.local once it boots and connects to the router. (However, once you have its IP address, shooting the dart is faster via IP address rather than by DNS lookup)…..” (read more)


Pasted Image 4 11 14 4 45 PM

Miguel Perez shared
a RasPi environmental monitor project that Nick Normal highlighted in a recent rasPi Design Contest Slideshow: “The Little Village Air Quality Initiative is based on multiple sensors programmed to collect Carbon Monoxide, Ozone, Nitrogen Dioxide, Temperature, and Relative Humidity levels in real-time, then visualizing the data to the public. Visualizations are written in C++ using openFrameworks and loaded on the RaspberryPi. There will be many Raspberry Pi’s with display monitors visualizing data in local business and public spaces.” (read more)


Pasted Image 4 11 14 4 49 PM

Members of the NYC Resistor hackerspace shared with us about their latest project — which features Adafruit NeoPixels, GEMMAs, and more! — currently on view at the Brooklyn Ballet! “Nick and Sayaka Vermeer, Olivia Barr, and William Ward have been working hard for the past couple weeks on an exciting project with the Brooklyn Ballet. We are transforming the dancers’ costumes into interactive performance pieces. Our contribution consists of six LED snowfall tutus for the ballerinas, one Pexel shirt for Mike “Supreme” Fields and six sparkling LED hair accessories for the young ballerinas. The dancers will be performing the snow scene from the Nutcracker in the Brooklyn Ballet’s Vectors, Marys, and Snow performance from April 3rd to April 13th….” (read more)


Controlling a lock with an Arudino and Bluetooth LE @ MAKE: “This project allows you to open a solenoid lock from a PhoneGap app using theBluetooth Serial Plugin and the new Adafruit Bluetooth LE break-out board for the Nordic Semiconductor nRF8001 chip.” (read more)


Drew Fustini shared: “I recently gave a presentation on Software Defined Radio (SDR) at my hackerspace in Chicago, Pumping Station: One. I’ve attached the slides to this blog post for reference. After the talk, someone told me they had seen a program that maps out airplanes flying in one’s area based on data received via Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) on 1090 MHz. After a search, I found dump1090 which works with cheap DVB-T USB sticks with certain Realtek chipsets thanks to the rtl-sdr library….” (read more)


Pasted Image 4 11 14 5 09 PM

@aonsquared: Adafruit gemma, bmp180, neopixel ring, plus a laser cut case (inspired by @pimoroni) and my altimeter is good to go! pic.twitter.com/vLAURvRoau (read more)


Pasted Image 4 11 14 5 12 PM

Joshua Herbert made this vest with 324 LEDs! Brookleynn Morris caught up with him at the Exploratorium wearables event last week and writes in: “Joshua Herbert’s Pixeldelic leather vests are covered in 324 LEDs that can be programmed to play any pattern or image. Anything seen on a computer screen, including videos right off of YouTube, live video and hand drawn patterns can be shown on the vest.” (read more)


Pasted Image 4 11 14 5 36 PM

Nice bag featuring many of the Adafruit skill badges!


Adafruit Google+ Community Footer
Community Corner! Sharing and celebrating the creative community: Show and tell, Ask an Engineer, mailbag, Twitter, Google+, Facebook, “Makers, hackers, artists & engineers. Sharing, learning and celebrating making!


Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards

Join Adafruit on Mastodon

Adafruit is on Mastodon, join in! adafruit.com/mastodon

Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.

Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.

Join us every Wednesday night at 8pm ET for Ask an Engineer!

Join over 36,000+ makers on Adafruit’s Discord channels and be part of the community! http://adafru.it/discord

CircuitPython – The easiest way to program microcontrollers – CircuitPython.org


Maker Business — “Packaging” chips in the US

Wearables — Enclosures help fight body humidity in costumes

Electronics — Transformers: More than meets the eye!

Python for Microcontrollers — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Silicon Labs introduces CircuitPython support, and more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi

Adafruit IoT Monthly — Guardian Robot, Weather-wise Umbrella Stand, and more!

Microsoft MakeCode — MakeCode Thank You!

EYE on NPI — Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey

New Products – Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers! — #NewProds 7/19/23 Feat. Adafruit Matrix Portal S3 CircuitPython Powered Internet Display!

Get the only spam-free daily newsletter about wearables, running a "maker business", electronic tips and more! Subscribe at AdafruitDaily.com !



No Comments

No comments yet.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.