Boing Boing » Arduino

Arduino-controlled pelvic-floor strength-tester, with light-up penis

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 23:03:56 +0000

Last September, Doctor Kristen Stubbs -- a roboticist who makes sex-gadgets for her Toymaker Project -- released a video (NSFW) demonstrating her prototype pelvic-floor strength-tester, called "The Hammer." The Hammer has a bulb that is internally inserted, containing a squeeze-sensor, and a penis-shaped, light-up readout that protrudes between the wearer's legs. The harder the wearer squeezes, the more the readout lights up.

Right now The Hammer has two modes: the test-your-strength game, where the more you squeeze, the more it lights up; and a demo mode which cycles through all of the colors of the LEDs. Soon I hope to connect the Arduino to my Android phone, and then I’ll be able to do even more cool things!

I’ll be following up on this with more technical details over the next few weeks. (Update, 10/11/12: If you would like to hear me talk about how I made The Hammer, you can see some excerpts and my slides from my technical talk at Arse Elektronika 2012.) My plan is for The Hammer to become an Open Hardware project. This is still very much a prototype, but I would be thrilled if anyone else wanted to build their own.

The Hammer: A Muscle-Controlled, Light-Up Dildo (via JWZ)

Gemma, a 1" diameter Arduino-compatible board for wearable electronics

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 20:19:59 +0000

Adafruit has announced "Gemma," a bite-sized, Arduino compatible board intended for use in wearable electronics projects. It measures 1" in diameter, and while it's not shipping yet, they're taking names for people who want to get 'em when they ship:

* Powered by the ATtiny85 with 3 available I/O pins, one of which is also an analog input and two which can do PWM output*
Progammable over the micro USB connection*
Onboard 3.3v Regulator and power LED*
Reset button*
Works with our Flora NeoPixels (can drive about a dozen - not much RAM!)*
Super tiny design, only 1" (25mm) diameter & 4mm thick

Adafruit Gemma - Miniature wearable electronic platform (Thanks, Matthew!)

30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius

Jason Weisberger — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 16:54:02 +0000

I had a lot of time on my hands this holiday season and decided to get an arduino kit (I have solar panels I want to aim for max efficiency during the day, on a VW van.) A lot of intro titles seemed interesting but Simon Monk's 30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius grabbed my attention. Good title!

Sadly, this is no guide to building shark-mountable lasers. There are however a lot of simple, short projects that help you understand building with an arduino controller. Monk uses very clear pictures and schematics to show what needs doing. His text is precise and understandable. The steps are easy to follow and the thing you should learn from an exercise is blatantly obvious. Most importantly these projects are fun! I'm not just making an LED blink or a speaker chirp when I work with this book. Projects like the temperature monitor and computer controlled fan are giving me the foundation I need to aim my solar panels. The results and functions are easy to apply to the types of things I want to do with an arduino.

Lasers would have been nice.

30 Arduino Projects for the Evil Genius by Simon Monk

Burrito Bomber: open source hardware-based drone autonomously delivers Mexican food

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 20:11:28 +0000

The good folks at Darwin Aerospace have figured out how to use drones to parachute burritos directly onto your property. They await pending FAA reforms before they can go into business, however. Here's how it works:

It works like this:

You connect to the Burrito Bomber web-app and order a burrito. Your smartphone sends your current location to our server, which generates a waypoint file compatible with the drone's autopilot.

We upload the waypoint file to the drone and load your burrito in to our custom made Burrito Delivery Tube.

The drone flies to your location and releases the Burrito Delivery Tube. The burrito parachutes down to you, the drone flies itself home, and you enjoy your carne asada.

We built Burrito Bomber using a handful of open source projects and some new bits we created ourselves. All the code and 3D models we created for Burrito Bomber are on our GitHub page so you can build one too!

Burrito Bomber - Darwin Aerospace (via JWZ)

Esplora - new Arduino device for learning and play

Mark Frauenfelder — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 17:49:57 +0000

Marc De Vinck says:

The Arduino Esplora is a ready-to-use, easy-to-hold controller that lets you explore the infinite possibilities you have in the world of Arduino, without having to deal with breadboards or soldering. Shaped like a game controller, it’s designed to be used out of the box without extra parts since it comes with many sensors and actuators already on it.

