There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 53,329 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!
Don’t miss the chance to catch up with great pieces from the community from this past week! Click the link below!
From the Google+ Community
(Note: Google+ login required.)
Matt Heilman shared: “A useful-short pen I made.” Really cool! (read more)
Nudatech shared: “experimenting with a shift register 74HC595N, an Aruino Uno and few LEDs…” (read more)
Jason Hollis shared: “Here is a demo of volume control using an ATTiny85 and a photo resistor. Write up on how this is done is on my blog at http://jdubb.net/blog/2013/06/photoresistor-volume-control/.” (read more)
sensei wu shared: “RGB led controlled processing” (read more)
Steve Spence shared: “Making yogurt with an Arduino, cheap and easy! http://arduinotronics.blogspot.com/” (read more)
phenoptix shared: “We’ve just made three of these for the winners of the MagPi (Raspberry Pi Magazine) prize give away. They’re a version of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:89745” (read more)
Mark Miller shared: “I set out to find a use for my Lexan scraps, a bunch(hundreds of feet) of 3/8 hard chrome brass tube, 1/4 20 lengths of threaded steel rod, boxes of small DC gearmotors and pounds of 1/4 20 nuts. I had already made a version of this(buried way down this page) but wanted an easier to make revision, and ones that could be stacked…” (read more)
Jeremy Cook shared: “An update on a project I did a while ago, this screen setup allows my automatic light graffiti device to be seen in “real life”.” (read more)
james w shared: “The battery powered “point and shoot” camera I made using my Raspberry Pi with the new Camera Board. It doesn’t have a screen or viewfinder so it feels very old-fashioned when taking a picture (like using a pinhole camera) but it works well. I am able to see the images from any other machine on my local network as they are taken without plugging the camera into anything. Drilled a hole in the Adafruit Industries case and hot-glue mounted the board on the inside so the lens sticks through. Camera lasted about 3ish hours on the charge.” (read more)
And here are some of the photos he took with his camera:
Mike Overstreet shared an update from his efforts to 3D print robot projects: “Super Strong 3D Printed Robot Bracket!!!!!
This bracket was design to be used with Dynamixel MX-28T and RX-24F servos.”
(read more)
Zviad Sulaberidze shared: “inmoov robot hand and biceps” (read more)
Erik Kringen shared: “Here’s a simple circuit for driving motors with MOSFETS” (read more)
baka chan shared a new blog post about “zelda, sewing, and shopping. Hope you enjoy!” (read more)
Bruce Lowther shared some graphing techniques: “Example of #R using #ggplot2 package for graphs. ex.data is sample random data and x axis is date time.” (read more)
Link Zero shared: “I’m doing a small micro-synth for atmega. Today I did a wah-wah effect. Here is micro-synth playing super mario theme. uSYNTH in action on an ATMega88 (read more)
MAKEwithMOTO shared: “Four teams comprising of students from Caltech and Art Center present the projects they have been working on all weekend.” (read more)
Darryl Sokoloski shares a claim: “It’s a fact: girls are better at soldering! ;^)” Followed by much discussion. (read more)
Jack Houweling shared: “Nnew charging and storage station.” (read more)
Michelle Thompson shared: “Electrified MG Midget Project Progress” (read more)
And check out further progress with the front suspension.
