Build an automated dehumidifier sump pump

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A perfect project for those too lazy to walk down to the basement to empty their dehumidifier… or who forget to give their in-laws a gift on the holidays. 

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This winter, Zachary J. Fields went home to visit his family, but neglected to buy a present for his in-laws for Christmas. After they asked him to go to the basement and empty the dehumidifier, he decided that instead of just doing the task once, he’d make a device that would do it automatically for them.

To accomplish this task, he used an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) to control a water pump via a relay. For water sensing, he employed two pairs of bare electrical wire. When each pair of wire is immersed, it conducts electricity from one lead to another. Unfortunately, water is a fairly poor conductor of electricity, so to compensate for this, each signal is amplified by a Darlington transistor pair before it is input into the Arduino.

Each pair of wire is set up on top of each other (in a nice braided configuration) so that water level can be read as “full” when both sensors are made, and “empty” when both are off. This allows the pump to start at the full level, then cut off when water is below the lower sensor. This is important so that the pump doesn’t suck air for a long time, possibly damaging components and wasting electricity.

If you’re tired of walking down to the basement to empty your dehumidifier, then you’ll probably want to take a look at this project.

SprayPrinter turns digital designs into wall art

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This smart spray paint device helps you create wall art — no art skills required.

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Have you ever walked past a cool mural or graffiti, and wished you could create large scale artwork in your own home or office? You can now with SprayPrinter, a spray paint device that reproduces images from your smartphone to any wall.

The Estonia-based team behind the gadget boasts SprayPrinter as the 21^st century way of designing walls. The SprayPrinter works similar to a dot matrix printer, except it is made up of two key components: a clip-on unit that controls the spray paint nozzle and the accompanying smartphone app that converts and sends images to the SprayPrinter. Together, the app maps the image to the wall, and the smartphone camera tracks the position of the spray paint can so it knows exactly when to tell it to release the dots of paint.

You can be making art like Banksy in three easy steps. First, you choose from the app what design you want printed on the wall. Then, you activate the SprayPrinter attachment and simply move the can along the wall. The app breaks down the chosen image into pixels, and communicates with the spray paint can on releasing paint at the precise location. The app will also host artwork by artists, designers and photographers.

Intrigued? Head over to the project’s Indiegogo page, where its team is currently seeking $20,000. You can start designing any wall with SprayPrinter for the price of $149. The first batches of units are set for delivery by December 2016.

 

SmartyPans is like a Fitbit for food

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SmartyPans is a Bluetooth-enabled skillet that calculates nutrition information of home cooked meals, in real-time.

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Are you the type of person who dines out every night because you don’t know how to cook or agonizes about the nutritional contents of your food with every bite? If so, those worries may be a thing of the past thanks to SmartyPans — an intelligent frying pan, which not only helps you whip up a meal but keeps tabs on what you consume as well.

SmartyPans enables anyone to make dinner like a chef, while tracking their intake like a pro. The cooking system is comprised of two parts: the connected skillet and an accompanying recipe app. It uses the combination of voice commands, weight and temperature sensors along with the app to provide you with real-time nutritional information about the food you’re preparing.

To get started, you tell the app what ingredients you’re adding to the pan. The app then employs those commands and its sensors to calculate calories and other nutritional data. What’s more, you can input those numbers into some of today’s most popular health and fitness platforms, like MyFitnessPal, Google Fit and Fitbit, as well as share your favorite recipes with friends and family.

In terms of electronics, SmartyPans features an Atmel | SMART Cortex-M4 MCU at its core, Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity and a rechargeable 800mAh battery. The pan itself boasts a unique design with an NSF-grade aluminum outer layer and a detachable inner cooking surface. This modularity allows you to use the top portion as a serving bowl and oven pan, or the entire thing as a kitchen scale.

Are you ready to cook with freedom and track with ease? Head over to SmartyPans’ Indiegogo campaign, where the brother-sister duo of Prachi and Rahul Baxi are currently seeking $40,000. The must-have accessory will come in red, black and orange along with the option of stainless steel or a ceramic non-stick coating. Delivery is slated for August 2016.

 

3D print a Daft Punk helmet with Bluetooth-controlled LEDs

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Harder, better, faster, brighter! 

