It’s never been so easy to build your own Arduino-based quadcopter

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The YMFC-3D V2 flight controller enables everyone to create their own Arduino drone. 

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Quadcopters, or “drones” as they are sometimes inaccurately known, seem to be getting a lot of attention currently. There are, of course, many off-the-shelf components to control your flying contraption, but if a stock flight controller (FC) isn’t geeky enough, you can always turn an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) into one.

That’s exactly what Joop Brokking has done. As the creator puts it, “I made the YMFC-3D [Your Multicopter Flight Controller] V2 flight controller software so everybody can build their own Arduino quadcopter and having a great learning experience.”

The video below explains things nicely, but to summarize, his Arduino software is divided into three sketches that attempt to automate much of the configuration procedure. First, a setup program is loaded into the Uno, which outputs specific steps for the user to go through to set up the transmitter and gyroscope. Next, a separate program is employed to help calibrate the electronic speed controllers, commonly known as ESCs, that directly power the motors. Finally, the actual FC program is loaded into the Arduino, so you can actually test out and fly your ‘copter.

For more information, as well as source code, you’ll want to check out Brokking’s website. He also has information there on his earlier version, which is meant for those already experienced with radio controlled flight and the Arduino.

One neat thing about a build like this is that, in theory, one could program the Uno to do all kinds of tricks, like control an LED strip while in flight or turn a servo. This concept could, it would seem, even be expanded to maneuver other kinds of RC vehicles. On the other hand, one would need to be careful not to tie up too much processing power and quite literally “crash” your system!

 

This Maker built an Arduino attachment for his stationary bike that let him pedal through a virtual world

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For $40, you can add a virtual reality experience to your boring stationary bike.

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As great of a calorie-burning exercise as it may be, riding a stationary bike is typically pretty boring. To add a little more excitement to the relatively dull workout, Paul Yan decided to enhance it with the help of virtual reality. The best part? Unlike commercial products that can cost upwards of a few hundred dollars, the Maker was able to create an “Arduino thingamajig” for just $40.

The unit attaches to a bike and wirelessly communicates with an accompanying mobile device over Bluetooth Low Energy. It is equipped with an optical tachometer that’s responsible for measuring the revolution of a wheel; meaning, it can monitor the movement and speed of any stationary cycle or piece of exercise equipment with a rotating part.

“I’m using a mountain bike on an indoor trainer but the beauty of this non-invasive approach is that you could use it with treadmills, ellipticals, rowing machines, or anything that has a looping/revolving surface,” Yan explains.

The attachment is placed next to the rear wheel, where it detects a paper strip on the tire as its starting point. Each time the wheel goes around, the Arduino sends a wireless message to the paired phone.

Using a custom app and a pre-fab virtual environment powered by the Unity 3D game engine, the smartphone is placed inside a VR viewer strapped to the cyclist’s face. Now instead of staring at the wall or TV while pedaling away, the wearer can immerse themselves in a 3D city. The virtual bike will only nudge forward whenever the app receives a message from the Arduino reporting that the physical bike’s wheel has made a complete rotation.

“We are effectively mapping the physical action of pedaling to movement in the virtual space to make an oversized gaming controller,” the Maker adds.

The headset that Yan used only cost $10, and is compatible with Google Cardboard. He does advise those looking to build something similar that, “It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to have the physical bike steer the direction of the virtual bike. Why not give the player total freedom to explore?”

When all is said and done, Yan’s project is certainly a fun and more engaging way of turning a mundane activity into something a lot more exciting — without breaking the bank or overcomplicating things. See it in action below!

Maker creates his own life-size BB-8

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17-year-old Angelo Casimiro decided to build a fully-functional, smartphone-controlled BB-8.

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Until Episode VII came out, if you were a true Star Wars fan, building a working R2-D2 replica would seem like the thing to do. With the emergence of BB-8, R2 now has competition for the coolest robot in the galaxy, and for which droid you should recreate.

At first glance the BB-8, with its continuously-rotating body and a head that always stays nearly upright, looks like something that could only be made with computer graphics on a movie set. 17-year-old Maker Angelo Casimiro, however, proves that isn’t the case with his life-size, phone-controlled toy. The best part of it all? According to his exhaustive tutorial, the project should cost only around $120 — a little less than Sphero’s miniature device.