Alexis Wiasmitinow shared: “Nice hacking session with 2 +EveryCook machines. It was about time to get those working… In the second picture you see the simple web interface we have for testing. After reaching 0.8 bar the heat was turned off automatically….” (read more)
Brandon Green shared: “3D printed some whiteboard marker/eraser holders for my office whiteboard (which strangely lacks a tray but has a rail/slot at the top and bottom). It’s surprisingly easy to design stuff in OpenSCAD”
(read more)
Peter Wobacz shared: “Home made resistive Soil moisture sensor.” (read more)
Joe Van Demark shared: “I’ve created an Arduino project: Barometric pressure/temperature sensor (this is used to calculate altitude, and of course measure the temperature ), Real time clock & a micro SD card. I intend to use this setup to measure the lapse rate (cooling of the atmosphere with height) and create graphs to see if I can identify the signature of a good flying day. The hardware is together, and the code is written. The last couple of things to do are mount the Arduino (securely) rebalance the sailplane and fly ;)” (read more)
Mano Biletsky shared: “I made a glove for my new music instrument. (Glove based MIDI instrument). I added stretchy strips of ribbon that will contain “Tactilus flex” sensors (donated by Sensor Products Inc. (Madison, NJ USA))” The glove itself is made out of spandex.” (read more)
Rifle Creek shared: “Protoboard development: this is a microstructure designed in Sketchup for a membrane shell, with a finely detailed matrix of tubular openings, each individually gated on both sides. Gateways are designed beforehand, within the digital file, prior to 3D printing. A printer with resolution of 20 microns or better can accurately 3D print the microstructure so that the membrane shell thickness would be 300 microns thick (two human hairs)….” (read more)
Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog
Bryan Duxbury shared his Custom Standalone Programming Fixture: “I spent my evenings over Memorial Day weekend working on a customized fixture designed to make programming and testing the electronics of our Question Block Lamp really easy. As part of our plan to bring the lamps back into production, we decided that a custom programming fixture would go a long way towards helping our outsourcing partner get exactly what we want quickly and without the difficulty of communication.” (read more)
NYU student/designer Xuedi Chen shared: “For her ITP class project, NYU student/designer Xuedi Chen used 3D-printing software and chia seeds to spawn these mossy fashion accessories. Their origins are somewhat grotesque: The Invasive Growth Series was directly inspired by a parasitic fungus. The cordyceps operates by infecting an insect with spores, growing inside the insect while performing a sort of “mind control” that forces it to clasp onto a plant just in time for the cordyceps to burst through its body and grow upward. It’s pretty badass.” (read more)
nickdisney shared an intriguing material science experiment — treating PLA to make it flexible: “okay, so yesterday I uploaded a video of a few parts I have managed to make into flexible pieces. So today I am giving you the how to. (I waited to make sure the parts remained flexible and to see if I could come up with a suitable way to restore the color to some of the treated parts.)” (read more)
Lenore from Evil Mad Scientist shared about a 3D printing use case: Custom parts for vintage cars: “When instructables user madmorrie had new door trims (interior panels) made for his 1962 Valiant, he neglected to allow for clearance for the door lock levers on the back door, so the original levers would no longer work….” (read more)
RobotGrrl shared her Lightning LoL Necklace Wearable: “I wonder if all wearable electronic projects are like this- if people come up to you just because it’s something different and want to know more. Perhaps more world-wide friendliness & curiosity could be an unexpected result from wearable electronics! So, it worked and we were able to get people to talk to us. I extremely recommend this to other shy/not-exactly-social people.” (read more)
We have a massive update on Cats of Engineering, we’re caught up and have added the latest rounds of cats. If you’d like to add your cat just scroll down to the bottom and send a photo (link) in! Pictured above: Test Subject Tigger Reporting for Duty.(read more)
Brian Chamberlain shared his “Deodorant flashlight”: “Finished my flashlight prototype AND IT WORKS!” (read more)
Lindsay Degen describes her recent knitwear: “My all-in-one-piece Jordana Tank Top is named after one of my best friends, Jordana Martin. I wanted to do something where you could knit everything in one piece to limit the finishing. This is the first time I’ve knit something only in one piece!” (read more)
Ken shared a teardown and exploration of Apple’s Magsafe connector: “Since you’ve done a lot with Apple chargers, I thought you might be interested in my article on the Magsafe connector on Mac chargers. I tore down the charger connector, determined that it communicates with the Mac via the 1-wire protocol and a DS2413 1-wire switch chip, and I used an Arduino to read the charger’s ID and control the status light.” (read more)
