Yes, the hardware revolution is upon us

The current hardware revolution is characterized by ubiquitous wireless broadband (Internet of Things) and reasonably priced equipment including processors, memory and sensors.

As the folks at True Ventures point out, it is a great time for Makers and the DIY community to tinker with hardware, since building factories is no longer a prerequisite for building products.

“Add to the mix emergent technologies such as 3D printing and inexpensive laser cutters that put prototyping capabilities onto a kitchen table and we suddenly are facing an extraordinary revolution in hardware-based innovation,” explained Jon, a True Ventures exec.

“This is a tectonic shift that is going to drive the next wave of industrialization — one that is more nimble, adaptable and rapidly evolving. One that is as much based in software as it is in assembly lines.”

According to True Ventures, the past 150 years were about the economics of labor and mass production. The present? Information flow, data and analytic platforms are the new tools augmenting the lathes, pneumatic hammers and assembly lines of yesteryear.

“Investors have historically shied away from hardware, but we have long believed these enormous forces will change the industry and the world,”  Jon continued. “True Ventures has been early and big investors in the burgeoning hardware and device wave.”

Indeed, True Ventures was an early investor in [the Atmel-powered] MakerBot back in 2010 and have since helped fund a number of hardware start-ups.

Jon also noted that True Ventures believes we are only at the very beginning of the hardware revolution, with the world eagerly awaiting new devices and new platforms.

“We need a large scale device control and management platform that enables configuration, addressability, access, registration, tracking. We are still in desperate need for advance control plane software that will enable features in robotics like sense and avoid, swarm coordination, traffic management, ideally across device types,” he added.

“Some of the platforms we’ve seen will literally blow you mind at first glance. New devices will create a entirely new view into our world, from the nano to the galactic, from the human body out into the oceans, the atmosphere, space and beyond. We expect brilliant things to come in the years ahead. Welcome to the hardware revolution.”

The full text of “The Hardware Revolution is Upon Us and Why it Matters” is available here on the True Ventures blog.

This pop-up electronic DIY book is powered by Arduino

A Maker by the name of Antonella Nonnis has created a unique interactive electronic book powered by two Arduino boards. The book, titled “Music, Math, Art and Science,” was inspired by the work of Munari, Montessori and Antonella’s very own mother.

“The book contains movable parts and uses the electrical capacitance of the human body to activate sounds and lights and other sensors like a button for the math page,” Nonnis explained in a recent blog post.

“The pages [were designed] using recycled materials that I collected during years in London (paper, fabrics, LEDs, resistors, wires, foil paper, glue, cardboards). It [is] powered by two Arduino Diecimilas (Atmel ATmega168): one controls the paper pop-up piano and the other controls the arts and science page. [Meanwhile], the math [section] runs autonomously with 2 3V cell batteries.”

The two Arduinos can be powered with 2 9V batteries, although Nonnis says they are more stable if run off a USB via a PC.

The above-mentioned book was given by Antonella as a birthday present to her 6-year-old niece Matilde. Additional information about the DIY pop-up can be found here on the official page of Antonella Nonnis.

1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg (Part 3)

RvK: Around 2000 it became clear to me that too few stakeholder were negotiating this paradigm shift. IoT literally is, without exaggeration, about global domination for whoever who ensures inter-operability through his standards, protocols and legal formatting. It must be a public IoT if we want to ensure the largest and most inclusive playing field of free men, women, animals and machines who through the best possible resource allocation and decision-making are able to live in harmony with each other and the environment. 

For the past 10 years I have been talking to political and civil servant decision makers. My story was and is that this transparency and full traceability is not an attack on their system. In fact they played a vital role in providing democratic tools such as education, libraries, relatively open access to knowledge. Yet they have no more agency in this current age. A large majority in the previous Chinese government were engineers. The new Premier is a chemical engineer. The country is already run like Google (which has about the same ration engineers/non-engineers). In the West our politicians are fundamentally unable to grasp that their skills and toolsets (and ego’s) have become irrelevant. The civil servants I talk to understand they have no more managerial role in the (semi) autonomous grids they have build themselves, but do not want to let go for fear of losing prestige, a pension, a “position.” Throughout history such paradigmatic shifts have led to revolution, breakdown and loss of life and resources. It is the task and duty of the current IoT engineering community to help these forces understand that we can facilitate their skillsets to move over into more networked organizations.

TV: Describe the foundation of the IoT consortium? Why is it important for organizations in technology to map to these requirements ensuring such use-cases are adopted? What is the integral center-piece? Any rule of thumb such as aligning with Efficiency? Cost? Experience? Customer? or Multi-Faceted?