The physics student from De La Salle University in the Philippines was able to purchase most of the items from a hardware store while recycling pretty much everything else, like a Christmas ball for its eye, an old Wi-Fi router antenna, and roll-on deodorant balls for the mechanism of the droid’s head to keep it upright. BB-8’s head is made from styrofoam, and the body is a beach ball reinforced with papier-mâché.

The secret to his BB-8 build is that inside the sphere is a two-wheeled vehicle. When it moves, this vehicle rolls around inside, changing the ball’s center of gravity and causing it to go across the floor. (Think of it like a giant hamster ball.) The head, in turn, is stuck to the top of the spherical body via a structure inside of the ball made out of wood and magnets. Control is accomplished using an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) with a motor shield and a Bluetooth module, which allows it to take signals from a smartphone via the “Arduino Bluetooth RC Car” app. There’s even an MP3 module and speaker that enables it to beep and talk just like in the film.

Though the concept of this bot is likely simpler than what you would have thought it would take to produce one of these, it still took a lot of work from several people to get things perfect! If you’d like to try it yourself, Casimiro has provided a detailed overview video, as well as a 47-step tutorial over on Instructables.

Building a power switch for Chromecast

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This Maker built a power switch for his Google Chromecast with the help of an ATtiny85, Bluetooth and Tasker.

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The Google Chromecast device is a neat media player that simply plugs into your TV to play media. One thing it doesn’t have, though, is a way to turn it off remotely. This might not be a problem for most people, but Ilias Giechaskel was using it as an input for a computer monitor which didn’t have a “remote off” function. It did, however, have the ability to go to sleep when no input was received, so turning off the Chromecast would serve a useful function in his setup.

Gichaskel decided to accomplish this task with “hardware that he already had available,” and opted for an ATtiny85 with its small physical footprint and number of I/O pins to control everything. He also used a Bluetooth chip for communication with his smartphone. The module receives an “on” or “off” command from the phone, then the ATtiny switches power to the Chromecast appropriately.

Originally, this setup meant that the user had to manually turn Bluetooth on, connect it to the Arduino, send the appropriate commands, then turn Bluetooth off. Doing all of this manually wasn’t what Giechaskel had in mind, so he wrote a Tasker plugin which takes care of this for him.

Of course, this isn’t Giechaskel’s only ATtiny85 hack. Be sure to check out how he replaced the guts of a bathroom scale using one!

Touch the banana, get the Wi-Fi password

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Bet your office doesn’t share wireless network credentials like this… 

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Turns out, bananas aren’t just an excellent source of potassium, they’re also an excellent source of wireless network credentials. Just ask Danish Reddit user and network administrator “Sysvival” who recently decided to use the fruit as a unique way to distribute Wi-Fi passwords to guests at his workplace.

The idea originated after Sysvival was asked to set up a captive portal for his office, like those seen in most hotel chains and coffee shops. The administrator decided to generate a pool of 5,000 passwords, each of which were valid for eight hours of access. These temporary codes are stored on a Raspberry Pi, which is connected to a Makey Makey GO (ATmega32U4) via a USB cable. The Makey Makey forms the a connection between the banana and Pi.

Now, whenever a visitor needs to get onto the Wi-Fi network, all he or she has to do is touch the banana, which triggers the Raspberry Pi to spit out a password on an attached display. When contact is established, the capacitance of the banana drops. The Makey Makey detects this change and interprets it as the press of a key, therefore sending the signal to the Pi that it needs to hand out a password voucher.

Why go through such lengths? According to Sysvival, “It’s fun, it’ll make people smile, it beats a static WPA password in funniness, and when people leave our office, they can’t access our Wi-Fi because there’s no banana to touch.” Intrigued? You can check out the entire project on its Reddit thread here.

Watch a robot solve a Rubik’s Cube in one second

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This Arduino-driven robot will unfix a Rubik’s Cube before you could even finish reading this sentence.  