For the time being, it's available at RadioShack stores.

Arduino Esplora

Video profile of co-creator of Arduino, Massimo Banzi

Mark Frauenfelder — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 20:50:55 +0000

The Braun Lectron was an electronics kit designed in the 1970s by Dieter Rams, whose minimalist aesthetic was hugely influential to Steve Jobs and Jonny Ives. The Lectron was also Arduino co-creator Massimo Banzi’s “Rosebud.” It not only got him interested in electronics, it also shaped his ideas about design. This fascinating 20-minute documentary about Arduino was produced by Wired Italy. It’s in Italian but is subtitled in English.

Open source, sonar-controlled vibrator you play like a theremin, with your whole body

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 09:04:52 +0000

Scanlime's Beth modded a remote control vibrator, replacing the interface with an Arduino-based sonar controller that she can activate with any part of her body, playing it like a theremin. The result is pretty cool -- it "closes the feedback loop" between the vibrator's intensity and the user's physical response. The post includes a detailed technical breakdown of the reverse-engineering steps that she used to work out how to hijack the control mechanism, and the steps that went into building the remote, including a 3D printed chassis. The plans are open source hardware (CC-BY-SA), and posted to Github.

This toy serves as a kind of analog bridge between two remote spaces: the column of ultrasonically-oscillating air in front of the remote, and whatever body part happens to be in contact with the vibrator. Touch that invisible space above the remote, and the vibrator touches you.
In fact, it does start to feel like there’s a palpable object in space above the remote’s sensors. Move your body close to it, and it reacts. Press into it lightly, or tease the edges. Flick your hand through it, or make graceful waves back and forth. You can use your whole body to touch it, almost like a big fuzzy vibrating cone floating in air.
If the sensor can see your body’s rhythms, it responds in kind, effortlessly synchronizing to its frequency. This is exactly the sort of closed-loop control I was after.

Hacking My Vagina (via Reddit)

Keyboard made from beer-cans

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 23:51:12 +0000

Here's a cute way to gimmick a keyboard out of a grid of beercans, using Raspberry Pis and Arduinos:

We did this at Webstock, event which took place in Bucharest in September. Staropramen, one of the sponsors of the event asked us for an innovative way to offer a trip to Prague to one of the event's guests.
So, we came up with a keyboard made out of 44 Staropramen beer cans. Each beer can was a key, and whenever someone touched it, the corresponding letter appeared on a large plasma screen (just like any regular computer keyboard).
And the surprise was fantastic! The user experience and engagement overcame any expectation. Every single person who attended Webstock tried the keyboard and participated to the contest.
Behind the scene, the system is built around an Arduino board and a few capacitive controllers (just like the ones which are inside smartphones' touch screens), connected to a Raspberry PI board which controls the plasma screen display.

The Beer Cans Keyboard Movie (via Hacker News)

Electromagnetic Field: a UK geek/maker/hacker weekend campout

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:08:50 +0000

Jonty sez,

Electromagnetic Field is a three day camping festival for hackers, geeks, scientists, engineers, artists, and crafters. From the 31st August to the 2nd September we'll be taking over a field in Milton Keynes and turning it into a place for makers and breakers to meet, build and learn from each other.
Throughout the event there will be talks and workshops on a huge variety of things, from gene therapy to welding, lock picking to electronics, DNSSEC to drones, and crocheting to carpentry. The camp is fully equipped with power and internet to every tent, and each attendee receives an Arduino-compatible wireless camp badge to hack on. We are encouraging people to set up campsites with friends, and we'd like to offer a limited number of discount tickets to Boing Boing readers!

Electromagnetic Field (Thanks, Jonty!)

Makie doll with expressive animal ears

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 19:52:04 +0000

Katsideswide has modded her alpha-version Makie doll with a pair of expressive animal ears. She drilled holes in the head of her custom, 3D printed dolls, used the head-cavity to house a controller, and went to town.

Ok, i've just started tinkering around with some tiny servos to get Suekat expressing herself. I'm yet to get the drill out to perform amateur surgery on her skullcap but I'm hoping the results will be exciting! I don't want to promise anything yet but I've hooked up an arduino pro mini, and the conveniently sized head cavity means I think i can get a fair amount in there. It looks like there's a handy hole in the neck leading to what looks suspiciously like a space for a battery in Suekat's back. Unfortunately I can't get a standard 9V battery into the space! It's a fraction too small. I was wondering what battery it was designed for? And if there's any chance I can get 9V out of it?

