What is Clusterbot? He is a small, affordable, autonomous Arduino-powered robot. He can move, see, avoid obstacles, and makes a melodic chirping sound sometimes. Clusterbot was my first Arduino project, and I think he makes a great project for a beginner. While building Clusterbot you will learn how to use motor controllers, ultrasonic rangefinders and […]
In this write-up, I’ll show how to create a value in Processing and then send this value over the serial port to the Arduino. In the example I’m setting values of LEDs making them brighter or dimmed but this example can be extended to control other items – which I plan to do later! Basically […]
Nature has a way of speaking to us in a way that soothes and revitalizes. Sounds of the wind in various places create low volume tones that we barely hear. They have a certain beauty and randomness to them that are unique to nature. We’ve all heard the wind rustling the leaves, hitting our cars, […]
So following on from my previous posts about visualising sensor data in Processing, I’m now looking at drawing 3D representations of the data recorded from the Sharp IR sensor – although can be any kind of range finder. I started by rigging 2 servos, one to pan left to right, the other up to down. […]
Ah yes, it’s time for another Instructable involving an Altoids tin… But this time it’s not about what’s inside the Altoids tin, it’s about the Altoids tin itself. In all its greatness, the Altoids tin we all know and love has one rather major flaw for DIY electronics use: it’s electrically conductive. To combat this, […]
So I had some luck with getting the Sharp Infrared range finder working and I’ve now plugged this on to my servo rig to see if I get better results on my radar styled display. Check out how to use the Sharp IR range finder here Few things to bare in mind, whilst the code […]
This instructable is not complete, I will post code soon The Arm: This instructable shows the process of building a robotic arm using servos, Arduino microprocessor, a gyroscope and multiple bend sensors. The user wears a glove containing the gyroscope and bend sensors which translate the movement of the users hand into motion of the […]
Using an Apple Pro speaker, I made a flashing RGB LED iPod dock for about $35. I recommend reading the entire ‘ible before starting. Also, note that the volume is control from the iPod. It consumes minimal power in shutdown mode, and is controlled by a Teensy. This took me ~3 days to build, and […]
This is where all the work is done to read an interpret the values from the servo and the sensor. If the readings are to erratic then you won’t have nice shapes. Also if you don’t allow enough time to the signals to be sent back then you’ll get false distance readings. So this code […]
Concept: Very simple, using an Arduino and the play melody basic program, create a music playing speaker out of a vibration motor and a piece of flexible foam. Instead of pulsing signal to a speaker, signal is pulsed to a motor varying how fast it can spin and when it spins. Science behind it (this […]
