Atmel’s jam-packed booth (#205) hosted Makers, modders and hackers on day two of Maker Faire Bay Area 2014.
We showcased a number of uber-cool exhibits and demos throughout the day, with various guest appearances by various personalities such as Massimo Banzi and Sir Mix-A-Lot.
Our Day 1 image gallery is available here – and more Day 2 pictures below!
Bay Area Maker Faire 2014 kicked off today, with hackers, modders, makers and veteran DIYs showcasing their creations, many of which are powered by Atmel microcontrollers.
Atmel’s booth – #205 – is drawing large crowds, with entire families clustering around to see a wide range of Atmel-based products, including the MakerBot Replicator 2 desktop 3D printer, Mel Li’s wearable electronics, various Arduino boards, Red Boards, ProtoSnap Pro-Mini, MicroView, FuzzBots, the Phoenar, Touch Board, Hexabugs and uToT Robots.
There are literally thousands of cool creations here at the show so stay tuned for more. In the meantime, enjoy the pictures below! The gallery for Day 2 is available here.
Atmel is getting ready to take center stage at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 in San Mateo on May 17th and 18th.
Our team is currently setting up booth #205, where we’ll be showcasing a wide range of Maker projects, platforms and devices, including the new Arduino Zero which is powered by Atmel’s ARM-based SAMD21 microcontroller (MCU).
So, what else can you find in booth #205?
Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 will kick off at the San Mateo Event Center in San Mateo, CA, on Saturday, May 17, from 10am to 8pm and Sunday, May 18, from 10am to 6pm.
Tickets can be purchased on-site at Maker Faire Bay Area 2014 on May 17 and 18, 2014 ($25.00 – $40.00 for a full day pass).
Can’t make it to the Faire? You can follow @Atmel live on Twitter for event updates, or join the conversation by tweeting #AtmelMakes.
A buddy just walked by and showed me the new Arduino Zero that will be showcased at the Bay Area Maker Faire 2014 this Saturday and Sunday.
It’s nice working at Atmel Headquarters where stuff like this happens to me. Better yet, one of our brilliant Norwegian marketing engineers walked by and I asked him about the Zero. I said: “OK, it has a SAM D21 ARM Cortex M0+ chip, but what is that other big chip?”
He said: “Its the debugger chip, the same one we use on our Xplained Pro boards.”
I say: “A debugger, like you can use on our Studio 6 integrated development platform?”
He says “yup.”
Now I happened to have the Arduino IDE running on my screen, and I point to it and say “But the Arduino IDE does not have a debugger interface!”
And he just smiled and walked away.
So there you have it, maybe not right away, but one day soon, you will be able to actually watch the guts of an Atmel chip as it executes your code in an Arduino. You can see registers and memory values, and set breakpoints and all the other things a debugger does. I am a big fan of debuggers, as evidenced by two recent videos I did here and here. You can do it now with our debuggers or our SAM D21 Xplained Pro boards, but only in Studio 6.2. If you prefer the Arduino IDE, you might be able to debug soon using that.
Carnegie Mellon student Liana Kong recently designed a DIY musical rain poncho using an Atmel-powered Arduino Uno (ATmega328), FM tuner and flexible speaker.
According to the official Adafruit blog, the poncho is capable of controlling the radio in a number of ways, including: Hood up/down – power, colorful snaps – different station presets and hood strings – volume.
“Most of my classmates made radios out of wood or plastic, something that sits on a table. When I told everyone that the colorful pile of fabric was my radio, they had to second guess themselves,” Kong explained in a recent blog post.
“A lot of my past projects have been pretty practical, so it was refreshing that people were getting excited about my poncho. Also, seeing their faces brighten into a smile when they put the poncho on was really fulfilling.”
Kong also noted that the “key point” of her DIY musical rain poncho was to stay connected to one’s surrounding while listening to and enjoying music in harmony with the rain, sans earbuds or headphones which create walls to the outside.
“While the exterior is a more muted tone, the inside reflects the excitement and playful aspect of the poncho,” she added.
Interested in learning more? You can check out Liana Kong’s blog post here.
A Maker by the name of Jason955 has designed an RFID-controlled garage door opener using an Atmel-based (ATmega328 MCU) Arduino board.
As HackADay’s Rick Osgood reports, the Arduino acts as the brains of the operation while an off-the-shelf NFC/RFID reader module is tasked with reading the RFID tags.
“To add new keys to the system, [Jason] simply swipes his ‘master’ RFID key. An indicator LED lights up and a piezo speaker beeps, letting you know that the system is ready to read a new key,” Osgood explains.
“Once the new key is read, the address is stored on an EEPROM. From that point forward the new key is permitted to activate the system. Whenever a valid key is swiped, the Arduino triggers a relay which can then be used to control just about anything.”
According to Osgood, the system also offers access to a number of manual controls, including a reset button (erased EEPROM) and a DIP that switch that allows the user to select how long the relay circuit remains open (configurable in increments of 100ms).
