Building a robotic bed with Arduino

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Self-driving cars? How about an autonomous bed instead? 

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Randy Sarafan over at the Instructables Design Studio has created a robotic social bed that seeks out people and makes new friends along the way.

You can think of it as an autonomous vehicle, just in the form of a queen-sized bed. Bedfellow is more than a futuristic piece of furniture, it’s capable of achieving some pretty impressive high speeds and sustaining 8 horsepower of force with peaks of 25 horsepower. Not to mention, the bed has quite a bit of torque behind it as well, having carried up to at least 12 people at once without ever slowing down.

Thanks to its wooden torsion frame box frame and sturdy central drive column, Bedfellow has been made to support up to 3,000 pounds. Additionally, the outer casters have springs to absorb some of the shock and account for uneven surfaces. The Maker does note, though, that there really isn’t any sort of suspension, so taking it outdoors may not be the best idea. There are also two drive wheels located underneath the bed, aligned in such a way that it can turn on point like a tank, along with a pair of high-powered DC motors, two Alltrax motor controllers and a 20:1 gear reducer.

“My specific model is capable of handling up to 400 amps. In the motor control circuit there is also a solenoid for engaging the power, and a reverse contactor for reversing motor direction. Each motor has its own separate drive circuit and battery bank,” Sarafan explains. “Currently, the drive system is operating at 24V, but I can be boosted to 48V for increased speed. However, traveling any faster than it is currently capable is likely not a good idea. There are also two chargers for each battery bank onboard.”

Bedfellow is built around the mighty Arduino Mega (ATmega2560), which reads 12 ultrasonic sensors and interfaces with the Alltrax motor controllers. How the system itself works is fairly simple: the bed picks a random direction to move, checks to see if there is anything in the way, and begins to move if all clear. If there happens be an object in the way, it will randomly choose another direction and try again. There are four safety bumpers which are linked to the Arduino using interrupts. If they’re hit, Bedfellow immediately stops in its place and restarts its routine.

Keep in mind, this project was admittedly done for sheer entertainment value and as a way to motivate Makers to go build something that’s fun, exciting and somewhat out of the ordinary. Sarafan explains, “Before you flood a thousand discussion boards talking about how pointless these instructions are, I just want to point out that I get it. No one is likely ever going to recreate this and, even if they wanted to, they probably don’t have access to all of the tools necessary to easily do so. This project uses a ton of expensive parts, is designed around a discontinued IKEA bed frame, takes forever to make, is largely cost prohibitive, and does not make sense to many highly rational individuals.”

Putting rationality aside, this would make for one heck of a bed racing vehicle! Intrigued? Check out the Maker’s exhaustive, 74-step breakdown of the build here…

Okay, now everyone hop on!

This cyberpunk wearable projects video graffiti onto walls

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VIDEOBLΛST_R is a wearable projection device used for mapping eight prepared audiovisual pieces.

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Spray-painted graffiti is so 2014. Just ask media artist R▲, who has developed a wearable projection device that enables users to map eight prepared audiovisual pieces in dynamic outdoor conditions. And the best part, it doesn’t leave a mess nor any trace of vandalism whatsoever.

Dubbed VIDEOBLΛST_R, the entire system is mounted onto a rollerblade wrist guard which goes around the forearm to make for quite the cyberpunk fashion statement. The wearable is comprised of eight vector graphics animated with Processing, which are accompanied by sound samples from a Cwejman S1 modular synthesizer. According to R▲, some of the visuals involved 3D animation, analog signal degradation and data bending techniques.

This GIF-like artwork is triggered by pressing buttons on a Nintendo Wii Nunchuk controller, connected to an Arduino Uno (ATmega328). The button mappings are all processed with the ArduinoNunchuk library and transferred via USB Serial to a Raspberry Pi 2 running the Processing environment. From there, video and audio signal output is sent to a Optoma PK-320 projector via an HDMI cord and voilà! The images can then be displayed on a variety of objects and surfaces, ranging from the walls of buildings to the bottom of fire escapes. The entire gadget is powered by 5V DC battery housed inside an iPhone band worn on the upper arm.

Intrigued? Head over to the R▲’s official page here, and be sure to see it in action below!

This artist turns celebrity tweets into psychedelic art

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With the help of Arduino and LEDs, this Maker combines analog and digital tech to convert tweets into vibrant light shows. 

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Today, it seems like just about every celebrity has a Twitter account. Whenever big names like Justin Bieber, Kim Kardashian and Miley Cyrus send out a post, not only do they receive thousands of retweets, they become an instant trending topic. Interestingly enough, artist Lori Hepner has taken their updates one step further by photographing them. Wait, what? You heard that correctly, she transforms their 140-character rants into psychedelic images.

