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Focus Flower blasts your face with liquid motivation

Everyone needs a little kick in the pants to stay motivated every now and then. With so many of us working from home, where bosses aren’t looking over our shoulders, that is truer now than ever before. Hardware Unknown’s Focus Flower gives that kick in the pants in the form of liquid motivation blasting your face.

Focus Flower’s operation is as simple as possible. When it’s time to start a new task, push the big red “easy” button. A bigger will begin its countdown, giving you a set amount of time to complete your task. Once you do, push the button again for a congratulatory auditory back pat. But if you don’t complete the task in time, that innocuous potted plate on your desk will shoot a jet of water at you. It’s good ol’ fashioned negative reinforcement.

That easy button connects to an Arduino Nano board in a small black enclosure. That enclosure also includes an arming switch, in case you’re not in the mood for damp motivation. The Arduino controls a solenoid valve that resides in the plant’s pot along a water reservoir. When the valve opens, water shoots out of a nozzle using the pressure coming from any conveniently-located air compressor. To provide the hardworking user with some indication of the time remaining, the easy button has a ring of LEDs.

The post Focus Flower blasts your face with liquid motivation appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Focus Flower blasts your face with liquid motivation was originally published on PlanetArduino

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ESP32 Internet Radio is no Game

More than once, we’ve looked at a cool board like the TTGO T-Display and thought, “What can we build with this?” If you are [Volos Projects], the answer is a tiny Internet radio. He’s done a lot of other projects with the board including some games and a weather station. You can see the project in the video below.

Of course, the core Internet streaming code would be useful with any ESP32, but the display makes for a good-looking unit. The code is available on GitHub.

With judicious use of network and audio libraries, the player only takes a few hundred lines of code. Pretty impressive considering it even shows a visualization on the tiny display screen.

What we’d really like to see is a nice case, power supply, and speaker option to make a tiny and portable unit. With a 3D printer, it is easy to make very professional-looking projects, as we often see. On the other hand, it does look better than the breadboard version you can see towards the end of the video. It is, though, a neatly done breadboard.

If you want a larger screen, you might enjoy the ESP32 internet radio we looked at before. Probably our favorite case for an Internet radio was this globe.

ESP32 Internet Radio is no Game was originally published on PlanetArduino

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World’s Cutest Pomodoro Timer Is Also a Clock

Student and hacker [prusteen] recently fell in love with the Pomodoro method of time management. That’s where you concentrate on your task for 25 minutes, then take a five-minute break, and repeat this four times with a longer break at the end. Initially, [prusteen] was keeping track on their phone, but hated having to change the timer value between Pomodoros and break times. In order to keep the flow mode engaged, [prusteen] came up with this darling little study buddy that does it all with the push of a button.

By default, this tomato shows the current time, which we think is a handy and often-overlooked feature of Pomodoro timer builds. Press that momentary switch on the front, and it starts counting upward to 25 minutes. Then it beeps in stereo through a pair of buzzers when the time is up, and automatically starts a five-minute break timer. Press it again and the display goes back to clock mode, although judging by the code, doing this will cancel the timer.

Inside the juicy enclosure is an Arduino Nano, an RTC, and a 7-segment display. We love the attention to detail here, from the little green leaves on top to the anatomically-correct dimple on the underside. And we always like to see lids that snap on with magnets. So satisfying. Check out the brief demo after the break, which unfortunately does not include any lid-snapping action.

Do you need more interaction with your Pomodoro timer? Build yourself a pomo-dachi instead.

World’s Cutest Pomodoro Timer Is Also a Clock was originally published on PlanetArduino

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This Arduino machine winds Tesla coils automatically

Winding a single strand of wire onto a cylinder when creating a homemade coil can be a very tedious process, and worse, the spacing between each rotation is inconsistent or has overlaps rather than a smooth, even surface. To make things a bit more easier and efficient, YouTuber Mr. Innovative created a DIY machine that accomplishes the task with very little human involvement. 

The core of the device is an Arduino Nano, which is connected to a pair of A4988 stepper motor drivers and a screen, all mounted onto a custom PCB. The 3.5” LCD functions as a touch display that lets the user select both the length of the wrapping and the width of the wire. This allows the number of windings to be calculated by dividing the length (such as 100mm) by the wire’s diameter (such as 200um for a total of 500 windings). 