Batteries?

(Disclosure: I'm proud to say that my wife co-founded MakieLab, manufacturers of the Makie dolls)

HOWTO open an electronic hotel-room lock without a key

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 16:21:18 +0000

Cody Brocious -- a Mozilla dev and security researcher -- presented a paper on a vulnerability in hotel-door locks last month at Black Hat. Many electronic hotel door-locks made by Onity have a small DC power-port that also supplies data beneath them. Brocious showed that if he plugs an Arduino into these locks, reads out the 24-bit number sitting there, and re-transmits it to them, some appreciable fraction of them (but not all of them) spring open.

Testing a standard Onity lock he ordered online, he’s able to easily bypass the card reader and trigger the opening mechanism every time. But on three Onity locks installed on real hotel doors he and I tested at well-known independent and franchise hotels in New York, results were much more mixed: Only one of the three opened, and even that one only worked on the second try, with Brocious taking a break to tweak his software between tests.
Even with an unreliable method, however, Brocious’s work–and his ability to open one out of the three doors we tested without a key–suggests real flaws in Onity’s security architecture. And Brocious says he plans to release all his research in a paper as well as source code through his website following his talk, potentially enabling others to perfect his methods.
Brocious’s exploit works by spoofing a portable programming device that hotel staff use to control a facility’s locks and set which master keys open which doors. The portable programmer, which plugs into the DC port under the locks, can also open any door, even providing power through that port to trigger the mechanism of a door lock in which the battery has run out.

Hacker Will Expose Potential Security Flaw In Four Million Hotel Room Keycard Locks

Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination at TEDGlobal 2012

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 16:52:55 +0000

Massimo Banzi is the co-creator of the popular electronics prototyping system called Arduino. He spoke at TEDGlobal 2012 about the cool things people are making with Arduino.

Massimo Banzi helped invent the Arduino, a tiny, easy-to-use open-source microcontroller that's inspired thousands of people around the world to make the coolest things they can imagine -- from toys to satellite gear. Because, as he says, "You don't need anyone's permission to make something great."

Massimo Banzi co-founded Arduino, which makes affordable open-source microcontrollers for interactive projects, from art installations to an automatic plant waterer.

Massimo Banzi: How Arduino is open-sourcing imagination at TEDGlobal 2012

Modkit: a simple graphical programming system for Arduinos and other microcontrollers

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 28 May 2012 22:00:09 +0000

Alexandra sez, "I'm writing to tell you about Modkit, a new interface for microcontrollers like Arduino. Modkit uses a graphical programming language based on the kids' programming language, Scratch. To write an Arduino program, you simply snap little blocks of code together. Basically, I think Modkit will make microcontrollers accessible to a much wider audience (younger, less tech-savvy, etc.). Modkit also has a lot of other cool features, like automatic hardware detection, both an in-browser and desktop version, and lots of supported hardware. They're running a Kickstarter campaign right now, so I thought I would pass along their website!"

(Thanks, Alexandra!)

The stunning packaging design for Arduino products

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 23 May 2012 19:21:33 +0000

One the highlights of Maker Faire for me was meeting Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of the Arduino project. He's very friendly and we had a nice time talking about design. I also enjoyed meeting Luisa Castiglioni, his girlfriend. She's a writer for a number of design magazines, including Domus. (Here's an article she wrote for Domus about makers in the Italian design world.)

Massimo brought with him to Maker Faire samples of the new packaging for Arduino's line of products, and they are beautiful. There were designed by Todo studio, which is run by Giorgio Olivero. Massimo was Giorgio's professor at the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea, Italy.

Take a look at Todo's photo gallery of Arduino packaging.

The cool new thing with tweens? Sewing.

Elisabeth Soep — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Fourteen-year-old Luna Ito-Fisher started making her own clothes and accessories when she was nine, after attending a friend’s birthday party at a sewing studio in LA.