@KimKardashian 4:06 PM – 1 Sep 2015
September Selfie Cover of @interviewmag #InterviewGang

As part of a series she calls Status Symbols, the Maker combines analog and digital tech to convert the tweets into an actual physical object, which she then photographs to create vibrant, circular shapes. Hepner’s Twitter portraits can best be described as a visual manifestation of celebrities’ fragmented thoughts — an exploration that recognizes the online musings of cultural icons and ultimately studies identity in the era of social media.

The idea for such an eccentric project came about nearly six years ago, after obtaining her first Arduino board and programming it to make eight spinning LEDs flash based on the binary code within a tweet. According to WIRED, a hashtag is red, the @ symbol is orange and quotes are purple. Every word becomes a random color in the light show. From there, Hepner uses a medium format camera to capture long exposures.

“I wanted to leave some of it to chance, but the patterns of language and the inherent patterns of the binary code come through. In my brain, I saw them as circular and presented in a way that you can’t undo the code, you can’t extract it,” the artist tells the magazine.

Intrigued? You can browse through her entire portfolio of Twitter portraits here. You’d be surprised. Even some of the most mundane, accidental pocket tweets translate into beautiful imagery… Right, Lady Gaga?

[h/t WIRED]

Napz is a biohacking device that lets you control your dreams

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This wearable mask wants to make lucid dreams accessible to everyone. 

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For many of us, getting a full night’s of shut-eye is quite the challenge. Between stress, late nights at the office, the kids or simply finding yourself unable to doze off makes getting the desired six to eight hours of sleep nearly impossible. But what if there was a wearable device that could help you get the most of out your limited time catching z’s?

That’s the idea behind Napz — an electronic, biohacking sleep mask designed to not only help you hit the hay but to induce a state of lucid dreams as well. This is the state where sleepers are aware that they are, in fact, dreaming and can control many elements of what happens during their nocturnal experience.

Developed by COCOLAB robotic engineer Octavio Martinez García, the prototype is meant to measure REM using LED lights that shine through the eyelids to stimulate you and bring you to the brink of consciousness where you can actually become mindful of the actions in your sleep. The wearable itself is comprised of infrared sensors, Adafruit NePixels and an Arduino Lilypad (ATmega328) for its brain.

“Napz is a wearable device intended to schedule lucid dreams and thus produce actual rest and better patterns of REM sleep. Its interface allows the programming, design, and analysis of dreams. As everybody is different the device needs to be calibrated to each individual,” Garcia explains.

Dream manipulation is a method commonly used to assist those who suffer insomnia, severe nightmares, PTSD and other sleep disorders. The idea is that, with Napz, users will be able to access controlled dreams much quicker and without the many hours of training typically required.

Napz was recently showcased at V&A’s Digital Design Weekend.

[Images: British Council Creative Economy]

Artist makes music out of spinning fool’s gold

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This Arduino-powered synthesizer can turn a 300 million-year-old pyrite disc into tunes.

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Pyrite is a common, naturally occurring iron sulfide whose metallic luster and brass-yellow hue has earned itself the well-known nickname of fool’s gold. Despite its abundance in nature, there’s a much rarer form of the mineral which is crystallized in a radial shape resembling that of a disc. Interestingly enough, these so-called ‘pyrite suns’ or ‘pyrite dollars’ can only be found in Illinois, some dating back nearly 300 millions years.

But what if you transformed these historic discs into a vinyl record-like music maker? That’s exactly what media artist Dimitry Morozov — aka ::vtol:: — has done in his latest, out-of-the-ordinary project. Ra can best be defined as a synthesizer which employs a laser reader to scan the irregularities of a pyrite disc and translate that data into sound.

“The project originated as a result of an interesting set of circumstances — a pyrite disc was given to me as a gift by a mineral seller in Boulder City,” ::vtol:: explains. “Upon hearing about my works, she asked to do something with such crystal, and refused to take payment for getting it. In the same period, I was reading articles on various ways of archiving and preservation of sounds from the first, historical sources of the recorded sound — wax discs and other fragile carriers. All technologies were based on the usage of lasers.”

Feeling inspired, the Maker decided to create a laser sound reader of his own, which would be able to produce tunes from various uneven surfaces, like that of the pyrite sun, without the help of many resources. In order to bring his idea to life, all that was required was an Arduino Nano (ATmega328), a Raspberry Pi, a DIY laser pickup/reader, stepper and servo motors, as well as a 3W mono sound system that towers above the machine. (There’s an audio output jack, too.)

