Now you can build your own DIY phone with Arduino

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Adafruit’s Limor Fried shows us how to create your own $125 phone using Arduino and a FONA Shield.

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Walking into your local Verizon Wireless store or going online to buy a gadget is so 2014. Instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for that iPhone or Samsung Galaxy, why not make your own for a fraction of the cost? Nowadays, nearly two-thirds of the American population own a smartphone, and for many, these devices are a key entry point to the online world. But what about the age of basic cellphones, like that old-school Nokia 5110, which packed just enough features to communicate with your friends and family via text or voice, keep busy playing Snake and set morning alarms? If you’re looking for something reminiscent of the late ‘90s, then you’ll love Adafruit’s newly-revaled Arduin-o-Phone — the brainchild of Limor Fried (aka Lady Ada) herself.

While you may not be able to accept Facebook friend requests, reply to emails or browse the web, this DIY project packs all of the necessary functions. Even better, it doesn’t require an extensive lineup of supplies to get started. As its name would imply, the Arduin-o-Phone is based on an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) along with a few other components including a FONA Shield for cellular network connection to make calls, a 2.8” TFT Shield for its resistive touch display, a GSM antenna and SIM card, and a LiPo battery for power. Additionally, the device can either be used with a headset or a speaker and mic combination for those looking for a more “hold it up and talk” style.

Designed with flexibility in mind, the capabilities of the Arduin-o-Phone can be expanded upon, or simply left in its barebones form. Using Adafruit’s libraries, Makers can devise their own dialer with less than 200 lines of code, as well as create their own interface and customize an app using the Arduino IDE.

“Most of the soldering happens on the FONA shield. Don’t forget to solder it with stacking headers,” Fried advises.

To piece it all together, attach the mini speaker and wired electret microphone, solder the vibrating motor disc, and add the LiPo battery. From there, insert the SIM card and GSM antenna into the uFL connector, and plug the FONA Shield onto the Arduino. Connect the Uno to the computer and upload the Arduin-o-Phone sketch.

And voilà, you just made your own phone! Intrigued? Check out a step-by-step breakdown of the build on Adafruit, and access its code on Github here.

Creating a wall-mounted, 3D-printed automatic pet feeder

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Driven by an Arduino, this DIY system will make sure your pup gets one cup of dry food twice a day. 

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Whether it’s due to long work hours, frequent vacations or purely one’s absent-mindedness, it can sometimes be difficult to ensure that dear Fido is fed on time. But thanks to one Maker, it may get a whole heck of a lot easier.

Created by Maker Mark Bissey, the 3D-Printed Automatic Pet Feeder is a wall-mounted device that is capable of dispensing exactly one cup of dry food twice per day. While its feeding times and the number of increments are adjustable, the amount of food is not. Meaning, if you have a smaller pup or a cat that requires only a couple of ounces of food daily, it looks like they may be getting a bit more than the recommended serving size.

Additionally, the Maker decided to implement an early feeding feature for training purposes, which can be activated through its embedded infrared or touch sensor. Bissey notes, “I firmly believe for obedience training dogs should work for their food. So if you catch the timer before it goes off you can make your dog do a trick or two and feed them manually.”

The project is comprised of seven 3D-printed parts, including its housing, a top, internal and bottom funnel, a cylinder and two caps. Meanwhile, enclosed within the system are an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), a stepper motor, a touch and infrared sensor, an SPDT switch, a 10K Ohm resistor, among a few other electronic components.

At the brains of the operation, the Arduino is tasked with checking to see if the opening of the cylinder is upright. The mechanism will continue to turn until it hits a limiting switch, thereby letting the food fall. A four-digit seven-segment display is also employed to reveal an ongoing countdown in between feeding times. When it reaches zero, a stepper motor starts to rotate and the food dispensing process begins. If the early feeding feature is used, the system will take the remaining time and add it to the next feeding cycle. This way, it will never be off schedule.

For those wishing to construct a DIY system of their own, Bissey has provided all of the necessary codes, schematics and a step-by-step breakdown of the build on his Instructables page here.

Creating a 3D-printed, Arduino-based laser robot for your cat

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When you’re just too tired to play with your pets, this automated gadget can help.