“I remember at the beginning, threading was so hard and I could never get it through the needle,” Luna tells me as she sets up her machine on her family’s dining room table. Now, she slides the thread through the tiny clips across the top of the machine, guides it up and down the rigging, licks the end and pokes it, like nothing, straight through the eye.

Luna takes sewing class every Saturday. She’s made hats, bags, bracelets for her school’s dance team, stuffed animals, and Sonic and Shadow the Hedgehog Halloween costumes for her and her brother. Last year, for a social studies assignment, she constructed an authentic medieval gown laced with a real corset. “When I took it out,” Luna remembers, “People were like, ‘Whoa, you made that?’ I got an A+.”

It’s hard to track growth in the kid sewing market, because usually parents are the ones buying the machines. But Janet Sway, who runs the National Sewing Council says her members constantly tell her that sewing camps for 8 to18-year-olds are very popular. She thinks sewing-related TV shows deserve a lot of the credit. The latest special from the Style Network, Confessions of a Fashionette stars a 12-year-old who, according to her website, had her first trunk show by age ten. When I ask the Craft and Hobby Association’s Acting Communications Director, Victor Domine, about market data on young sewers, he has to laugh. His organization doesn’t collect that kind of research, he tells me, but he will say that his wife just splurged on a full-tilt electronic sewing machine for their ten-year-old daughter. “I was going, ‘Honey, you spent two hundred dollars?!’” to which she replied, “It’s a lifelong gift.”

The computerization of today’s machines is another factor that’s turning sewing into something other than what it was, something younger, more exciting. Unlike knitting or embroidery, machine-sewing requires technology. When the hardware beeps error messages or the needle starts acting possessed, kids consult manuals and online tutorials as technical as any software guide, and they look to role-models in maker communities way beyond the traditional crafts.

Even so, while sewing’s getting more popular and more techie, Luna can’t totally shake the pastime’s old-lady associations among some of her friends. “Most of them think it’s cool because I always make stuff for them for their birthdays,” she says. “But one of my friends, when I say I have sewing on Saturday, so I can’t hang out, she calls me grandma.”

“Young women and girls are reclaiming that image,” says Luna’s mom, Mimi Ito. “They’re making things that are quirky and funky and tied to a punk DIY aesthetic.” Mimi thinks there’s a culture shift going on, even though we still have those old images of what crafting means.

Mimi’s not just Luna’s mom. She is a University of California-based anthropologist of youth culture. Mostly she studies geeks—kids who, for example, remix Japanese anime music videos.

“What Luna has taught me through sewing,” Mimi says, “Is there’s this whole dimension of technical and geeked-out practice that’s much more girl-facing and girl-friendly. One of the really interesting things about sewing is how much technical knowledge and engineering knowledge it requires.”

“Algorithmic thinking” is the term computer scientist—and sewer—Leah Buechley uses to describe what it takes to translate a two-D paper pattern into a three-D soft object.
One project Leah’s been working on for six years now is LilyPad Arduino. It’s a set of sewable electronic pieces that includes a little computer and sewable lights, motors, and temperature sensors. You can stitch these components into fabric and sew them together with electronically conductive thread, and pretty soon you’re making dresses that register carbon monoxide levels through a pattern of LED lights embroidered into the front and back of the gown.

Leah is no one’s grandma. She’s a young professor at MIT’s Media Lab and rocked mustard-colored skinny jeans at the conference where I met her. Her love of engineering started early. She spent one summer as a teenager rebuilding an old Fiat with her dad. “And then for my 16th birthday, I got a bunch of engine parts. It was really great.”

Leah’s also always been obsessed with craft. And now that her LilyPad Arduino has been on the market for a couple years, an army of other makers is integrating sewing and embroidery with technology. One of her hopes when she decided to take LilyPad out of the lab and into the mass market was to draw young women and kids into engineering in a creative way.

Leah says traditional electronics hobbyists—people who use Arduino to rig home alarm systems and remote control vehicles—have been mostly really receptive to e-textile makers, showcasing their coolest projects on electronics websites. And when you check the message boards, there’s a whole lot of serious and supportive back-and-forth among Arduino users, including those deploying the technology to charge up accessories and frocks. But lately, Leah’s also been noticing a troubling phenomenon.