Check out Mephisto II: Building an Internet Radio with the Raspberry Pi: “Inspired by mightyohms internet radio I decided to build one on my own too. So I build my first radio with an Asus WL520-GU router and an Arduino Ethernet as UI controller: Mephisto I. The project has been so much fun that I decided to build another one, but with a cheaper and more efficient hardware by choosing the Raspberry Pi. (read more)
Rebecca Watson shared a really cool use of SpokePOV to animate a picture of Carl Sagan: “We used a serial-to-USB converter to be able to upload images to the computers, each of which has enough space for four different images, allowing us to create animations or just to display a rotating set of images. For my first go, I tried a portrait of Carl Sagan. Because we only have one color, I had to find a simple portrait that was easy to reduce to a single color. I found this one on Google Images, and turned it into this. Check out Rebecca’s blog for documentation and links to source code! (read more)
Jeremy Blum shared: “Utilizing the super-high-intensity LED circuit board that I had designed for my masters thesis on Hybrid Fiber Optic LED Lighting, I built a web-connected LED graduation cap that would be truly ridiculous. Graduations can be a bit boring, so I wanted to develop an interactive platform (on my head) that others could fiddle with during the ceremonies. And thus, the “Control my Cap” project was born.” (read more)
We spied some Adafruit sensor breakouts in the flight of a high-altitude balloon carrying a slice of pizza featured in Anamanaguchi’s newest music video “Endless Fantasy.” Looks like a BMP085 Barometric Pressure/Temperature/Altitude sensor, to be precise, appearing at the 3:07 time mark. Good luck out on tour, guys! (read more)
Very nice repurposing of classic 8-bit Tetris by Michael Birken: “By rotating, positioning and dropping a predetermined sequence of pieces, the Tetris Printer Algorithm exploits the mechanics of Tetris to generate arbitrary bitmap images. Check out the full post here including source code! (read more)
Kyle shared: “I just saw your teaser for the LED Suspenders and figured I’d share this. I made a set of RGB Suspenders for myself and a down-angled belt of blue LEDs for my girlfriend for her turnabout dance. The suspenders are nylon webbing with RGB LED strips glued to the back controlled by one of those 3-button controllers and a lithium pack. A single color controller drives the belt. Thanks for all the wearable inspiration!” (read more)
Evil Mad Scientist shared designs for eggbot by RoboGenius: “We’ve been watching the work of RoboGenius for quite some time. He has created some of the neatest non-geometric work anybody has done on the Egg-Bot. Recently, he uploaded a number of his designs to thingiverse, which means you can try them out, too.” (read more)
Sophi Kravitz shared a project created by her husband Ollie, DIY EDM Machine: he “decided to build an Electric discharge machining (EDM) machine a couple of months ago. EDM machining is a process where a shape is obtained from a piece of metal by using sparks to remove material! If you have a shape that you wish to reproduce-you make a copper positive of the shape you wish to reproduce (hereafter called the electrode), and by passing a high voltage spark between the electrode and the process material (will become the finished part), erode the process material to exactly match the shape you want. (read more)
Billy Keyes shared: “SketchSynth lets anyone create their own control panels with just a marker and a piece of paper. Once drawn, the controller sends Open Sound Control (OSC) messages to anything that can receive them; in this case, a simple synthesizer running in Pure Data. It’s a fun toy that also demonstrates the possibilities of adding digital interaction to sketched or otherwise non-digital interfaces.” (read more)
alexba.in shared techniques for using a RaspberryPi and Pebble Watch to control a home theater: “Hey Adafruit! I just finished a blog post describing how to use a RaspberryPi and a Pebble watch to control your home theater. Now that the Pebble watch SDK has been released I thought it would be fun to connect my RaspberryPi project (the Open Source Universal Remote http://opensourceuniversalremote.com) with my Pebble watch. I bought most of the electronics parts from you, and I couldn’t have made it this far without the guides and helpful instructions. Keep up the great work!” (read more)
Check out this glitch inspired digital art by Kaliptus Ohm. (read more)
ch00ftech shares about “The Slowest $380 I’ll Ever Make”: “So it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. In addition to a number of small personal obligations I’ve had over the past few weeks, I’ve also been spending a lot of time shipping out QR clocks to my customers and handling customer service requests. I’ve been really eager to post a final summary of the whole QR clock experiment, but I had to wait for the experiment to end first. Now that all of my clocks are happily in the hands of their new owners, I can.” Best analysis on kit costs ever! (read more)