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If you’re a cat owner, you know this situation all too well: You’re sitting on the couch or in the office chair, and suddenly good ol’ Whiskers comes over. With a ball in month, he suddenly drops it in front of him and begins to meow. As he continuously gazes up at you in hopes of throwing the ball, you have no choice but to succumb to that cute little face. However, no matter how much you love your pets, sometimes you’re just too tired from a long day at work to give them the attention that they deserve and often require. Faced with a similar dilemma, Maker Miska Karvonen took it upon himself to devise an Arduino-based solution that would take care of the tedious task itself. And so, the Cat Laser Entertainer Robot was born.

The automated machine has one job and one job only: To keep your cat occupied by chasing every feline’s favorite device, the low-power red dot laser pointer. The Maker employed an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) along with a simple shield, two 9G mini servos, and of course, the 5mW laser to complete the project. The Arduino runs on either a 9V battery or a USB port. Meanwhile, the Maker produced the robot’s parts using his own AT90USB1286 driven Printrbot 3D printer. The entire printing process took him just over an hour, all while costing no more than 15 cents.

With the build just about done, Karvonen programmed his Arduino so that the servos randomly move along the wall, and not so much the ceiling or floor. After all, as he explains, “Cats are not interested in red dot on the ceiling where she can’t reach.”

So does it work? As you can see at the tail-end of the video below (around the 0:50 mark), the Maker’s exhausted cat appears to be pretty content as it lies on the floor and the robot continues to move. Cat lovers everywhere, rejoice! Need one of your own? Find a step-by-step breakdown of the pawesome project here.

Build your own K-9 robotic companion

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Relive the days of Doctor Who by creating your own K-9 replica with Arduino, XBee and SparkFun.

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For those who may not be familiar with Doctor Who, K-9 was the name of the steadfast companion in the long-running British science fiction TV series. In these stories, the robotic dog proved useful for the powerful laser weapon concealed in his nose, his encyclopedic knowledge, his vast computer intelligence, among many other things. In fact, the character still holds a special place in the hearts of the show’s rabid fan base, just ask Maker “MrBithead942.”

“I’ve been a Whovian for many years and the 4th Doctor (Tom Baker) will always be my favorite. There are many reasons including his playful quirkiness, colorful scarf, his fondness for Jelly Babies, but definitely K-9, his robot dog companion,” the Maker writes. “30+ years later, I finally built up the courage and skills (and funds) to try to build a replica K-9 for my own and I’m really happy with the results!”

In total, MrBithead942’s project took just about four months to build entirely from scratch. The replica’s shell is comprised of the a light, bendable and easy-to-machine plastic HPDE, which required a custom plastic bender to get the angles just right. The rest of the body was made up of various custom laser-cut parts.

K-9’s frame consists of an aluminum channel, which houses several electronic components including an Arduino Uno (ATmega328) and an XBee shield tasked with handling the remote voice, eye sensors, a few RGB LED strips, and in true Doctor Who fashion, a laser on its nose. An additional Arduino is also paired with an Adafruit motor shield to control the linear actuator for the neck movement, while a Raspberry Pi drives its built-in LCD screen.

Beyond that, the Maker’s very own robotic dog is radio controlled, made possible through the use of a SparkFun Fio (ATmega32U4) attached to another XBee, a 16×2 LCD, a 1000mAH rechargeable LiPo battery, and a few other components to help keep the robot on its wireless leash. Meanwhile, an Adafruit Class D Amp circuit was used to boost the signal of an embedded MP3 module for voice playback.

Aside from just remote-controlled movements, the DIY canine sidekick features triggered playback of 12 different voices and sound clips from the original TV series, glowing red eyes, a movable head and power switches along its back.

Intrigued? Relive your Doctor Who days by checking out the entire project here, or watching it in action below.

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Phreak out with this Arduino-based blue box

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This is ‘phreaking’ awesome!

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Dating back to the ’60s and ‘70s, blue boxes were electronic devices that generated the same tones used by telephone operators’ dialing consoles, enabling users to make free long-distance calls. While they may have become obsolete, a site by the name of Project MF allows users to make blue box-like calls (except that it abides by the law) like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their pre-Apple days.

Maker Steve Lodefink and his son Harlan, who became interested in vintage computing and phone phreaking, recently decided to create a slick phone-tone generator from scratch that they could use with Project MF. The unit itself was based on an earlier Arduino BlueBox by Nick Poole.

In case you were wondering, the Maker had turned an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), a keypad and a buzzer into what he dubbed a “Rainbow Box” that emulated five different phone phreaking tone generators. These components were all housed inside an aluminum enclosure, covered with some masking tape and slapped with 2600 Magazine stickers to give it the full vintage look.