“Why don’t you blinky kids take a step back.” Leah’s reading me a comment that showed up on an electronics online discussion group. “You seem more focused on the fashion part (Hey look at me, my shirt shows when I’m aroused, aren’t I cool?) than the engineering part... Outside the raves and clubs, this is useless junk.”

And then there’s this one.

“I hate e-fashion. It’s not electronics. It’s crafting, and it has no place in the electronics hobby.”

Leah’s not exactly sure what to make of hostile comments like these. She’s disheartened. But she’s also really interested in how new materials like LilyPad can so palpably threaten people’s identities and understandings of what counts as “real” technology expertise.

As sewing evolves from home-ec into home engineering, all sorts of boundaries are being crossed. Kids of both genders who might have dismissed sewing as matronly are suddenly begging for machines as birthday presents. Crafty types experimenting for the first time with wired clothes are encroaching on online communities typically dedicated to reconfiguring computers and robots. And so every time young sewers like Luna, and e-textile designers like Leah, make a new garment, they’re also, in small ways, making new cultures of technology. Whether traditionalists on either side like it or not.

Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep is Research Director and Senior Producer at Youth Radio and co-author of Drop That Knowledge: Youth Radio Stories (University of California Press, 2010).

HOWTO sneak an accelerometer-triggered Tardis sfx box into an elevator

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 23:59:59 +0000

The Sparkfun folks have a sweet recipe for building an Arduino-based, accelerometer-triggered Tardis sound-effects box into the ceiling of an elevator, noting that care must be taken not to freak out riders and precipitate a bomb-squad visit.

As it stands, the contraption works well enough (much like the TARDIS itself). But for those looking for perfection, there could be a few improvements. These are left as exercises for the reader:
Improve battery life using sleep mode. Right now the Arduino is on all the time, using about 20mA of current continuously. We’re got a pretty big battery attached to it (6000mAh), which gives it a lifetime of about a week, but the battery could last for months if the project went to sleep between playings. The Arduino can indeed be programmed to go to sleep, waiting for an interrupt signal (a pin changing state) to wake it up. And the ADXL345 accelerometer can be configured so that it sends an interrupt when an acceleration threshold is reached, so this shouldn't be difficult to do. In practice you can’t get down to microamps with a full Arduino board, since it will always be burning some current in the voltage regulator, power LED, etc. But with a bit of software and hardware hacking, sleep mode would definitely improve the lifetime situation.
Stop playing when the elevator stops. Currently, the TARDIS MP3 was edited so that it is approximately the length of an elevator ride, and the code plays the MP3 to the end before listening for further accelerometer bumps. But you could also end a longer MP3 when you detect that the elevator stops (or, since the MP3 chip has a volume control command, you could even fade it out!)
Bigger and better! Bigger speakers, disco lights and music, black lights... you can really go in any direction. Make us proud. But remember...

Elevator TARDIS (Thanks, Bruce!)

HOWTO make a fur-lined barbarian forearm bracer with a digital D&D dice-roller built in

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 20:17:36 +0000

The wizards at Sparkfun, an open source hardware company, show us how to make one of these spiffy furry barbarian leather arm-bracers with a charmingly anachronistic D&D dice-roller built into, built around a Lilypad soft Arduino controller.

I’ve got nothing but respect for the DIY/open source community who take conductive thread, LEDs, and Arduino boxes and make them into marvelous little working crafts. I find it all a bit above my metaphorical pay grade. However, if there was anything that was going to convince me to learn how to rig a circuit, it would be the project that Dia forwarded to us yesterday. ,p> It’s a fur-lined leather gauntlet that can roll 100, 20, 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4-sided dice with the flip of a switch and the shake of a forearm. It combines my love of tabletop with my desire to live in the future where we all poke our wrists to get things done.

Theoretically, there's a complete tutorial for this beauty, but it's 404 at the moment. The link below goes to The Mary Sue's writeup.

New Life Goal: Make a Leather Bracer that Rolls Dice

Arduino device mutes uninteresting celebrities on TV

Mark Frauenfelder — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:22:50 +0000

Matt Richardson of MAKE built this wonderful Arduino device that scans a TV show's closed caption track and mutes the TV when anyone on of his celebrity-blacklist is mentioned.

The Enough Already: The Arduino Solution to Overexposed Celebs