Featured Adafruit Community Project
This week there was a lot of renewed interest in the InMoov project, so we wanted to celebrate one of the members of our community who has been working away at a set: Zviad Sulaberidze!
Right now, all over the world, 3D printing hackers and robotics enthusiasts are printing their own Open Source sub-$1k, life-size humanoid robot from the inMoov project created by gael langevin (known on Thingiverse as hairygael).
Check out the InMoov blog here for updates and to see the additions others are making to these fascinating robots! (read more)
There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 58,787 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!
Electronics show and tell with G+ On-Air hangouts every Saturday at 9:30pm ET. Want to show a project on an upcoming show and tell? Leave a comment on the show and tell announcement on Adafruit’s G+ page: http://google.com/+adafruit
From the Google+ Community
(Note: Google+ login required.)
Robert Svec shared: “Palm sized autonomous robot with Arduino, Parallax Ping and Sparkfun servos, all powered with a LiPo battery setup – just for fun!” (read more)
Stanley Seow shared: “With a help of a student to make the PCb, I designed these nRF adapters for UNO with a 3.3V LDO Reg from Pin10 as Vcc as the nRF24L01+ pins are 4×2 and not UNO nor breadboard compatible… check this out.” (read more)
Jeremy Cook shared: “GoPro + Water Balloon Slingshot + Fin = Awesome Flight Video.” (read more)
Leslie Birch shared an update from her FLORAbrella project: “I just couldn’t stand the Adafruit Neopixel LED Strip 30 sitting in its box any longer. It looked so lonely and dark in there. So, I decided to take the risk — hook up the FLORA with the LiPo (2600 mAh) and strip. I was so scared a wire would overheat and I pictured all those old movies with the mad scientists pulling the big switch and big puffs of smoke everywhere, but I decided that Tesla and the others must have done their share of crash and burn. My turn.” (read more)
Jay Doscher shared: “This short clip shows the first generation main body, including the compass, GPS and Arduino. Here you can see the motor going through panning movements to test out the arduino programming controls.” (read more)
Mano Biletsky shared: “Added a led for seeing in wich octave you are playing. Software is now setup to calibrate the fingers. (Not yet calibrated in this video). Sound is better allready…” (read more)
Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog
Tom Hartley shared about the AirPi project. (Also highlighted as an important project on RaspberryPi.org.) “For the last 10 months, I’ve been working with Alyssa Dayan to create the AirPi. Its a shield for the Raspberry Pi capable of recording data about the air quality and current weather conditions, coupled with code to upload its recordings to the internet in real time. The project started back in October 2012, when one of our teachers (we’re both sixth form students) told us about the PA Consulting Raspberry Pi competition. The challenge was to create something, using a Pi, which would “make the world a better place”. We didn’t have a very clear idea of what to design, so we looked at the different kinds of hardware we could connect to the Pi. After checking Adafruit’s website, we discovered a vast assortment of sensors, many of which measured meteorological information. Over the next 4 months, we purchased and added on various parts from all over the world (testing and calibrating as we went along), starting with the DHT22 which measured temperature and humidity, and finishing with the UVI-01 which measures UV levels. That was the very first incarnation of the AirPi….” (read more)
Ben Miller shared his hacked commercial pet feeder that can be controlled remotely: “For our first project we decided to create something that would allow my dad to feed his dogs remotely if he and my mom were out gallivanting (technical term) about. Don’t worry, the dog door allows for the post-processing to occur safely. We did some research and found this cool project by Amanda Ghassaei. She had done a lot of the research already like finding a powered dog feeder and determining how to hack it to work on demand. Apparently, if you push the Volume and Set buttons at the same time it triggers the feed cycle. She shows how to connect to the board and use an arduino to logically push these buttons. We loved it, but wanted to add a few features.” (read more)
Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog
Here is Fred Kahl‘s “MaX Fredroom 3D Printed Hangover” from the Flickr Group “The Art of 3D Print Failure”: “Inspired by a blog post from RichRap, this group is meant as a show and tell of the prints that went wrong. Add a description of what happened and your thoughts and analysis and hopefully others will comment on how best to avoid the problems in the future.” (read more)
Elizabeth shared: “We are big fans of #WearableWednesday and Adafruit in general. We wanted to share our project, Lüme. It is a mini collection which brings together practical garments with wearable electronics. The pieces are made to be easy to wear day to day, the electronics can be easily removed and attached so the garment can actually be washed! We used your LPD8806 and Neopixel Strips in the pieces. Each piece has a micro controller, Bluetooth module, and LiPo which is controlled via a mobile app that we also put together. This enables the garment to be driven from any of the cell phone’s sensors. Currently the app allows for the control of color, pattern, and even taps into the microphone and GPS of the phone.
(read more)
Nic Wallenberg created an unusual Human Speaker: “The Human Speaker works much the same way, except the collar, rather than voice box, is the source of the vibrations. The pitch of the notes that emerge is determined by the collar, which, Wallenberg writes, can produce up to two notes at a time. Wearers can manipulate the sound with their mouths much as they would normally. (read more)
Check out the Mars rover these two girls built in their garage: “Two sisters, 11 and 13, have built a Mars rover in a workshop in their family’s garage. Camille and Genevieve Beatty have also been invited to the New York Hall of Science to show off their rover as part of a special exhibit on astronomy. The rover will roam around a mini-Martian landscape and analyze rocks with hidden heat lamps embedded inside.” (read more)
Paul Stoffregen shared: “Yesterday I made a little audio clip player for a Monty Python Flying Circus theme party. It plays the 3 second dramatic sound for the unexpected Spanish Inquisition entrance. The hardware is pretty simple. It’s just a Teensy 3.0 that “plays” the audio using a PWM pin. The PWM is amplified to a 9V signal using a NPN transistor, then a pair of transistors buffer the signal to the current required to drive an 8 ohm speaker. I had intended to make a nice L-C filter to remove the PWM carrier, but only the 100 uH inductor made it onto the breadboard as I quickly put this thing together in only a couple hours.” (read more)
Chicago Dave shared a cool Neopixel Ring project in the Adafruit Forums! “Using Arduino UNO, Adafruit’s Compass/Accelerometer & NeoPixel Ring (AND excellent libraries)…A digital LED compass to show you the way in any light! I was playing with the new, and very cool, NeoPixel Ring — I hooked it up to my UNO, along with the Accelerometer/Magnetometer breakout board. I wrote a simple little sketch and…viola! An RGB LED compass on my Arduino. A quick little video I made of it.” (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!