DIY Ambient Orb with Arduino, update « todbot blog - Nightly There’s been some confusion as to whether or not the DIY RGB orb presented in the last post was actually connected to a computer and receving color data from it. Here’s a video that more accurately depicts what’s going on and all the code used to create it. Hardware The hardware is just an Arduino board connected via USB to a laptop. Arduino code The code sketch running on the Arduino board is a slightly modified version of the one presented in the last Spooky Arduino class. Arduino code: serial_rgb_led_too.pde Processing code To bridge between the Arduino and the Net, a small Processing sketch was created that uses the standard Java HTTPURLConnection class to fetch a web page (really, a text file on a web server) containing a line with a color value in the format “#RRGGBB”. Processing code: http_rgb_led.pde
Robotic Xylophone With the holiday season approaching, we are always looking for a way to add a little Christmas spirit to our office. This year, we thought it would be awesome to have a musical instrument that we could control with a NerdKits microcontroller kit, and have it play holiday music. Keeping true with the NerdKits spirit, we decided to build a xylophone, build the whole thing from scratch, and teach about solenoids and shift registers along the way! Our homemade xylophone was a great way to put our milling machine to use cutting the bars for each note, and using the lathe for the solenoid forms and steel slugs. We made our xylophone from aluminum bars -- all 6061 aluminum alloy rectangular bars, with a 1.5" x 0.375" cross-section. We made the base from a 1/8" thick sheet of acrylic (a transparent plastic). We used a 1.5" long nylon spacer, plus three #6-32 nuts, plus one rubber washer to set the height of the bar above the acrylic. We added four magnets to the top of each slug.
Arduino Tutorial - Learn electronics and microcontrollers using Arduino! - Nightly So, I get two or three emails a day, all basically asking the same thing: "Where can I learn about electronics?" In general, most of these people have seen some of my projects and want to be able to build similar things. Unfortunately, I have never been able to point them to a good site that really takes the reader through a solid introduction to microcontrollers and basic electronics. I designed this tutorial course to accompany the Arduino starter pack sold at the Adafruit webshop. The pack contains all the components you need (minus any tools) for the lessons Follow these lessons for happiness and prosperity. Lesson 0 Pre-flight check...Is your Arduino and computer ready? Here are some recommended tools: If you need to get any soldering done, you may also want.... All of the content in the Arduino Tutorial is CC 2.5 Share-Alike Attrib. Love it? To some extent, the structure of the material borrows from: The impressively good "What's a microcontroller?"
InterfacingWithSoftware You have come to the place to learn about connecting an Arduino to other devices, whatever software is running on those other devices. The Arduino can "talk", (transmit or receive data data) via a serial channel, so any other device with serial capabilities can communicate with an Arduino. It doesn't matter what program/programming language is driving the other device. You can either use the Arduino's "main" serial port, the one it uses when you "talk" to it to program it, or you can leave that channel dedicated to programming (and the development environment's serial monitor), and use two other pins for an extra serial link dedicated to the external device. Some programs (like Flash) don't have native serial capabilities. CmdMessenger messaging library A Messaging library for both Arduino and C# .NET / Mono. Commands that can be sent or received. Instrumentino is an open-source modular graphical user interface framework for controlling Arduino based experimental instruments. For Mac
Bodies, Sensors, and Sound workshop | machine project - Nightly Working with accelerometers and movement to manipulate sound. Sunday, September 23rd Saturday, September 29th Sunday, September 30th 12 – 3pm Instructors: Natalie Metzger and Stephanie Smith Non-members: $200 Members: $185Parts & materials included. Course Description: We will build a simple arduino-based accelerometer interface that will interpret movement to manipulate sound. What you’ll need: Laptop with PureData (free program that we’ll install in class) A sock or stocking (clean preferred) The following kit will be provided: Arduino UNO R3 (w/ headers)accelerometer: MMA7361USB 2.0 cableall necessary resistors, wires, and solder Lesson 1: Sensor Introduction Sensor Build Movement Introduction Lesson 2: Movement exploration Sensor Programming Lesson 3: Active playing with sensors and movement Brainstorm future potentials and projects Instructor Bios: Natalie Metzger (movement artist) is an award-winning choreographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles.
Playground - SolenoidTutorial You can not drive a solenoid directly from your Arduino. It requires more current than you can provide and produces destructive voltages when it is switched off. There is a simple solution. Solenoids take a lot of power The solenoid I was testing with is a 12 volt solenoid the size of my thumb. Solenoids are Inductors A solenoid is a coil of wire with a magnetic core. Don't panic at the schematic Most of the schematic is test point labels and my extra protection circuitry for testing the bad configurations. The bypass diode The schematic shows a bypass diode, D1. The other protective device The IRF640 shown in this circuit operates as if it has a zener diode in parallel. It still generates a large voltage that I would have to be careful to isolate. Still, it's nice to know it's there and I did operate the circuit with only this mechanism while collecting some of the data shown here. Making enough current The IRF640 is a field effect transistor. You could also use an NPN bipolar transistor.
Pre-Engineering: Electronics with Micro-controllers - Nightly Arduino Tutorial - Learn electronics and microcontrollers using Arduino! So, I get two or three emails a day, all basically asking the same thing: "Where can I learn about electronics?" In general, most of these people have seen some of my projects and want to be able to build similar things. Unfortunately, I have never been able to point them to a good site that really takes the reader through a solid introduction to microcontrollers and basic electronics. I designed this tutorial course to accompany the Arduino starter pack sold at the Adafruit webshop. The pack contains all the components you need (minus any tools) for the lessons Follow these lessons for happiness and prosperity. Lesson 0 Pre-flight check...Is your Arduino and computer ready? Here are some recommended tools: If you need to get any soldering done, you may also want.... All of the content in the Arduino Tutorial is CC 2.5 Share-Alike Attrib. Love it? To some extent, the structure of the material borrows from: The impressively good "What's a microcontroller?"
Free Online Course Materials | Resource Home | MIT OpenCourseWare - Nightly Controlling solenoids with arduino In this instructable we will be building a simple circuit that will allow us to control a solenoid using the popular physical computing platform arduino. I became interested in controlling solenoids for robotic music applications. A similar circuit can be used to control a motor or other devices that require more current than the arduino can provide directly from its output pins. Since the solenoid requires higher current than the arduino can provide we will be using an alternative power source for the solenoid (a couple batteries) and will be "driving" it with a TIP120 transistor. The circuit we're using can be found online here. Build time was exactly one-beer.
serial_arduino/Tutorials/Arduino IDE Setup - ROS Wiki - Nightly This tutorial assumes that you have completed the previous tutorials: ROS Tutorials . Arduino IDE Setup This tutorial shows step-by-step how to setup up the Arduino IDE to use rosserial. Hello World (example publisher) Introduction The Arduino and Arduino IDE are great tools for quickly and easily programming hardware. NOTE: If you do not already have an Arduino IDE installed, download it from the Arduino website . Our ROS bindings are implemented as an Arduino library. In order to use the rosserial libraries in your own code, you must first put #include <ros.h> prior to including any other header files, e.g. #include <std_msgs/String.h> otherwise the Arduino IDE will not be able to locate them. Installing from Source If you want to install from source, you'll need to do a few extra steps: hg clone rosserial rosdep install rosserial_arduino rosmake rosserial_arduino Finishing Up roscd rosserial_arduino/libraries cp -r ros_lib <sketchbook>/libraries/ros_lib