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If there is one musical group that has inspired more electronics projects than any other, Daft Punk has to be it. Besides just producing awesome electronic tunes, the helmets that they wear are filled with blinking lights. Adafruit’s latest helmet build, which is the brainchild of the Ruiz brothers, features a replica of Thomas Bangalter’s helmet and uses two microcontrollers for lighting control.

Possibly the most impressive thing about this wearable is the work it takes to 3D print something like this. One not experienced with this type of machine might expect to press a button and see a shiny new headpiece to simply pop out of the machine, after printing, the three sections had to be joined together, painted, and sanded in several steps. Additionally, the visor was made separately, and heated to bend it into place.

Of course, the helmet wouldn’t be much fun without an array of blinking LEDs. The visor lights are provided by a NeoPixel strip, cut into two layers and embedded in the helmet. Animations for this portion are enabled by an Adafruit Feather 32U4 Bluefruit LE (ATmega32U4), which offers the ability to communicate over Bluetooth. This, in turn, allows animations to be controlled via a smartphone or even a smartwatch using Adafruit’s “BLE Connect” app. Meanwhile, the NeoPixel rings on the ears are managed by a 5V Trinket board (ATtiny85), with both rings sharing data, power and ground; certainly an interesting technique that one might want to keep in mind for later use.

 

This robot will save you from shoveling this winter

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When was the last time you had to shovel snow from your driveway? What if you never had to again? 

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It’s January, which for many of you means winter is well underway. Whether you simply hate the freezing cold or always seem to throw your back out while shoveling, what if there was a machine that could take care the tedious task for you without ever having to step foot outside? This is exactly what Vittorio Loschiavo decided to do by devising his own open source, remote-controlled Snow Plow Robot.

This piece of equipment is based on an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) and can be wirelessly maneuvered using a PlayStation 2 controller. The bot consists of an ordinary snowplow frame, which supports a motorized blade along with electric motors, wheels and caterpillar tracks.

If you absolutely hate shoveling, head over to Open Electronics’ exhaustive project page where you’ll find everything you need to get started.

ChameleonMini can emulate and clone NFC cards

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This open source, programmable device can emulate and clone contactless cards, read RFID tags and sniff RF data.

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Over the last several years, researchers David Oswald and Timo Kasper have been hard at work developing a family of NFC security projects. Their efforts, which began with a tag-emulating coffee cup, have led to the newly-unveiled ChameleonMini — an NFC analysis device capable of cloning contactless cards, as well as reading RFID tags and sniffing RF data.

The completely portable, extremely versatile tool can virtualize up to eight contactless cards operating at 13.56MHz. The board itself consists of a PCB antenna along with an ATXMega128A4U that handles the RF encoding and USB interface, and a rechargeable Li-ion battery that provides hour-long standalone use. The microcontroller’s AES and DES hardware engines enable speedy computation of cryptographic algorithms. In other words, if your contactless card has encryption and you have the cryptographic key, the ChameleonMini can replicate it.

The freely-programmable platform can create perfect clones of existing commercial smart cards, including cryptographic functions and the Unique Identifier (UID). Aside from emulating NFC devices, the ChameleonMini can even appear passive in a sniff mode, log the RFID communication, and serve as a basic RFID reader.

A convenient, human-readable command set allows to configure its behavior and update the settings and content of up to eight internally stored, virtualized contactless cards. During battery-powered standalone operation, the integrated buttons and LEDs offer user interaction and feedback.

The ChameleonMini can be easily equipped with new firmware via a USB bootloader. It can be interfaced with a standard terminal software, via the command line or controlled through user-written scripts and applications. What’s more, the modular firmware structure gives expandability to other not yet supported cards and standards.

There are several variants of the ChameleonMini, which range from a barebones PCB version to a budget-friendly, emulator-only version to the latest iteration (Rev.G) with all the bells and whistles. Intrigued? Head over to its Kickstarter campaign, where Oswald and Kasper have blown right by their $24,258 goal. Delivery is slated for August 2016.

This five-axis robotic arm will lend you a helping hand

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One Maker decided to build his own 5-DOF robotic arm using ServoCity parts, a Pololu Mini Maestro controller and an Arduino Uno. 