RvK: This is indeed a key issue. It is about the nature of value. No one is making money with IoT at the moment beyond the boring low hanging fruit of optimizing, efficiency and pre-pre figuring out predictive maintenance; nickles and dimes. These do add up of course on a global scale but even there at one moment every object is tagged with a barcode, QR code, NFC, RFID, monitoring device. Cisco has grasped the implications and is selling its hardware and is moving into output based business models, occupying the very moments where the data becomes meaningful to the customer entangling customer relation management of their client clients with their own formats of making the data legible to them in the first place. Imagine a giant like Cisco having to go through the nitty gritty of identifying 21 use cases (including the ‘smart toilet’) and imagine the savvy people trying to sell that to the Board as their only way of survival: trying to get through the next three to five years making pennies of these use cases, just to stay afloat in order to be the new hegemony in a world that has become fully traceable by then. Quite a feat I’d say.  The real value of IoT will only be visible if it is embraced, trusted and really wanted by the people. One can imagine a business model of providing neighborhood servers, amassing all data anonymous, selling or auctioning it to providers who enrich it and play back scenarios that you might want to buy into on the full spectrum from housing to mobility, from food to health, from better sleep advice to matchmaking skill sets and providing work (not ‘jobs’).

TV: The appeal for IoT has taken the stage globally now. How are you involved in the IoT China Consortium and what are the drivers regionally? Do they have distinct differentiators across other regions for IoT? 

RvK: I was asked to moderate the first IoT Conference in Beijing in 2010. In the conversations prior to that I realized from the questions how savvy the Chinese organizers were. No wonder given the fact that most top politicians are engineers. In 2005 a Whitepaper on RFID was published. It was released by 15 Ministries and Commissions, including the Ministry of Science and Technology. To build that level of integration between your Ministries means that the channels to communicate and understand a technological paradigm shift underlies the entire structure. The same might be said to be true of the US, but with a difference that in the US half your tax dollars go to the military which is building a similar structure (as we see now in the revelations of Manning and Snowden) but fully closed without any sense that this cybernetic harness could be used for something else then security and isolating data.

In fact, negotiating with the top military is what needs to happen fast by the top IoT US companies – Cisco, IBM, Google, Apple, GE, Microsoft, or else they will suffer greatly from the lack of trust that globally is beginning to take shape. And as we know, trust is the key to making money and adding value in IoT. Imagine if they could do what RAND did after WWII, take the entire field to a new plane: space in their case. Imagine that negotiations could start on how the entire USA, or maybe even the whole world, could benefit from opening up this military infrastructure and use it for sharing and cooperation?

For the past two years I have been involved in helping to program and shape the IOT China Conference in Shanghai and I have been struck by the enthusiasm and the positive attitude towards monitoring – and why should that not be? IoT can help clean the air, provide better food from farm to fork, solutions to the crazy car ownership notions, streamline energy from infrastructure to devices (why should you ‘own’ your washing machine? Is that what life is about? ‘Owning things?). 

My point is very simple and I make it everywhere. If we want a better balance between humans, animals, resources and the planet we should take control of infrastructure that should be fully open, modular and public. All data coming from that platform should be open to the public to build better services and better iterations of the infrastructure. I think I can safely say that the Chinese leadership also knows that if it wants to make full use of the creative potential of this younger generation, that it should stop any kind of censorship on content level, but precisely open all data sets and allow all stakeholders to work in the public interest. If all is in the open, it is very difficult to be corrupt or to isolate data for a long time. Building the best balance between open and closed on a platform will be the biggest challenge. Whoever gets that right will have the hegemony in the 21th century.

TV: What vertical industry or player do you see playing a major role in fulfilling at least a major part of IoT concepts then reciprocating this back to the customer?

RvK: Given the current global crisis the focus is not so much on the home and housing, but I think about the Connected Car. The revenue streams are as solid as possible. The younger generation is buying less cars, but still sharing them. Fleet management is relatively stable. China and Africa are growing markets. Automotive is both a vertical as well as a horizontal. It makes it possible for Apple for example to sell hands free Siri across a range of brands. Google can sell its expertise of autonomous driving. Synching data from home, work, and even ehealth with the sensors in the car allows for the ‘seamless’ experience. People like driving cars, they won’t easily give up this sense of ‘freedom’ (even if they are in traffic standing still in most mega-cities).

TV: What are the differentiators between IoT, IoE, Industrial Internet? Do you see an overlap, is there a need to coin the evolution into a unified technological disruption?