In the latest iteration of the device, the father-son duo had configured their DIY blue box to unlock and listen to a bunch of old recordings of DTMF music, interviews with blind phone phreaking pioneer ‘Joybubbles’ and other relics, Boing Boing reveals.

Building an automated plant watering system with Arduino

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This DIY solution will prevent you from killing another houseplant.

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If you’re heading out of town for a long weekend and don’t want your plants to wither while away, sure, you can always ask a friend to swing by and do the chore for you. Or, you can simply devise an AVR powered automated system that will do it for you.

Created by JMoon Technologies, the project is comprised of an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), a flow and soil moisture sensor, as well as a micro plastic submersible pump that is placed inside a bucket or tank of water.

Inside the pot, the Arduino communicates with the moisture sensor to determine whether the soil is dry and in need of some watering. If so, this triggers the submersible pump, which begins to dispense water to the plant. After a half liter of H2O flows to the plant, the accompanying moisture sensor will once again check to see if a sufficient moisture level has been achieved. If not, it continues the hydration process. Otherwise, the small pump is turned off and the sensor returns to monitoring the soil until it dips below the threshold again.

With spring officially underway, an automated system like this one will surely come in handy to help keep those budding plants alive. Want one of your own? Head over to the project’s page here.

Arduino makes an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon

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One young Maker had the chance to show off her Arduino-powered Wildfire Warning System to Jimmy Fallon. 

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An Arduino Uno was the unexpected guest on The Tonight Show last Friday. That’s because 14-year-old Maker Sahar Khashayar had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to show off her latest project, the Wildfire Warning System, as part of Jimmy Fallon’s “GE Fallenventions” segment.

As its name would suggest, the ninth grade student recently devised an inexpensive device capable of detecting wildfires (and house fires, too) and sending a text alert to emergency personnel before flames rage out of control. In search of a solution, Khashayar wanted to build something that was not only cheaper than most systems, but could detect multiple types of fires and inform authorities should a situation arise.

With that in mind, the young Maker configured her $50 device with monitoring heat, smoke and infrared detection. To do so, she employed a gas/smoke sensor for carbon monoxide and other gases, a temperature sensor for heat and an infrared sensor for light waves. These sensors were then connected to an Arduino Uno (ATmega328).

Beyond that, the Maker used a pair of circuit boards — one for the sensor trio, the other for a Bluetooth module. With a little programming, she created an algorithm that sends a text message via Bluetooth to a smartphone when a possible fire is discovered. Khashayar even designed her DIY system with flexibility in mind, meaning owners can manually change the thresholds that trigger a warning notification to better suit their environment.

With a working prototype in hand, the Maker isn’t stopping there. In the near future, she hopes to include GSM communication to allow for messages to be sent across longer distances, and perhaps even communicate with one another through the woods, fields or neighborhoods.

So, do you think funny-man Fallon knew what an Arduino was? Well… sort of. “I know what the Arduino Uno is… (shrugs)… Arduino Dos, Quattro, Tres… all of them… I love Arduinos.” Watch the entire demonstration below!

This device lets you know how long your office’s coffee has been sitting out

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Don’t know how old that coffee is? BrewDoo does.

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In the morning, the coffee tends to go pretty fast throughout the office. However, as the day goes on, caffeine consumption often dwindles down a bit. And when it’s time for that late afternoon pick-me-up, it’s sometimes difficult to guess just how long the coffee has been sitting in the pot. Luckily, Maker Paul Kerchen has devised a solution to keep track of that.

“I had two design constraints: no modifications to the brewing system were allowed and the device had to be simple to use. The company I work for leases their brewing equipment from a coffee supply company, so even permanently fixing anything to the brewing unit or carafes was out of the question, let alone hacking into the wiring or mechanical parts of the system. This meant that making it as simple as possible to use was imperative, because it would have to rely on the coffee drinkers of the office to be diligent about telling the device whenever a pot was brewed,” Kerchen writes.

How the BrewDoo works is pretty straightforward: After fresh coffee is brewed, a timer tasked with tracking each respective pot (in Kerchen’s case, his office has two carafes) is triggered by pressing a button to reset the brew timer. Once reset, an RGB LED will immediately display green, and over the course of an hour, will gradually transition to yellow and eventually red — meaning “don’t drink!”