Check out this cute 8-bit inspired throws by Penelope and Clyde! (read more)
Raspberry Pi Projects from the #Piday Blog Series
Andrea shared an update to his electronic doorplate project that we posted about last fall: “Tuco 2.0 is an electronic nameplate on the door: “intelligent” open source and open hardware. It ‘was designed to be installed on the doors of our university studies. The purpose of the label is to display real-time information such as: number of the study, teachers, office hours, contacts, mail and / or phone etc etc … but especially alerts taken in real time from one of the communication channels of the university. Tuco 2.0 is the evolution of the prototype published precendemente, this version uses Raspberry PI, minicomputers designed in the UK by the Raspberry PI Foundation.” (read more)
limpfish shared a Raspberry Pi WiFi Radio: “Heath Robinson RPi wifi radio! Has, so far : 3 buttons, 2 dials, a 4 digit 7 seg display clock (controlled by MAX7219), a 128 x 64 LCD (ST7565), wifi dongle, cheap USB ‘sound card’, PWM analogue meter showing download rate. Needs 1x box. Runs MPD for the audio. Code updates clock, LCD etc. calls MPC with various BBC playlists.” (read more)
netguru shared about sandwich and coffee counting with Raspberry Pi: “The idea is very simple: we press a button and send a request to our website which then increases The Sandwich/Coffee Count. The design isn’t much harder than that – thanks to RaspberryPi we can build a very basic circuit (power -> button -> line out to RPi -> LED -> resistor -> ground, it doesn’t get much simpler than that) and then just “catch” the signal and voila! RPi sees the signal and fires out a POST request.” (read more)
Kevin Ochs shared: “Here is a quick test of the collision detection using a Xtion Pro Live (Prime Sense) with a Raspberry Pi as the brain. To note the Rpi is overclocked to 1000Mhz. (You will notice a slight click in the middle of me turning on the collision interrupt call. I forgot I turned it off in the beginning since it was so close to the camera. I realized it after it wasn’t responding to the cone in front of it.) Collision is only detected in the middle of it’s vision. This is due to the legs sometimes crossing over into it’s field of vision during full body rotations. I have also integrated the three vision options into a “heads up display” using OpenNI and OpenCV.” (read more)
pihw.wordpress.com shared: “While I have not had time to properly play around with the new Raspberry Pi camera, I did create a quick time lapse video with it. A week or so later during some twitter based Camera discussions with @RasPiTV @RPiSpy, we had @_smstext join in. His question was how to get a time lapse to start automatically on power up. What a great idea, I already had to use my “porta-pi” set-up [a portable DVD Player with some internal modifications to connect to the Raspberry Pi] to perform the time-lapse, where it would be MUCH easier to simply place the Raspberry Pi in location, plug-in a standard mobile phone charger power pack and off it goes! Challenge accepted!” Source code and more here! (read more)
Steven Hickson writes: “I’ve made some big changes since my last post with voice control with the Raspberry Pi. You can now verify the keyword, change the keyword, change the response, put it in quiet mode to not talk to you, and put it in ignore mode to not try to answer questions not in your config file. The config file format has also been changed from voice=command to voice==command, comments have been allowed in the config file by starting a line with #, and special settings can be done by starting a line with !. I’ve updated the TTS from espeak to Google’s API since it sounds a lot better. Finally, I’ve made an update script in the Install folder, that way you don’t have to reinstall every time new changes get pushed out to github. All of the source code is at: https://github.com/StevenHickson/PiAUISuite (read more)
Gary over at rlab.org.uk shows how to remove the IR filter from a RPi camera: “Tonight at Reading Hackspace we spent a good hour or two dissecting the Raspberry Pi cameras and figured out how to remove the cameras IR filter, which makes it super fab for night time use with infrared LEDs, this opens up the opportunity to use it with security, wildlife and astronomy applications in mind. Don’t try this at home, we did break a camera on our first go….” (read more)
Alex Eames posted a how-to at raspi.tv showing how to shoot close-up with the Raspberry Pi camera: “Shooting Close-up with your Raspberry Pi Camera. Video supplements blog article here… http://raspi.tv/2013/adapt-your-raspb… I tried a couple of different lenses; a “proper” camera +2D lens and cheap reading glasses. The results from both were pretty good.” (read more)
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!