RvK: Internet of Things is a term coined by Kevin Ashton that was timely and productive, and it still is. To the researchers doing ubicomp, pervasive computing and ambient intelligence it must be a bit sour that people start googling ‘Internet of Things’ and are not finding their work. So yes, there is a huge overlap between the cybernetics from mid last century, McLuhan, Mark Weiser, the pervasive and calm computing groups and AmI (ambient intelligence). The new terms coined by the big boys is just marketing. Smart Planet, IoE, Industrial Internet have the same roots. The focus might be slightly different. IBM sees the smart city as the business model for IoT (just lease everything in a gated community), Cisco wants to draw attention away from end to end connections only and focuses on intelligence at the edge of the network, in the devices (one can imagine routers that could be enhanced with robotic qualities; drone routers), therefore the ‘Everything’ and in a mail conversation I had with GE on the name, that I thought was retro leaving out all the DIY, Maker movement, Kickstarter, open hardware and bottom up qualities of IoT, I was informed that with that name they refer to huge and mission critical infrastructure and services thinking very little of that messiness on the ground. I think such thinking is a huge mistake. There is no more top, down, middle. We are in the network now and becoming a supernode means that you take each and every stakeholder (even to the level of one/the super-empowered individual/lone entrepreneur) extremely serious.

TV: We have seen how Social Networks changed things from all places. How does IoT affect culture, poverty, business, and earthly things such as humanity? What does it take for this to clearly show?

RvK: We see the effects most clearly in the fact that the creative elites are able to organize with cheap tools on the web now. In fact, Council too is just a website and I post everything myself. Membership is free and all the Knowledge Partnerships I have done so far are done without money, simply swapping logo’s. We see it in organized and semi organized networks such as Anonymous, Wikileaks and all kinds of new initiatives on Kickstarter, itself a good example of bottom up funding for those without resources like money, heritage or institutional power. The Internet and IoT is a meritocracy. All you need is time, intelligence, focus and perseverance, belief and hope maybe too. The cracks in the all old system power – banking, government and security agencies, hereditary forms of authority – are beginning to show because as a bright geek or activist you are no longer dependent on their ‘salons’, ‘projects’, ‘creative industries’.

You just start your own team and if you are good the brightest will find you, immediately or eventually, like in the Coolio song ‘I’ll see you when you get there’. What this means for the world? Only good things, a thorough shift from forces of competition, to forces of cooperation and sharing. Monitoring resources eventually eradicates corruption and mafia (this is already happening). There is no longer a role for the state, nor the current actors that make up states. The future is in ‘platforms’ and a Steve Jobs model of dedicated devices talking to particular platforms where citizens manage services, taxes and identities. Again it is our task to help the current actors to see this as a logical and normal generational and technical operation that they should not stall or perceive as a threat, but welcome as a joint responsibility of much more stakeholders.

TV: How can a business line manager, Executive for Engineering, CEO, or Founder take evolve a product or business in to IoT centric characteristics and IoT customer-centric experience?

RvK: For the past two years now I have posted a course on Internet of Things on a Dutch portal for courses where people that are working go to find out to learn about the latest trends. They flock to courses on social media and Twitter but so far I have no takers, none at all!  After a while I realized that if you are working or running a business you do not see ‘IoT’, no you simply start to worry or be a bit surprised that you see clients you never saw before, new types of customers that come for a problem or a solution that does not fit your current business model. The trick is to go and talk to your competitors now as they probably experience the same issue with your service or product and jointly look for IoT type of solutions, taking it together to a whole new level.

From that point on you lower structural costs to a minimum as you share them and compete on issues tailored to specific needs of clients. It is for these kinds of situations, as well as for in house consultancy: talking to basically everybody in the company – that we set up IoP Limited in London recently with Lorna Goulden (ex Philips), Martin Spindler (specializing in energy) and Alex Deschamps Sonsino (ex Arduino and Tinker, now Goodnight Lamp and IoT Meetups London). We have learned that basically the major issue is the balance between good old fashioned change management  and technical potential in every given business, that will determine the successful implementation of new business models.

This concludes Atmel’s 1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg.  View Part 1 and Part 2.

1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg (Part 1)

1:1 Interview conducted by Atmel’s Tom Vu with Rob van Kranenburg, IoT-A Stakeholder Coordinator, Founder of Council, and Adviser to Open Source Internet of Things, osiot.org.

TV: Why IoT-A? There are a multitude of IoT consortiums important to forging the progress of this next era of connective technology. Why is it important to the general business and mainstream? Why so many consortiums? Will it eventually roll up to one?

RvK: In systemic shifts the next normal is at stake. Of course you have to believe that IoT is a systemic shift first. Paradoxically, it is precisely the fact that we see so many contenders and consortia – no one wants to miss out or be left behind – that IoT is moving from being a vision to a business proposition. The success of the device as a standard – the Steve Jobs approach to controlling hardware, software, connectivity, app store; what goes in and what goes out and who it is friends with – has been an eye opener.