With the figure calculated, the first stepper motor spins the attached cylinder to wind on the wire. While that happens, a secondary stepper turns a threaded rod that moves the head across the cylinder at a fixed rate. The resulting coil has a smooth, even finish that nearly any hobbyist would be proud of, and better yet, it was created automatically.

For more details on this project, you can view Mr. Innovative’s video below.

The post This Arduino machine winds Tesla coils automatically appeared first on Arduino Blog.

This Arduino machine winds Tesla coils automatically was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Low-cost, highly accurate piano tuner made with an Arduino Due

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Electronic instrument tuners have existed now for several decades, but the ones with a great amount of precision can cost over a thousand dollars to the consumer, which is far above what many are willing or able to pay. To address this issue of high prices while still maintaining a high degree of accuracy Jan Herman built his own device that utilizes just a few relatively common parts. 

Within the housing of his tuner is an Arduino Due, which was selected because of its 32-bit architecture (for precision when measuring frequencies), faster speeds, and a large amount of GPIO pins. Apart from that, Herman included an AD9833 waveform generator breakout, a PAM8302 amplifier circuit, a pair of rotary potentiometers and switches for getting user inputs, and a transducer/speaker setup along with various passive components for power input.

Initially, Herman had planned to include a small speaker that would listen for feedback from the instrument and give the tuner an amount to adjust the string by. However, this proved to be too costly, thus why the transducer and speaker combination was chosen instead. When the user of this project wishes to adjust the frequency, they simply listen to the wave generator and attempt to match it.

This is a very brief overview, and you can read much more about the theory behind tuning an instrument here in Herman’s Instructables write-up. 

The post Low-cost, highly accurate piano tuner made with an Arduino Due appeared first on Arduino Blog.

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Low-cost, highly accurate piano tuner made with an Arduino Due was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Arduino device trains BMW drivers to use turn signals

BMWs are known for many things: performance, luxury, quality, and pedigree. But BMW drivers are only known for one thing: being inconsiderate to others on the road. That stereotype is exemplified by a complete lack of turn signal usage, according to Marc Radinovic. To solve this issue and repair the reputation of BMW drivers, he turned to Arduino to create a training device.

Radinovic attached this device to his own car, which he didn’t want to hack apart. So he avoided tapping into the CAN bus by utilizing an abundance of hardware. That hardware includes two Nano 33 BLE boards, an Uno WiFi Rev. 2, and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. Each Nano 33 BLE has an integrated 9-axis IMU, which Radinovic uses to detect steering wheel movement and turn signal stalk movement.

Both Nano 33 BLE boards communicate with the Uno WiFi board, which connects to the Raspberry Pi via serial. If the steering wheel moves without the turn signal stalk moving, the Arduino Uno WiFi tells the Raspberry Pi to play an angry sound effect through the car’s stereo. That’s the negative reinforcement in the training regimen. The positive reinforcement comes from playing congratulatory sound effects when the driver uses their turn signal before turning the steering.

The post Arduino device trains BMW drivers to use turn signals appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Arduino device trains BMW drivers to use turn signals was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Move! makes burning calories a bit more fun

Gamifying exercise allows people to become more motivated and participate more often in physical activities while also being distracted by doing something fun at the same time. This inspired a team of students from the Handong Global University in Pohang, South Korea to come up with a system, dubbed “Move!,” that uses a microcontroller to detect various gestures and perform certain actions in mobile games accordingly.

They started by collecting many different gesture samples from a Nano 33 BLE Sense, which is worn by a person on their wrist. This data was then used to train a TensorFlow Lite model that classifies the gesture and sends it via Bluetooth to the host phone running the app. Currently, the team’s mobile app contains three games that a player can choose from.

There is a dinosaur game that operates similarly to the offline dinosaur game in Google Chrome where the user must jump to avoid incoming obstacles. The jumping jack game alternates between different movements that are mirrored by the player in a certain amount of time. And finally, there is a boxing game where the player punches the air when commanded onscreen.

You can read more about Move! — which was one of the five winning projects in the TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Challenge — here and view/download the code for both the BLE Sense and mobile app on GitHub.

