I am working on a few ways of taking seemingly random data (static, light) and turning it into some sort of physical representation with cool colors. While looking at ways others were doing it, i found VandalSpray. Here are some pics and video.
Source: http://blog.formatlos.de/2008/12/01/digital-graffiti/
Digital Graffiti – Spray Demo from Martin Rädlinger on Vimeo.
Digital Spraycan – Early Demo from Martin Rädlinger on Vimeo.
http://www.talk2myshirt.com/blog/archives/1266
This is super cool. Its a band to be work over the womb to detect movement of the baby. Then it bluetooths a computer which then posts the movement to twitter. It almost makes me want to have another kid. Let me see if my wife would wear this.
It’s official; droops and I will be speaking at Notacon 6 in Cleveland, OH April 16th -19th 2009. Our talk is entitled “Interactivity with Arduinos, Transducing the Physical World”
The Arduino is an open source microcontroller development board that makes it easy for beginners in electronics to do crazy things. We are going to be continuing our Intro to Arduinos talk from Phreaknic, Anyone new to Arduino’s should watch that talk online. We will be discussing building your own devices to interact with the real world: making electronic musical instruments, wireless communication, networking Arduinos, controlling lights and sounds, sensing touch, RFID, building custom games with custom controllers, sensing temperature changes and ways of notification like phone calls, sms, hidden buzzers. We will also go into building clothes with embedded electronics.
Learn more about Notacon http://www.notacon.org/
Stop by and say, “Hi”, if you come… we would love to see ya!
Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover. –Homer J. Simpson
Having only discovered the duino recently, I’m constantly searching for applications that push the limits of what can be done with the device. There have been several sketches posted that will output composite black and white video to your TV with a very simple circuit, but the most interesting of these to me is the Arduino Pong code by Alastair Parker. What I’ve done is strip the code down to just the intro screen in order to simplify the idea and get my mind wrapped around it. Check out the following schematic, code and resulting output.
Download the code.
Arduino Composite Video Schematic
To change the on-screen text, grab a sheet of graph paper, create a rectangle that is 38 units wide and 14 units tall, and mark the pixels you would like to turn on. After that, it’s simply a matter of changing the “setPixel(x,y)” lines in the code. Have fun and as Homer says: Let us all bask in television’s warm glowing warming glow.
Composite Output Result
The circuit on breadboard
Recently I did a video attempting to describe and compare the differences in a digital PWM signal and an analog signal. To supplement my recent video, I am sharing another video I recently found while traversing the tubes.
This video is about using PWM with FPGA’s— it’s not directly related with micro-controllers and is a bit technical. For us though, Mrs. Shelly gives a good definition, examples and usages of PWM and the info could be helpful to those who still lack a good understanding of what PWM is doing. The first 4:30 of the video is the only relevent part to us in the *duinoverse, after that it’s just about software implementation of FPGA’s …
Signals come in two basic types – Analog and Digital. Analog signals are capable of being any value, where Digital signals are called “discrete”, meaning they capable of being in only one of two states! The terms for these two states of a Digital signal are varied but include; ON/OFF, TRUE/FALSE, 1/0, HIGH/LOW, etc.
So what’s that mean? A good example of a Digital signal is a light switch in your house. You can either flip the light switch ON, or flip the light switch OFF. To follow this line of thought, an example of an Analog signal would be a light with a dimmer switch. With a dimmer switch you can adjust how bright or dim the light is, anywhere from completely OFF, to completely ON.
Okay… The Arduino is capable of analog and digital INPUT, but only capable of digital OUTPUT. When working with the Arduino we see that there are 6 analog pins and 14 digital pins. (It should be noted that if you have no need of analog INPUT; you may use the analog pins as extra digital OUTPUT pins — declaring them as digital pins 14 – 19)
So, if we are only capable of digital OUTPUT on the Arduino, how are we able to dim a LED?
dimming LED with digital PWM
ENTER PWM!! (Pulse Width Modulation) Some, but not all pins on the Arduino are capable of Digital PWM OUTPUT. Basically, PWM is the digital way of mimicking an analog OUTPUT.
To better show the difference between Analog and Digital PWM, I put together a simple LED dimmer circuit and hooked up an oscilloscope to view the Analog and Digital PWM signals. I took some video of everything in action to better serve as an example.
Analog Signal VS PWM Signal from Morgellon on Vimeo
The sketch I used in this video is available here: http://serverwillprovide.com/icuubi/examples/analog_vs_PWM.pde
I wanted to see the range of my new distance sensor, so I hooked it up to some led’s.
/*Distance Ranging to LED Bar*/
//this can be done better in a loop
#define led1 2
#define led2 3
#define led3 4
#define led4 5
#define led5 6
#define led6 7
#define led7 8
#define led8 9
#define led9 10
#define led10 11
//the analog distance sensor
#define distancePin 5
//incoming value of distance sensor
int val = 0;
//this can be done better in a loop
void setup(){
pinMode(led1, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led2, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led3, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led4, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led5, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led6, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led7, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led8, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led9, OUTPUT);
pinMode(led10, OUTPUT);
//you do not have to declare inputs, all pins are input by default
pinMode(distancePin, INPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
}
void loop(){
val = analogRead(distancePin);
Serial.println(val);
//turn all pins off, can be done better in a loop
digitalWrite(led1, LOW);
digitalWrite(led2, LOW);
digitalWrite(led3, LOW);
digitalWrite(led4, LOW);
digitalWrite(led5, LOW);
digitalWrite(led6, LOW);
digitalWrite(led7, LOW);
digitalWrite(led8, LOW);
digitalWrite(led9, LOW);
digitalWrite(led10, LOW);
//these values may need to be changed for your setup
if (val < 600){
digitalWrite(led10, HIGH);
}
if (val < 560){
digitalWrite(led9, HIGH);
}
if (val < 520){
digitalWrite(led8, HIGH);
}
if (val < 480){
digitalWrite(led7, HIGH);
}
if (val < 440){
digitalWrite(led6, HIGH);
}
if (val < 400){
digitalWrite(led5, HIGH);
}
if (val < 360){
digitalWrite(led4, HIGH);
}
if (val < 320){
digitalWrite(led3, HIGH);
}
if (val < 280){
digitalWrite(led2, HIGH);
}
if (val < 240){
digitalWrite(led1, HIGH);
}
delay(50);
}
Arduino Distance Sensor from droops on Vimeo.
I am not a car guy, but I enjoy my Scangauge and knowing my MPG every second of driving. We have really changed how we drive and consume gas with this simple ability.
So how do I do with with an Arduino? I had no idea other than there is some way to get the information from the OBD port. Well it seems that you can use one injector lead and do this, there is even a project that spends time working on this. Presenting the MPGuino!!
You can build this yourself, or you can get a kit for 40$.
Here is a forum post with schematics
Here is how to put it in your car
I will hopefully order one of these soon and get to play with it.
Morgellon had a cool idea to build a clone of one of these games. ie press a button of the right color when you are told to do so, to keep the music playing.
So we are both working on 2 totally different ways to build such a device and randomly i stumbled across this awesome video. Instead of recreating the whole game, they built a tool to actually play the game. In the video this is not done with an Arduino, but it could be done with processing and an Arduino.
