Community Corner: This Week in Adafruit’s Community – March 14, 2014 « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Featured Adafruit Community Project

The HackHers Robotics team from Needham High School in Needham Massachusetts stikes their “Rosie the Riveter” pose at the Massachusetts FTC Championship Tournament. HACKHERS is an all girl team in their second year of competition. At last weekend’s tournament, they were the winners of the Promote Award for community outreach and promotion of STEM education.

And their robot’s name? Ada of course!

There are people making amazing things around the world, are you one of them? Join the 76,738 strong! And check out scores of projects they shared this week after the jump!

Last Week on Adafruit’s Weekly Electronics Show and Tell!

From the Google+ Community

(Note: Google+ login required.)

Jeremy Cook shared: “Progress on my four-legged MountainBeest ‘walker'” (read more)

Tobias Skoglund shared: “My home automation project (and more). Demonstrating Speech recognition to add Voice commands to Android and Spotify. www.indrome.com” (read more)

Alfonso E.M. shared: “”Robotic” badge I built for the First LEGO League. A concealed switch (made from two shaving blades) let me light it on or off. More photos in Flickr” (read more)

Matthew D N Parsons shared: “Bamboo tripod Teepee Bungy speaker! Very clear sound with no box resonance bamboozle!” (read more)

dustin evans shared: “Just wanted to show you all my Tesseract case from The Avengers.” (read more)

Miles Flavel shared: “I redesigned my keyboard controller board to allow it to fit under the key matrix. Now it’s 54% slimmer than before and looks 100% better :)” (read more)

Mark Miller shared another strange experiment: “I was cleaning up my shop and ran across a small propeller and attached it to a motor. I was amazed such a small prop had lots of pulling power and decided to do some testing to find out how much. I had already went through my “flying craft” craze years ago and wanted to try something different, so I made this rig. Turns out it was fun…lots of fun.. and I continued to make it into what is shown here. I guess you really can’t call this flying, but it is propelled by the thrust from a motor/prop, and with the addition of a servo to control “altitude” it feels sorta like flying. Dangerous flying.. The tether is a thin piece of music wire that I had(wished it was longer!) and as the craft gains speed it forces the servo to center(the servo is unpowered until the receiver sends a signal) due to centrifugal force. So altitude is either the servo pushing the rod tether up or back down against the centrifugal force acting on it….” (read more)

Community Projects from the Adafruit Blog

A London Hackspace member Tom created the Dirty Dish Detector to help keep the hackspace sink clean: “The system alerts users when a dish has been left in the sink for too long, ensuring you’ll get all of those dishes cleaned up before napping ensues. The Dirty Dish Detector uses a webcam above the sink, hooked to a BeagleBone open-source computer, based on TI’s Sitara AM335x processor. The computer runs the HoughCircles function in OpenCV to detect circle-shaped items like plates, classes and bowls. BeagleBone then sends a signal to an Arduino, which deploys different alerts (based on how long the sink has been full) to remind people to clean up their dishes.” Code on Github here! (read more)

Haris Andrianakis shared with us his digital thermostat project: “In the need of my new homemade energy saving fireplace (which boils water for the radiator) i designed and built a digital thermostat. …To prevent …opening and closing the electric valve in so small time spaces i designed a thermostat that can delay the sample points. It check’s the fireplace boiler temp and drives the electric valve once the water temp exceeds the thermostat limit. After that it waits for a half hour or more and then checks the water temp again….” (read more)

Barry shared his NeoGeo GoBack Machine project on the Adafruit Forums: “…The case is made from two 2″ x 3/4″boxes from the Container Store. They are bolted together bottom to bottom with the same screws that mount a USB charger in the bottom, which also holds the 500 mAh Li-Po battery and on-off switch. The top holds a Neo Geo Watch sandwich – GPS, Flora, magnetometer, plus a pushbutton. The battery also powers the GPS’s VBackup pin. I’ve dubbed it my NeoGeo GoBack Machine.” (read more)

Victor shared: “My niece is turning 15 and I thought she needed a more sophisticated/advanced present this year. What better way to show off her uniqueness than with a walking light show? LEDs were a hit recently in New York fashion too, so this fit perfect.” (read more)

@BeardedInventor: ISS-Overhead @ Github: “ISS-Overhead. A simple project that glows when the ISS is overhead.” (read more)

Mark’s Space shared a great tutorial on how to scroll text across a matrix with a Raspberry Pi: “A friend requested if it was possible to scroll text across three 8×8 LED matrices, specifically this type from Adafruit, which are very bright. So, I got to work. These matrices uses a HT16K33 controller chip and communicate with the Pi via the i2c bus. Adafruit have very good and detailed tutorials on how to solder it up and get i2c working between your Pi and your matrices. Since we are having multiple matrices using the same i2c bus, we need to make sure that each uses a unique address. By default they will have 0×70 (hexadecimal notation). This value can be changed by brindgin the gap on some copper pads on the back of the matrix.” (read more)

vade‘s installation documentation features the use of RasPis: “Video Triptych in the spirit of 60’s video installation art. 3 Raspberry Pi micro computers running custom OpenFrameworks applications generate feedback, star fields / solar systems. Running the Raspberry Pi camera for feedback….” (read more)