Meanwhile, an LCD display reveals the time that has lapsed since each timer was reset. What this does is takes the guesswork out and provides a user and their colleagues an at-a-glance indication of the coffee’s age. In the event that a pot’s timer hasn’t been reset in four or more hours, the device will turn off the LED for that pot and show a question mark on its screen. This is basically BrewDoo’s way of saying, “I don’t know… you’re on your own!”

Though BrewDoo was prototyped using an Arduino Uno, his final version was built around an ATmega328 based custom board. Since the Maker’s company leases their coffee equipment, he decided to fabricate an enclosure that was cut with his CNC machine using g-code that he wrote from scratch. The casing is attached to the machine via a pair of hard-drive magnets and powered by an old Motorola cellphone charger.

Want a BrewDoo for yourself? Head over to the project’s official page here.

Play real music with an ATmega328

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Maker creates a slick six-voice AVR wavetable synth song machine.

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What originally began as an 8-bit guitar simulator has evolved into a sophisticated six-voice music player running capable of running on an ATmega328 MCU. Maker Enrico Colombini wanted to see how far he could get with only a few resistors and capacitors, and so, selected an Arduino Uno to do the trick.

The project, which is dubbed play-v6, is an open-source synthensizer that can be programmed in plain C in Atmel Studio 6 and the Arduino IDE. Using only a tight 512-cycle CPU loop, the device is capable of producing six independent 8-bit voices with individual note volume and a play-time voice mixer, a 31.25 kHz sampling frequency oversampled at 62.5 kHz for better quality and filtering, as well as emitting both built-in music from Flash and uploaded tunes from RAM memory.

play-v6 can function as both a standalone device and via USB-Serial remote control. Beyond that, it is equipped with an adjustable tempo and up to 16 selectable instruments — each with its own waveform and ADSR envelope.

“It’s pretty sweet to get six channels of 31.25 kHz sampled 8-bit audio running on a 16MHz chip. The code underlying it works through some tricky optimization in the sample update routine (UpdateVoiceSample() in play.c if you’re reading along) and by carefully prioritizing the time critical elements,” Hackaday’s Elliot Williams writes.

Aside from simply playing embedded music, the package also includes several system-independent tools. With these, Colombini’s project can act as a compiler that converts sheet music into a compact block of binary data, an instrument generator that creates new or modifies existing sounds to emulate everything from a guitar to an accordion, and an auxiliary tool that to prompts firmware tables. The Maker notes that a music packer is required to store music into the Flash memory of the Arduino, so that it could be played without a USB-computer connection.

Additionally, a table generator is responsible for producing a note table that play-v6 employs to generate the correct pitch (frequency) for a given note. What’s more, it creates the tempo table that controls each musical setting and for how long an 1/64 interval will last. Doing the slow math as infrequently as possible lets Colombini make his timing. For instance, the pitch is updated once every two PWM samples, I/O and other auxiliary player tasks every eights samples, and the sound’s dynamic volume envelope is only recalculated every 48 samples.

“The table generator adds comments in player\tables.c indicating the pitch error for each note, assuming an accurate microcontroller clock. Unfortunately the Arduino Uno uses a cheap and imprecise ceramic resonator instead of the usual crystal. This could add a pitch error up to about 20 cents, but it does not affect the relative pitch between different notes, so unless you are a trained musician with an ‘absolute ear’ you will probably be unable to tell the difference,” the Maker concludes.

Interested? Head over to the project’s official page to learn more, or watch it in action below. (Nice find, Hackaday!)

Creating an Arduino-based, 3D-printed robot

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Maker designs a DIY four-wheel robot for less than $50.

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Maker Miguel Angel Lopez had been on the lookout for a mini, inexpensive robotic vehicle that he could tinker with; unfortunately, his searches came up short. So in true DIY fashion, he decided to build his own with the help of 3D printing and Arduino.

Dubbed WatsonBot, the four-wheeler is comprised of several 3D-printed components including its undercarriage, front and rear bumpers, and central pillars between the wheels on each side. In order to power up his design, the Maker added an Arduino Uno (ATmega328), an Arduino Motor Drive Shield and a recycled RC car battery — all of which he had lying around his home.

Beyond that, Lopez obtained an infrared sensor proximity that enables Watson to “see” in front of him. For the next version, the Maker notes that at least two more sensors will be implemented to let the bot know what’s going on along its sides as well.

With a couple of nuts and screws, and finally a little programming of the Arduino, WatsonBot was good to go. Those wishing to create a DIY robot of their own can head over to his Thingiverse page here.