The post Move! makes burning calories a bit more fun appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Move! makes burning calories a bit more fun was originally published on PlanetArduino

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This Arduino Terminal Does All The Characters

The job of a dumb terminal was originally to be a continuation of that performed by a paper teletype, to send text from its keyboard and display any it receives on its screen. But as the demands of computer systems extended beyond what mere ASCII could offer, their capabilities were extended with extra characters and graphical extensions whose descendants we see in today’s Unicode character sets and thus even in all those emojis on your mobile phone. Thus a fully-featured terminal has a host of semigraphics characters from which surprisingly non-textual output can be created. It’s something [Michael Rule] has done some work on, with his ILI9341TTY, a USB serial terminal monitor using an Arduino Uno and an ILI9341 LCD module that supports as many of the extended characters as possible.

A graph, entirely in Unicode characters.

It’s fair to say that most of us who regularly use a terminal don’t go far beyond the ASCII, as it’s likely that a modern terminal will sit in a window over a desktop GUI. So even if you have little use for a hardware terminal monitor there’s still plenty of interest to be found in those rarely-seen character sets. Our favourite is probably the Symbols for Legacy Computing, an array of semigraphics characters that may be familiar to readers who have used an 8-bit home computer or two. He includes a graph example using these characters coloured with ANSI escape codes, and it’s certainly not what you expect from a terminal.

If microcontroller terminals capture your interest, this isn’t the first we’ve brought you.

This Arduino Terminal Does All The Characters was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Mapping Dance syncs movement and stage lighting using tinyML

Being able to add dynamic lighting and images that can synchronize with a dancer is important to many performances, which rely on both and music and visual effects to create the show. Eduardo Padrón aimed to do exactly that by monitoring a performer’s moves with an accelerometer and playing the appropriate effect based on the recognized movement. 

Padrón’s system is designed around a Raspberry Pi 4 running an MQTT server for communication with auxiliary IoT boards. Movement data was collected via a Nano 33 BLE Sense and its onboard accelerometer to gather information and send it to a Google Colab environment. From here, a model was trained on these samples for 600 epochs, achieving an accuracy of around 91%. After deploying this model onto the Arduino, he was able to output the correct gesture over USB where it interacts with the running Python script. Once the gesture is received, the MQTT server publishes the message to any client devices such as an ESP8266 for lighting and plays an associated video or sound. 

Padrón plans on adding more features to his system in the future such as Bluetooth connectivity, kinetic sculptures, and more animation effects. You can read more about his project, which was named a winner in the TensorFlow Lite for Microcontrollers Challenge, on DevPost here.

The post Mapping Dance syncs movement and stage lighting using tinyML appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Mapping Dance syncs movement and stage lighting using tinyML was originally published on PlanetArduino

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This tinyML device counts your squats while you focus on your form

Getting in your daily exercise is vital to living a healthy life and having proper form when squatting can go a long way towards achieving that goal without causing joint pain from doing them incorrectly. The Squats Counter is a device worn around the thigh that utilizes machine learning and TensorFlow Lite to automatically track the user’s form and count how many squats have been performed. 

Creator Manas Pange started his project by flashing the tf4micro-moition-kit code to a Nano 33 BLE Sense, which features an onboard three-axis accelerometer. From there, he opened the Tiny Motion Trainer Experiment by Google that connects to the Arduino over Bluetooth and captures many successive samples of motion. After gathering enough proper and improper form samples, Manas trained, tested, and deployed the resulting model to the board.

Every time a proper squad is performed, the counter ticks down by one until it reaches a predefined goal.

For more details about the Squats Counter, which was recently named a winner in the TensorFlow Lite for Microcontroller Challenge, you can view its GitHub repository here. 

The post This tinyML device counts your squats while you focus on your form appeared first on Arduino Blog.