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If you’re wondering when you’ll get the time to work on all of your crazy projects, you might look forward to retirement. This is great if you’re close, though possibly discouraging for younger workers. Either way, 62-year-old “CyberMerin” decided to make his own robotic arm from scratch. As he puts it, “I promised myself was that when I did retire I was going to complete all those projects I had running around inside my head … That’s about 50 years or so of projects.”

He also notes that microprocessors didn’t exist years ago, and a machine shop was needed to make mechanical parts. It’s a great time to be alive for those that love to build stuff!

This particular project, a five-axis robotic arm is quite ambitious, works well and is extremely well-documented, even including pictures of 3D CAD models. Though complicated, the Arduino wiring is relatively simple since it communicates serially with a Mini Maestro USB servo controller. This allows the Maestro to do the “heavy lifting” for each servo. (Be sure to check out his article for a huge amount of background on building something like this.)

Human interface is handled by a nice graphic slider setup running in Processing 3. As shown in the video below it responds quickly to commands. (Check out around 3:00 when it stacks a green block on the other two.)

For an entirely different take on a robotic arm, here’s one that employs only three servos, a coffee tin for a base, and a gaming controller. Even with these limitations, it still manages to be able to manipulate objects.

Is your smartwatch stealing your passwords?

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A computer science student has demonstrated that software running on a smartwatch could be used to record a user’s passwords and PINs.

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Unless you eschew modern technology altogether (such as reading websites), chances are that data on you is being collected. Smartphones are capable enough data sponges, but smartwatches have the potential to extend this reach even further. According to Tony Beltramelli’s master’s thesis for the IT University of Copenhagen, the sensors on the Sony SmartWatch 3 (and likely many other present and future watches) are so accurate that they can be used to sense what button you press on a 12-segment keypad with “above-average” precision.

As seen in the video below, it appears that this ability comes from the user actually moving their hand from button to button. The wearable’s built-in accelerometer and gyroscope can sense these motions and then feed that information into a recurrent neural network. Using a deep learning algorithm, Beltramelli is able to sift through all the “noisy data” and detect patterns for various events, such as when the user moves and taps their finger on a touchscreen to unlock a PIN-protected phone or when the user enters a code on an ATM’s keypad.

Interestingly, as reported in section 6.3 of the thesis, the device did a better job of “touchlogging” — recording virtual keystrokes on a touchscreen — at 73% acuracy, versus “keylogging” — where a physical keyboard is used for input — at 59% accuracy. The touchscreen used was larger in this experiment than the keypad, apparently leading to this discrepancy.

“By their very nature of being wearable, these devices, however, provide a new pervasive attack surface threatening users privacy, among others,” Beltramelli explains. “The goal of this work is to raise awareness about the potential risks related to motion sensors built-in wearable devices and to demonstrate abuse opportunities leveraged by advanced neural network architectures.”

As you can imagine, there are still a few limitations that make this type of approach with a smartwatch impractical as an attack against specific targets. For starters, it only works if the person is using the arm that the gadget is on. So, if you have a watch and are concerned about spying, you can simply strap it onto your less dominant wrist. Or alternatively, you could make a habit of typing with three fingers on numeric keypads.

Qtechknow’s Qduino Mini is now available

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The Qduino Mini is the first tiny Arduino-compatible board with a built-in battery charger and fuel gauge.

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Adding to 15-year-old Quin Etnyre’s already rather long list of accomplishments was a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign back in March 2015. The Qduino Mini — which has been on display numerous times inside the Atmel Maker Faire booths — is the first tiny Arduino-compatible board equipped with a built-in battery charger and fuel gauge that can notify its user when a LiPo needs a little extra juice.

“I always struggled to find a way to charge and monitor a battery, bundle with an Arduino and fit inside of every project.” Inspired by his own frustrations, the young Maker immediately went on to prototype his concept with hopes of one day bringing it to market.

Now available on SparkFun, the Qduino Mini is entirely open source and based on the versatile ATmega32U4 — the very same chip that can be found at the core of the Arduino Leonardo and several other Arduino AtHeart devices. The breadboard-friendly MCU runs at 8MHz at 3.3V and boasts plenty of dedicated digital, analog and PWM pins.