Along one edge of Ra’s triangular frame lies a control board that consists of nine switches and 10 knobs for dialing in envelope filters and modulations, setting processor parameters and choosing between 16 DSP effects programs. What’s more, ::vtol:: can manually adjust the position of the custom laser reader, as well as the disc’s spinning speed and direction.

Intrigued? You can listen to Ra’s experimental, eerie and somewhat sci-fi-ish sounds below!

This glove can translate sign language into text and audio

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Maker designs a smart glove that translates sign language from hand gestures into visual text on a screen and audible dialog.

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In an effort to improve communication between people with different disabilities, designer Hadeel Ayoub has developed a smart glove capable of converting sign language into readable text and audio.

The aptly named SignLanguageGlove works by using several flex sensors attached to the fingers that record their position, while an accelerometer​ detects which way the glove is oriented. Built around the mighty Arduino, all of the collected data is fed into a computer program that identifies the gestures and displays the correct output.

Ayoub, who is also a student at Goldsmiths, University of London, has gone through a series of prototypes with each version less clunky than the one before. The original model, which looked like a bunch of wires attached to a winter glove, consisted of five flex sensors, an Arduino board and a four digit graphic numerical display. It worked by interpreting the user’s gestures and translating them into visual letters on a screen.

The second iteration was a bit faster, more durable, and featured smaller hardware. The Maker incorporated a LilyPad Arduino (ATmega328) and tinier flex sensors, as well as revamped the software to allow text to scroll on a screen, deleting the old and adding the new.

Her latest piece incorporates a text-to-speech chip with the majority of equipment sewn into the lining of what appears to be a Rawlings batting glove. She is currently working towards integrating a language translation function into the system, too. This way, when finished with her next prototype (dubbed ​Reach All​), a user will be able to connect to a smartphone via an embedded Wi-Fi module. The motions will then be relayed wirelessly and translated in real-time through its accompanying app.

Pretty amazing stuff, right? You can head over to the Maker’s Tumblr page to see the progression of her work.

Creating fake passports from your personal data

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This robotic installation will steal and share your data — with your help. 

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The brainchild of ECAL student Martin Hertig, Sensible Data is a unique project designed to show just how easily people are willing to give up their personal information in exchange for fun. The playful installation collects a user’s data, judges their mood, age, gender and beauty, and creates a faux passport that is also randomly sent to another participant without them knowing.

If you think about, what really happens when you openly give your name, numbers and other information online, and where does it go? Although the experiment was done intentionally to test a small sampling’s confidence in how data is collected, it does highlight a much broader privacy issue that exists today, especially in the wake of several mainstream leaks.

The Maker’s exploration is comprised of three machines that are essentially modified versions of the Piccolo CNC, an open source drawing device based on the Arduino Pro Micro (ATmega32U4). Meanwhile, a Raspberry Pi acts as the brain of the installation, running a Python script for every step of the process. Each script listens to the desired input and relays the plotting commands to the necessary gadget.

How it works is pretty straightforward. First, a participant snaps a selfie with an iPad that’s automatically synced up to a Raspberry Pi using Dropbox. A Python script takes this picture and converts it into a line drawing with the help of OpenCV. The user is then prompted to send a blank email to the project’s iCloud address.

From there, the person’s face is analyzed. Upon receiving an email, the Raspberry Pi transmits the previously taken image to the Rekognition API. The facial recognition program is able to properly determine one’s mood, age, gender and their beauty, which is measured as a percentage. This information is stored in a database and inked onto the novelty passport letter by letter using a laser-cut stamp-wheel.

Last but not least, the participant is asked to press a dubious button that is actually a fingerprint scanner. Once the validation step is complete, an email with a matching participant’s data including their fingerprint, photo and email address is sent to the user. (Absurdly, the matchmaking is determined by the amount of lines in the portrait.)

The idea is that, when encountered with a decision, more times than not people are willing to just hand over their likeness, not knowing what will be done with it. Intrigued? Check out the entire project here, and be sure to watch it in action below!

This LED map tracks the MBTA in real-time

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Maker uses an Arduino, Raspberry Pi and LEDs to create a real-time map that keeps tabs on Boston’s trains.

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Inspired by his love for making and public transit, MIT student Ian Reynolds has built an MBTA map into the wall of his fraternity room to show real-time locations of vehicles using bright LEDs.

The Maker employed a few meters of NeoPixels, driven by an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) that takes orders from a Python script running on a Raspberry Pi lying on his floor. The color of the LEDs were specially designed to match those of each transit line (e.g. red line, blue line, green line, orange line, etc.). Every 10 to 15 seconds, the system receives data via the MBTA’s API, which in turn, causes the respective lights to flash based on the trains’ approximate GPS location throughout Boston.