Patrick Moorhead writes in his Forbes piece that “the stunning success of smartphones, followed by similar success for tablets, has pushed the standardization opportunities for next generation infrastructure into play for the top tier of visionary companies”¹, listing among others IBM Smarter Planet, Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, Google, IPSO Alliance, ARM, International M2M Council, IoT-A (Internet-of-Things Architecture), and Intel’s Intelligent Systems Framework (ISF).  Software as a service, could only come into existence with the Cloud: “In the 90s, storage disks of less than 30GB capacity were incredibly expensive. Today, thanks to innovations in silicon technology, we are able to get high capacity storage disks at a nominal cost.”² In the early 2000s we see the first experiments with real-time feedback.

In an earlier post you mention Formula 1. In 2002 Wired published a piece on sailing and the America’s Cup: “We’re trying to find patterns, to see that one set of conditions tends to result in something else. We don’t know why, and we don’t need to, because the answer is in the data.” This a programmer talking, a programmer and a sailor: Katori is writing a program that crunches the measurements and creates a “wind profile number an implied wind,” a wind an implied boat can sail on, as sailing, so long an intuitive art, has become a contest of technology: “Sensors and strain gauges are tracking 200 different parameters every second and sending the information across Craig McCraws OneWorld’s LAN to its chase boats and offices. Then the info gets dumped into a Microsoft SQL database, where it’s sifted to pinpoint the effects of sail and hardware experiments. Unraveling all the input is, in the words of OneWorld engineer Richard Karn, “nearly impossible.” And that’s not all: every day for the past two years, five OneWorld weather boats have headed out into the Gulf to harvest data.”³

I remember how struck I was by that notion of an “implied wind.” Before that notion there was the “real” and the “digital,” two concrete and separate worlds. You could argue that prior to that there was the “real” and the “surreal” or spiritual world. Large groups of people historically have been animists. To them objects do have stories, hold memories, are “actors.” Things are alive in that vision. Introducing this notion of implied, it became clear that it was no longer about the relation between the object and the database, materialized in a “tag,” but that the relation itself was becoming an actor, a player in a world where you did not know why, and you could nor care less why or why not – you wanted to gather data. There is “something” in it.

Grasping this key paradigm shift, it then becomes clear that the stakes are very high. In 2001, Steve Halliday, then vice president of technology at AIM, a trade association for manufacturers of tagging (RFID) technology, interviewed by Charlie Schmidt claimed: “If I talk to companies and ask them if they want to replace the bar code with these tags, the answer can’t be anything but yes. It’s like giving them the opportunity to rule the world.”⁴ Since then the most publicized attempt to create one single architecture, an Object Name Server, is the story of the RFID standard called “EPC Global” -two standard bodies EAN and UCC merging to become GS1 in 2005. In a bold move that no regulator foresaw, they scaled their unit of data from being in a batch of 10,000 and thus uninteresting for individual consumers to that of the uniquely identifiable item.

TV: Gartner suggest IoT as a #4 business creation factor for the next 5 years. What are your thoughts? Is this true?

Credit: Image obtained from Gartner’s 2012 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies Identifies “Tipping Point” Technologies, Unlocking Long-Awaited Technology Scenarios

*****

RvK: Depending on how you define IoT, I would say definitely. Internet of Things influences changes in production (smart manufacturing, mass customization), consumption (economy of sharing, leasing vs ownership), energy (monitoring grids, households and devices), mobility (connected cars), decision making processes (shift to grassroots and local as data, information and project management tools come in the hands of ‘masses’), finance (IoT can sustain more currencies: Bitcoin, bartering, and again ‘leasing’) and creates the potential for convergence of the above shifts into a new kind of state and democratic model based on the notion of “platform.”

It is more an operation on the scale of: before and after the wheel, before and after printing/the book. In a kind of philosophical way you could say that it is the coming alive of the environment as an actor, it touches every human operation. The browser is only 20 years old – Mosaic being the first in 1993. The web has dramatically changed every segmented action in every sequence of operations that make up project management tools in any form of production and consumption. Because of this some people in the EU and elsewhere are trying to change IoT name-wise to something like Digital Transition. The Singularity is another way of looking at it. As a concept it is Borgian in the sense that the next big trends: Nano electronics and (DIY) biology are not in an emergent future realm as time to market could increase exponentially as they are drawn into being grasped within the connectivity that IoT is bringing.