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Last November, 14-year-old Lucas Etter set a new world record for the fastest time to solve a Rubik’s Cube, becoming the first person to ever break the five-second barrier for unravel the iconic 3 x 3 x 3 puzzle. As impressive as that may be, nothing may compare to this duo’s latest project. That’s because software engineers Jay Flatland and Paul Rose have devised an automated mechanism that can crack it in just over a second.

With an Atmel chip at its heart, the system is comprised of stepper motors, some 3D-printed parts and four webcams all connected to a Linux-based computer. The software engineers used the Kociemba algorithm to solve the puzzle, and have modified the Rubik’s Cube by drilling four holes into the middle of each of its six sides so the robot could manipulate it. Since the robot needs the cameras in order to function, the webcams are covered with a piece of paper until the cube is properly scrambled.

The team is now in the process of applying for the Guinness World Record. Pending all goes to plan, the robot will crush the current record holder’s time of 3.253 seconds.

This tennis racquet grunts like Sharapova (and others) when you swing it

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A racquet that makes quite the racket.

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Conventional wisdom says that tennis players grunt because it helps them apply the maximal force when they strike the ball. However, don’t be fooled, these noises are totally unnecessary and downright annoying. In fact, there are top names in the game like Maria Sharapova whose screams routinely top 100 decibels. This has led many, including the legendary Martina Navratilova, to call into question whether or not the behavior is actually a form of cheating.

Cognizant of this, Maker Seiya Kobayashi has come up with a hilarious solution for this problem: a racquet that does the grunting for you. You simply select one of four notable noisemakers — Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal — and the aptly named Grunting Racket will take care of the rest.

This allows you to focus on your footwork and hitting the ball, while the combination of an Arduino Pro Mini (ATmega328), an accelerometer and speaker emits the obnoxious sounds. Additional components include a LiPo battery, an Adafruit Audio FX Sound Board and a button on the grip that lets you choose the player. These electronics are all housed inside the racquet’s handle. Kobayashi employed both Arduino and Processing sketches along the way to prototype his idea.

How it works is fairly simple: When a value from the accelerometer exceeds a particular threshold, the sound board will play one of the four tones. You can see (and hear) it action below!

[s/o to fellow tennis players Artie Beavis and David Scheltema]

KATIA is a robotic arm that can scan, 3D print, laser cut and even decorate a cake

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KATIA brings the functionality of an industrial robotic arm to mainstream consumers. 

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Will robots replace humans? This is a question we have speculated for decades, and the World Economic Forum released a report this week predicting the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in 2020. While the thought of robots taking over can be daunting, one San Francisco-based startup offers a positive near future where robots can work with us.

Meet KATIA — short for “Kick Ass Trainable Intelligent Arm” — the brainchild, or shall we say brain arm, of Carbon Robotics. Behind this great name is an even greater product. KATIA is a robotic arm that is modular, open source and can be manually trained for those not fluent in code, making it incredibly versatile and easy to use. Co-founders Rosanna Myers and Dan Corkum sought to create a robotics platform designed for the consumer market. Ordinary people can make use of KATIA, no programming skills or roboticist required.

KATIA is hackable, modular and customizable for each use and environment. It was built on an open platform so users can access its API via tools like Arduino and Python. Add-on attachments can be swapped on and off the robotic device, allowing KATIA to be more than a just an arm that can grab and move objects. It can be transformed into a 3D scanner, 3D printer, laser cutter, and even a cake decorator.

KATIA can be taught new movements if you simply guide the arm as it will replicate the desired motion, or you can draw a path for it to follow in the accompanying app. So if you wanted to decorate a cake, for example, KATIA can squeeze the icing in the design of your choosing.

The Carbon Robotics team recently presented at TechCrunch’s Hardware Battlefield finals back at CES 2016, where Myers said in the presentation, “The problem is that [robotic arms] are expensive. They’re difficult to use, and quite frankly not that safe. And that’s where we come in.”

KATIA can carry up to 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and moves with sub-millimeter precision. This powerful robotic arm also ensures safety. Enclosed in its carbon fiber frame are sensors that can detect humans and things that come within close range.