“It maps those to some LEDs, decides which ones actually need to be changed, and then sends that information to the Arduino, which does the bit pushing,” Reynolds explains. “In addition, I’m writing a tiny web app that lets me change visualizations and adjust the brightness for when I need to sleep.”

Intrigued? The Maker has put together an elaborate blog post that breaks down his entire project, from the hardware to the headaches. You can also get a glimpse of it all below!

Maker turns a doorstop into a game with Arduino

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Line Wobbler is an Arduino-powered, one-dimensional dungeon crawler game with a doorstop spring as its controller and an LED strip as its display.

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While we’ve seen plenty of unique video game interfaces over the years, a door-stop may certainly be among the most bizarre. Okay, so it’s not that odd as it does resemble a joystick after all. Inspired by a video of a cat playing with a doorstop, Maker Robin Baumgarten has built a one-dimensional dungeon crawler game running on an Arduino.

Developed as part of a 48-hour game jam, Line Wobbler is played using a unique Wobble controller made out of a doorstop spring placed on a rigid base and a bright LED strip display. All the movement is controlled by bending the makeshift gamepad left and right, while enemies are attacked by wobbling.

“We use a long strip of densely packed NeoPixels, which is both super bright and physically flexible,” Baumgarten writes. “Using selective brightness for specific particle effects, we evoke the retro-feeling of vector-displays. (Remember the bullets in asteroids? Very satisfying!)”

“The flexibility of the strip allows us to incorporate physical space into the game by bending and looping the display around objects and walls, and modifying in-game objects according to the strips’ orientation, breaking out of the rigid linearity that a 1D display imposes,” Baumgarten adds.

In order to transform the everyday doorstop into a joystick, the Maker employed an accelerometer that provides input to an Arduino Uno (ATmega328).

As for the game itself, the character is a green dot that a player must guide to the top of the LED strip. Along the way, it will encounter a few enemies, represented by red dots, that move at varying speeds. The player must battle these enemies by wobbling the spring. Should an avatar get too close and touch one, it will ‘die’ in a colorful explosion and will require the level to be restarted. According to the Maker, there are currently 10 levels which include everything from lava obstacles and a boss fight.

Admittedly, Baumgarten says the one-dimensional game is a bit challenging but interesting nevertheless. Since its inception, Line Wobbler has been exhibited in number of places, like the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC 2015, Burning Man 2015, London, Chicago and Oslo, and has even been the recipient of two AMAZE Awards in Berlin. Looking ahead, the Maker hopes to create more Wobble controllers and introduce multi-player concepts. Until then, you can check it out in the video below!

The Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 is now available

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This Wi-Fi shield is based on the ATWINC1500 module, and wirelessly connects your Arduino to the Internet.

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A year after breaking the news at Maker Faire New York, the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 is now available for purchase on the Arduino Store.

The low-cost ($49.90) shield is an easy-to-use extension that can be seamlessly attached to any Arduino or Genuino board enabling high-performance Wi-Fi connectivity. This device provides the design community with more opportunities to securely connect their IoT applications, ranging from consumer goods to wearables and robotics.

“In this increasingly connected world, the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 will help drive more inventions in the IoT market,” Massimo Banzi explained. “Expanding our portfolio of Arduino extensions, this new shield can flawlessly connect to any modern Arduino board giving our community more options for connectivity, along with added security elements to their creative projects.”

The Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 makes connecting with a wireless network super simple, with no further configuration in addition to the SSID and password required. What’s more, it comes with an easy-to-follow Wi-Fi library that allows you to write sketches that link to the Internet using the shield.

The board itself is based on the Atmel SmartConnect WINC1500 module, compliant with the IEEE 802.11 b/g/n standard. This network controller features an integrated TCP/IP stack, TLS security and SoftAP for seamless provisioning. On top of that, the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101 boasts an ATECC508A CryptoAuthentication chip for enhanced security.

It should be noted that this is the first Arduino product fully supporting SSL, as well as all the communication between your board and their secured server. With the power of the Arduino Zero (SAMD21) and the Wi-Fi Shield 101, Makers can now develop secure IoT applications using the highly popular Arduino Language.

“A working example and instructions on how to get started are available on Arduino Cloud, a work-in-progress project that gives you access to a pre-configured MQTT server for your IoT sketches using only your Arduino account. More examples and features will be available in the next months,” Arduino adds.

Interested? Head over to the Arduino Wi-Fi Shield 101’s official page here.