As Jason955 points out, the opener pictured above is simply an initial design prototype, with the next iteration likely to be a prototype shield followed by a PCB.
“The top section of components (Arduino and breadboard) will be placed inside the garage and the bottom section of components (LED, buzzer, NFC/RFID reader) will be placed outside (in a project box),” he adds.
Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s official page here.
Nintendo’s Game Boy Advance (ゲームボーイアドバンス), or GBA, is a 32-bit handheld video game console. The successor to the Game Boy Color, the console was launched way back in 2011, giving Makers like Chanudn plenty of time to come up with various mods for the unit.
Indeed, Chanudn recently debuted a slick speech-controlled GBA on Instructables. The basic idea? Players say the name of a button (left, A, start, etc.) and the GBA responds as if the button had been physically pressed.
So, how does it work?
“You say a word into a small microphone (let’s assume you say ‘start’) – and this signal is sent from the microphone to the computer through the [Atmel-based] Arduino Uno (ATmega328 MCU). The speech recognition software BitVoicer sees that ‘start’ is a word it’s supposed to respond to and sends the Arduino the string ‘start’,” Chanudn explained in his Instructables post.
“The Arduino receives the string and sets the voltage of one digital output pin to HIGH and the rest to LOW. The pin set to HIGH is connected to a relay that is in turn connected to two metal pads on the GBA circuit board that correspond to the start button. Since the pin is set to HIGH the relay switches states, making the two metal pads electrically connected. This electrical connection is what happens when you usually press GBA buttons, so the GBA responds as if the start button was pressed.”
Aside from the Arduino Uno, key project components include:
“This is a project I worked on for my electronics class at Pomona College. Thanks to Professor Dwight Whitaker and Tony Grigsby for their help and guidance – and credit to Jonathan Wong for the idea for this project,” Chanudn added.
Interested in learning more about the speech-controlled Game Boy Advance? You can check out the project’s official Instructables page here.
A Maker by the name of Derek recently created an optical theremin to illustrate the types of devices typically found in hacker and Maker spaces.
As HackADay’s Rick Osgood reports, the solderless Noise-o-Tron kit is powered by Atmel’s ATtiny45 microcontroller (MCU).
“Arduino libraries have already been ported to this chip, so all [Derek] had to do was write a few simple lines of code and he was up and running,” writes Osgood.
“The chip is connected to a photocell so the pitch will vary with the amount of light that reaches the cell. The user can then change the pitch by moving their hand closer or further away, achieving a similar effect to a theremin.”
According to Osgood, Derek designed a simple PCB out of acrylic, with laser cut holes to fit the components and leads twisted together.
“I learned a lot with this project and I think some other people did too. I had kids as young as 5 assemble these boards with guidance, some of them with surprisingly little help,” notes Derek.
“Everyone seemed to like them and I ran out of components for kits. I’m calling it a huge success and I hope that this project is replicated and taken to Maker Faires, expos and ‘learn electronics’ nights.”
Interested in learning more about the solderless Noise-o-Tron kit? You can check out Derek’s blog post here and the relevant Github files here.
In the latest episode of Atmel Edge, Analog Aficionado Paul Rako discusses our newest debugger, the Atmel-ICE.
As Rako notes, the Atmel-ICE is a powerful development tool for debugging and programming Atmel ARM Cortex-M based Atmel SAM and AVR microcontrollers.
Key features include:
Atmel-ICE is currently available from the official Atmel store for $85 here.
The Silverlink of yore connected TI calculators without USB ports to PCs, facilitating the easy transfer of files, screenshots and operating systems.
As KermMartian of Cemetech notes, Silverlink was first introduced about 15 years ago, so it doesn’t comes as much of a surprise that a number of units are starting to show their age by failing over time.
“We anticipate that the rest will gradually lose their firmwares (with no way of repairing them) in the next decade or two,” writes KermMartian.
“To fill this gap, ideas for a community-coded Silverlink clone have been kicking around for several years. Tim ‘geekboy1011’ Keller has taken the initiative in creating Silverlink clone software for the Arduino Leonardo (Atmel ATmega32U4) microcontroller development board.”
Keller kicked off his clone project by leveraging KermMartian’s Arduino to TI calculator linking routines, which he ported from Arduino “C” to bare-AVR C. He then deduced the relevant file transfer protocols using USB sniffing, the TI Link Protocol & File Format Guide and checking against the TILP repository.
“Tim is using the LUFA library for AVRs to handle USB; the flexibility of the library lets his Silverlink clone appear to be an original Silverlink to the host computer, and thus requires no new drivers,” KermMartian explains.
“Since it appears to be a regular Silverlink to computer-side software, Tim’s clone works with both TI-Connect and TiLP, the two popular software options for linking TI calculators and computers.”
Interested in learning more about Tim’s initiative? Additional information is available on the Cemetech forums here.
