Featured Adafruit Community Project: AMRI 2013 Wrap-up Presentations

The debut fellowship season of Additive Manufacturing Research Institute included a series of fascinating investigations that impact desktop 3D printing’s immediate future. The four makers and scientists this year shared with us about their groundbreaking projects, for the benefit of everyone exploring these fields. (read more)

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 60,187 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Donald Watkins shared: “Watch a BOE-BOT based robot that I built a while ago as it autonomously navigates a corner. I programmed a “semi-random” approach to problem solving which gives it a bit of a lost-and-confused look. It’s all fun no matter what the outcome!” (read more)

Thomas Leplus shared: “My latest Raspberry Pi project. The goal of this project is to have a physical traffic light in my office to monitor the current status of our latest development branch in our continuous integration system (Jenkins). Several similar projects have shown that a fun notification system encourages developers to pay more attention to continuous integration. These so called extreme feedback devices have been very popular since the advent of extreme programming.” (read more)

David Bernier shared: “Thanks to PiFM, Raspberry Pi is replacing the remote control unit as it transmits the forward command to the RC toy car over the airwaves (49.865 MHz).” (read more)

Manoel Lemos shared: “Finally,all the parts together and the code is running. Actually the voltage and current sensors are not connected, but the code things they are. We have an ultra cool OLED display from Adafruit, a Real Time Clock also from Adafruit, Temperature and Humidity sensor, two buttons to accept user commands and an status RGB LED. We also have both the Ethernet and SD card running. SD card will be used when the network is not available and also for some important auditing and debugging information. I had to use an Arduino Mega 2560 because my software is getting really big (around 42K) and it uses lots of RAM (around 4K). Now I’m going to polish the software for a while and then attach the voltage and current sensors to the prototype.” (read more)

Matt Heilman shared: “An interesting instrument” (read more)

Tom Sayles shared: “I’m working on a MPPT Shield for Arduino based on a design by Tim Nolan. This is the very first prototype PCB….” (read more)

Guillermo Amaral shared: “Some of my boards are in from the fab, they’ve all checked out fine. :)” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

The photo above uses the Adafruit NeoPixel strips. Matt Borgatti designed the wire + OSHW logo and it was made Artisans Asylum in Somerville. (read more)

Andy Ayre’s solution to help transfer his DVD collection to his media server: build a robot to do it! “Recently inspired and armed with a 3D printer I decided to build a robot to perform the disc changing. Jack the Ripper Bot was born.” (read more)

Collin Smith shared his MintyBoost Solar Charger Project, housed in his “up cycled” antique cigarette box, on the Adafruit Forums! “Just to share my project using the MintyBoost V3 with a solar panel. I use it to charge my iPhone 5 daily and works really well. No tweaks to the MintyBoost were required, just some additional battery power.” (read more)

Kenny Repine aka @newbanZo shared this epic fan remake of the LED cube from Anamanaguchi‘s “Endless Fantasy” album cover and live show–on a leather jacket! He used the Adafruit LED belt kit and some extra LED strip and white fabric to create this visually stunning effect. (read more)

Will shared a glowing cow watermelon project: “A food + electronics project? Yup. Please be careful if you plan to do this. Electricity and water(melon) don’t mix well. I got shocked a few times. I made this glowing cow watermelon for my annual Beef Appreciation BBQ. After I gutted the watermelon, I cut out a cow face with a few layers to give it some dimension. I kept it all together and attached it to the watermelon with Kebab sticks and toothpicks. On the back of the cow face, I cut out a piece of EL Panel that I got from Adafruit. This is cool stuff. I attached it by cutting little tabs that I then stuck into the watermelon rind. The watermelon not only glowed, but shocked you if you touched it. After being shocked a few times, I decided not to put the fruit salad into the watermelon for the comfort of my guests. However, it did dry before the event and stopped shocking people.” (read more)

Here’s a video update from Peter De Smidt’s DIY film scanner project, shared on the Adafruit Forums: “This video shows a prototype do it yourself dslr film scanner. The camera is a D600 with a 55mm Micro Nikkor at 1:1 magnification. The scanner takes 25 pictures to scan a 4×5″ piece of film. It is controlled by an Arduino Uno, with two EasyStepper drivers for the stepper motors. For serious use, the lens would be masked, and there’d be dark material keeping outside light off of the film carrier.” (read more)

EVRE shared on the Adafruit Forums: “I built a webserver based on the Arduino Mega, it does the following:

• Take sensor readings and picture every 10 min and store on SD card.
• Barometric pressure
• outside humidity
• inside humidity
• outside temperature
• inside temperature
• outside ambient light level (needs better sensor, like the one available on Adafruit)

The server has its quirks and downfalls.” (read more)

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