This tinyML device counts your squats while you focus on your form was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Core Memory: Why We Used 60-Year-Old Tech in an Arduino Shield

About ten years ago, we designed and made an Arduino shield implementing “core memory,” a technology that was sixty years old even then. Our shield stored 32 individual 1s or 0s using magnetic fields going either clockwise or anticlockwise around 32 tiny doughnuts of magnetisable ‘ferrite’ material. This kind of memory, invented in the 1950s, […]

The post Core Memory: Why We Used 60-Year-Old Tech in an Arduino Shield appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Core Memory: Why We Used 60-Year-Old Tech in an Arduino Shield was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Light Deck is a MIDI Lightroom controller

Using Adobe Lightroom can be a tedious process, especially for those who don’t have their keyboards set up with a hundred macro shortcuts. Andrea Lunaro wanted to make this process easier by constructing a large, physical bank of buttons and potentiometers that can be used to perform a whole host of functions within Lightroom. It can output commands to copy/paste, set HSL values, do basic transformations, and navigate around the software in general, all over the MIDI protocol. 

This device — called the Light Deck — is powered by a single Arduino Micro, which is connected to several 16-channel 74HC4067 multiplexer ICs that handle both the input and output with the bank of rotary potentiometers and buttons. Data is outputted via USB to the host computer running Lightroom where it is then converted to Lightroom commands with the help of the MISI2Lr plug-in. 

Both the PCB and enclosure were custom-designed and assembled, with the enclosure being fully 3D-printed along with its accompanying button/potentiometer covers. As seen in this demonstration video, the Light Deck works really well at providing users with a pleasant analog interface for fine-tuning various image parameters. 

For more information about this project, you can check out Lunaro’s write-up on Hackster.io and design files on GitHub.

The post Light Deck is a MIDI Lightroom controller appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Light Deck is a MIDI Lightroom controller was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Arduino enables USB mouse support on custom 6502 homebrew computer

The MOS Technology 6502 was one of the most popular processors of the 8-bit era. It found a home in legendary computers like the Commodore 64, Acorn Electron, BBC Micro, and Apple II. Even the NES had a custom implementation of the 6502. Because the 6502 is so well documented, it is possible for today’s enthusiasts to use it in their own homebrew computers. To enhance their DIY 6502 computer, rehsd used an Arduino to add USB mouse support.

This homebrew computer is a Ben Eater design, which rehsd modified and created a PCB to streamline. It operates like most computers from the late ’70s and early ’80s. Computers back then didn’t support USB mice — the USB standard wouldn’t even exist until 1996. Joysticks were common, but graphical user interfaces and the mice to support them were not. So rehsd had to find a way to get a USB mouse talking to his 6502 processor. He settled on an Arduino Mega as an adapter.

The mouse connects to the Arduino through a USB host shield, which lets the board read data coming from standard USB devices. The Arduino runs a sketch that polls the mouse data and then sends that data to the 6502 through the VIA (Versatile Interface Adapter). It first triggers interrupts on the VIA and then writes the mouse data to the VIA ports. Code written in assembly runs on the 6502 and reads the mouse data after the interrupts. To demonstrate the mouse, rehsd wrote a simple drawing program that would have been a hit in 1978.

The post Arduino enables USB mouse support on custom 6502 homebrew computer appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Arduino enables USB mouse support on custom 6502 homebrew computer was originally published on PlanetArduino

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This Arduino radio looks like something from 100 years ago

As time has progressed, personal radios have shrunk from the size of a large filing cabinet down to a tiny circuit that can be integrated into other ICs. Instructables user exposedwire wanted to bring back the feeling of a vintage 1920s radio set, so they built one out of wood that carries the same antique feeling with some more modern features.

For the electronics, exposedwire went with an Arduino Uno for the main control board, along with a TEA5767 FM receiver IC that communicates with the Uno over I2C. The currently tuned frequency is displayed on a seven-segment LED module, which is driven by the ubiquitous TM1637 chip. The station can be changed by rotating the accompanying rotary encoder. Finally, the resulting audio signal is sent from the TEA1637 to an NS8002 amplifier and outputted from a small speaker.

The outer shell of the enclosure was fabricated by first 3D printing an arch-like structure and gluing it to the back wooden cover. After the speaker was set into its mount, the wooden faceplate was attached along with its speaker grill and front panel assembly. The FM radio antenna simply sticks out the back next to the power input jack. 

To read more about this DIY radio project, you can view its writeup here on Instructables or see a build/demonstration video here on YouTube.