The pint-sized project is not only packed with a battery charger circuit and fuel gauge, but possesses an uber-mini, ultra-thin form factor as well. This makes the shrunken-down, lightweight ‘duino an ideal choice for DIY quadcopter or high-altitude balloon projects, in addition to a wide range of other gadgets like an NFC Smart Lock and B&W Selfie Printer.

Since its inception, the Qduino Mini has received a few minor upgrades before arriving at its latest iteration. According to Quin, these included two RGB LEDs (one for status, another that’s user programmable), a USB and power switch on the same face, and a LiPo connector on the opposite side of the board. What’s more, it has become even more “mini,” having been reduced from its original 1″ x 1.5” size to 0.8″ x 1.5”.

Sound like the tiny, Arduino-compatible board you’ve been looking for? Well, look no more as the Qduino Mini is available for $29.95 on SparkFun!

17 smart crowdfunding campaigns you may want to back this week

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Every Friday, we take a look at some of the smartest, most innovative projects that caught our attention on Kickstarter and Indiegogo over the last seven days. 

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Droppler

This unobtrusive monitor uses advanced audio recognition technology to track water consumption in real-time. Nascent Objects is currently seeking $70,000 on Indiegogo.

CoDrone

This drone can be easily programmed to do whatever you want, whether that’s following you, engaging in laser battles or navigating its way through a maze. Robolink has already soared past its goal of $50,000 on Kickstarter.

ZAR

This lightweight, foldable electric scooter is ideal for those needing to travel short distances quickly. Crazyfire Technology has almost doubled its initial $50,000 Kickstarter goal.

Tinylab

This tablet-sized, fully-integrated platform makes prototyping a breeze. Bosphorus Mechatronics is nearing its $25,000 goal on Indiegogo.

Teslasuit

This full-body haptic suit enables you to touch and feel the future of VR and gaming. Tesla Studios is currently seeking $369,009 on Kickstarter.

Gestor

This sleek air mouse is equipped with touch ring buttons that let you control your smart TV or computer using hand motions. Gestor Devices is currently seeking $39,550 on Kickstarter.

BASE by Wiivv

These 3D-printed, body-perfect insoles are designed from 2D snapshots taken from a smartphone. Wiivv has just about doubled its $50,000 goal on Kickstarter.

dokiWatch

This smartwatch is exclusively made for kids and features things like video calling, GPS and fitness tracking. Doki Technologies has already well surpassed its $20,000 goal on Kickstarter.

ChameleonMini

This freely-programmable, standalone tool for NFC security analysis allows you to emulate and clone contactless cards, read RFID tags and sniff RF data. Kasper & Oswald GmbH has garnered more than $25,000 on Kickstarter.

FitPal

This continuous heart rate monitoring  and activity tracker patch will take your fitness and health to the next level. FitPal is currently seeking $100,000 on Kickstarter.

Hobby Hand

This 3D-printed, Arduino-driven robotic hand mimics the natural movement of its human overlord. Biomechanical Robotics Group is currently seeking $30,000 on Kickstarter.

Orilamp

This origami-inspired, Bluetooth-connected lamp boasts a wide range of applications, from accent to outdoor to emergency lighting. Orilamp is currently seeking $50,000 on Indiegogo.

Mu

This sensor add-on acts as a smart eye and brain for your existing remote-controlled toys. Morpx is currently seeking $100,000 on Indiegogo.

AromaCare

This smart essential oils diffuser allows you to configure your own aromatherapy sessions right from your phone. AromaCare is currently seeking $59,507 on Kickstarter.

AlphaTechBlocks

This set of alphabet blocks combines the charm of yesterday’s learning toys with the powers of modern-day technology to teach preschoolers letters in both English and Spanish. AlphaTechBlocks is currently seeking $90,000 on Kickstarter.

Arduino PLC

This industrial-grade, Arduino-based PLC is perfect for home automation, security and HVAC systems, as well as robotics projects and 3D printing. Team IoT is nearing $5,000 in funds on Kickstarter.

Blaze

This stackable, mini development board includes a high-res 1.6″ display with capacitive touch and a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M4 MCU. Kevin Webster is currently seeking $7,380 on Kickstarter.