Marketed as having the capabilities of an industrial robot at the price of a laptop, KATIA will be selling for $1,999 starting this March. To stay up-to-date, be sure to check out the Carbon Robotics website here.

ATtiny85 helps breathe new life into a broken scale

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Rather than toss out a broken bathroom scale, this father-son duo decided to refurbish it with an all-new electrical system.

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What do you do when your scale breaks? If you’re like most people, you either buy a new one, or don’t weigh yourself hoping that you didn’t actually gain any weight over the holidays. If, however, you are Oxford doctoral student Ilias Giechaskiel, you simply design a new electrical system for it, then build it with the help of your dad.

As the Maker puts it, “The obvious solution…was to get rid of the internal components, reuse the case and the sensors, and build everything from scratch.”

One of the more interesting techniques employed in this project is the use of a Wheatstone bridge in conjunction with a load cell to measure weight. As the voltage change in this type of setup is quite small, a separate chip was needed to amplify the signal before it was passed to an ATtiny85’s analog input. Another neat design choice was the use of the ATtiny85 with its limited input/output (IO) capability (5 IO pins plus a reset pin).

Giechaskiel explains his selection of MCU,“I like its small form-factor, and did not want to have unused pins.” However, he does admit that more I/O would have been useful to implement more functionality in the scale.

If that wasn’t enough, he programmed the ATtiny with an Arduino, as outlined in these instructions, and his new display is a nice bright red. This would seem to be an improvement over the boring gray, though if you’re not happy with the reading, it might be harder to conceal!

There are several neat concepts in this build, so be sure to check out his code, library, and schematics on GitHub. if you think you might be able to use some of these ideas!

 

 

This 3D printer on wheels wants to fix potholes

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Addibots are self-driving and remote-controlled 3D printers that can smooth over roads… or skating ponds at the very least.

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When it comes to 3D printing, who says you can’t think (and create) outside the box? Clearly not Robert Flitsch, a mechanical engineer and Harvard graduate who recently founded his own New York-based startup Addibots.  

An Addibot is a four-wheeled robot that can be either autonomous or remote-controlled, and holds an array of printheads on its undercarriage that enable it to 3D print with various materials as it drives.

Breaking free from the restraints of conventional 3D printing, Addibot can move its printing components to any desired location and produce items of any size. Unlike most machines where an object is built inside the print area and then removed for use, this platform can turn any surface into a workspace.

“A central limitation of current 3D printing methods is the fact that they operate inside a workspace of finite dimensions,” Flitsch explains. “For many household 3D printers, these dimensions are merely a few inches in each direction. For these printers, larger objects can only be manufactured with larger printers, making the fabrication of sizable industrial products either incredibly expensive (due to astronomical equipment costs) or downright impossible (for objects, like buildings or bridge trusses, just too large for a printer of this type).”

Flitsch’s first prototypes were equipped with inkjet cartridges, designed to show off the Addibot’s concept in 2D. And since water possesses similar fluid characteristics to ink, the engineer  — who also happens to be a lifelong hockey player — turned his attention to repurposing the bot as an ice resurfacing tool for skated-upon rinks. Like a mini Zamboni, the Addibot poured water that was cooled just above its freezing point into the slices and chips made by the blades, which would freeze on contact with the surface.

While the team notes that there are endless possibilities for Addibots, they are initially focusing their efforts on road repair and construction. They are working towards a new distribution array that can use asphalt materials, with hopes of fixing cracks, large potholes and eventually the resurfacing of our roadways altogether. The robot’s ability to streamline this process could potentially help public works departments and municipalities across the nation meet the massive demand for improved streets.

The robot operates much like any other 3D printer, just scaled down. Housed inside its chassis are multiple nozzles that lay down materials layer by layer, as needed. Impressively, the technology may even be able to one day “print” sensors into roads, which would be used for communication by self-driving vehicles.

“All the storage for material, all the chemical processing could be done on board the Addibot,” Flitsch told Popular Science. “Tar materials, which have to be kept at a high temperature, can be done in a tank with a constant heat source added to it. Power sources could be various kinds, depending on the size of the robot.”

Intrigued? Head over to its page to learn more, or see it in action above!