The post This Arduino radio looks like something from 100 years ago appeared first on Arduino Blog.

This Arduino radio looks like something from 100 years ago was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Laser Pointer and Arduino Make a Minimalistic Shooting Game

Video games are great and all, but sometimes you just want the thrill of manipulating actual objects in addition to watching action on a screen. This must have been the reason why Nintendo’s Duck Hunt became so popular despite the simplicity of its gameplay. Prolific hacker [mircemk] similarly made a computer-plus-physical game called “Laser Shooter“, which somehow reminds us of the good old NES game.

The game is based on an Arduino Nano, to which five LEDs as well as five photoresistors (LDRs) are connected. When the game is started, the LEDs light up at random and the player has a limited time to “shoot” the corresponding LDR with a laser pointer. This time limit is decreased as the game progresses, and the game is over once the player fails to hit the target on time. The “Game Over” message is accompanied by a sad tune, but luckily no giggling dog.

Complete schematics and code are available for anyone willing to try their hand at replicating or improving this game. And no, you can’t simply sweep your laser across the five LDRs all the time, because you lose if you shoot at the wrong target. For more laser pointer-based games, try this Laser Command clone or this laser tag badge system.

Laser Pointer and Arduino Make a Minimalistic Shooting Game was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Arduino Brings USB Mouse to Homebrew computer

When building your own homebrew computer, everything is a challenge. Ultimately, that’s kind of the point. If you didn’t want to really get your hands dirty with the nuts and bolts of the thing, you wouldn’t have built it in the first place. For example, take the lengths to which [rehsd] was willing to go in order to support standard USB mice on their 6502 machine.

Code for mapping mouse movement to digital output.

The idea early on was to leverage existing Arduino libraries to connect with a standard USB mouse, specifically, the hardware would take the form of an Arduino Mega 2560 with a USB Host Shield. There was plenty of code and examples that showed how you could read the mouse position and clicks from the Arduino, but [rehsd] still had to figure out a way to get that information into the 6502.

In the end, [rehsd] connected one of the digital pins from the Arduino to an interrupt pin on the computer’s W65C22 versatile interface adapter (VIA). Then eleven more digital pins were connected to the computer, each one representing a state for the mouse and buttons, such as MOUSE_CLICK_RIGHT and MOUSE_LEFT_DOWN.

Admittedly, [rehsd] says the mouse action is far from perfect. But as you can see in the video after the break, it’s at least functional. While the code could likely be tightened up, there’s obviously some improvements to be made in terms of the electrical interface. The use of shift registers could reduce the number of wires between the Arduino and VIA, which would be a start. It’s also possible a chip like the CH375 could be used, taking the microcontroller out of the equation entirely.

From classic breadboard builds to some impressively practical portable machines, we’ve seen our fair share of 6502 computers over the years. Despite the incredible variation to be found in these homebrew systems, one thing is always the same: they’re built by some of the most passionate folks out there.

[Thanks to Jim for the tip.]

Arduino Brings USB Mouse to Homebrew computer was originally published on PlanetArduino

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Arduino Nano Floppy Emulator For When Your Disk Is Not Accessible

Among the plethora of obsolete removable media there are some which are lamented, but it can be difficult to find those who regret the passing of the floppy disk. These flexible magnetic disks in hard plastic covers were a staple of computing until some time in the early 2000s, and their drives could be found by the crateload in any spares box. But what about today, when there’s a need for a real floppy drive and none is to be found? Enter [Acemi Elektronikci], with an Arduino Nano based floppy emulator, that plugs into the floppy port of a PC old enough to have one, and allows the easy use of virtual floppy disks.

Aside from the Nano it has an SD card and associated level shifter, and an SSD1306 i2c screen. Most of the Arduino’s lines drive the floppy interface, so the five-button control comes to a single ADC pin via a resistor ladder. He freely admits that it’s not a perfect cycle-exact emulator of original hardware and there may be machines or even operating systems that complain when faced with it, but for all that it is a useful tool. One of the machines that may have issues is the Amiga, but fortunately there’s a fix for that with a Raspberry Pi.

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Arduino Nano Floppy Emulator For When Your Disk Is Not Accessible was originally published on PlanetArduino