Interested in reading more? Tune into Part 2 of Atmel’s 1:1 interview with Rob van Kranenburg. View Part 2  and Part 3

*****

¹ http://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2013/06/27/how-to-intelligently-build-an-internet-of-things-iot/?goback=%2Egde_73311_member_253757229

² http://www.ramco.com/blog/5-cost-effective-ways-to-store-data-on-the-cloud

³ Carl Hoffman, Billionaire Boys Cup. High tech hits the high seas in a windblown battle between Craig McCaw and Larry Ellison. Carl Hoffman sets sail with Team OneWorld in the race to take back the America’s Cup.http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.10/sailing_pr.html

⁴ Beyond the Bar Code – High-tech tags will let manufacturers track products from warehouse to home to recycling bin. But what’s great for logistics could become a privacy nightmare. By Charlie Schmidt, March 2001.http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/400913/beyond-the-bar-code/

Arduino-Lego DIY book hits Amazon

Jon Lazar has penned an instructional book for Makers that describes how to use various Atmel-powered Arduino boards in a wide variety of LEGO projects.

“Once the list of projects was decided, some needed to get approval. [So] I began work on the non-licensed projects while reaching out to the IP holders of other projects,” Lazar explained. “While some turned down the inclusion of the book, the most exciting email I received was from the BBC allowing me to include the TARDIS in the book.”

According to the author, featured projects include:

• The Android – Turning its head in response to Ultrasonic sensors.
• Ultimate Machine – A machine that turns itself off.
• Twitter Pet – A Karotz inspired LEGO sculpture that reacts to Twitter.
• Crystal Ball – An RFID activated crystal ball that reacts when a wand is waved in front of it.
• TARDIS – Lights and sounds animate the LEGO TARDIS.
• Train Controller – Control LEGO trains with the Arduino.
• Light Sensitive Box – A music box inspired box that will react when exposed to light.

All the projects are described in-depth, says Lazar, providing technical information in terms that are easy to understand.

“It starts from the beginning, teaching the basics and moving on to more advanced techniques, so that anyone can build them. It also includes a list of all parts necessary, so that all the necessary parts can be easily ordered to build them,” he added.

“Arduino and Lego Projects” can be ordered from Amazon for $15.39 in e-format.

The Maker movement is growing exponentially

Do you worry that we’re becoming a culture of technology consumers, rather than a society of creators? Well, so does Larry Magid, a technology journalist who writes for the San Jose Mercury News.

“I don’t expect everyone to be designing the next electric vehicle, killer tablet or even smartphone app or Web page, but I do like it when people – especially children and teens – are actively engaged in creating their own innovations,” Magid opined in a recent Mercury article.

“It doesn’t have to be complicated. It could be as simple as creating your own blog or posting impressive graphics on Pinterest or using some of your digital photographs to create a calendar or picture book. Even posting cool comments on Twitter or Facebook is an act of creation, if you put some thought into it.”

Magid says he is particularly encouraged by the Maker Movement which seems to be growing exponentially by taking advantage of 3D printers, inexpensive microcontrollers, robotics, CAD and the ability to control machines with computers, tablets and smartphones.

Source: Wikipedia

As previously discussed on Bits & Pieces, thousands of hackers, modders, makers and veteran DIYs recently gathered in Silicon Valley to showcase their creations, many of which are powered by Atmel microcontrollers. What did every exhibit have in common? The notion that people can “make” their own things.

“What I liked most about the Faire were all the school and youth projects on display,” he explained. “Working with the UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Hall of Science, the Tech Museum of Innovation and the Bay School, the organizers of the Faire this year showed off their ‘Young Makers’ projects that included student-made microscopes, toys, balloon projects, solar vehicles and much more.”

Magid also highlighted a new book written by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager titled “Invent to Learn: Making, Tinkering and Engineering in the Classroom,” which he described as a “part philosophical treatise, part hands-on recipes and part inspirational.”

Projects outlined in the Maker book range from creating customized projects to programming computers and mobile devices to designing wearable computers such as a biking sweatshirt with flashing turn signals. There is also a section on how to build LEGO robots and advice about incorporating Atmel-powered Arduinos into a wide range of DIY devices. The truth is, we are all Makers to a certain extent, even if some of us don’t know it yet.

“All of us – even Leonardo da Vinci – were late comers as far as the Maker movement is concerned. Our prehistoric ancestors millions of years ago, figured out how to turn stones into tools so that they could make things. Only they didn’t have fairs, books and websites to document the process,” he concluded.

A xylophone-playing robot?!

Makeblock is an aluminum extrusion construction system for DIY mechanics and electronics that can be used to create robots, toys, machines and even art-ware.

Recently, the folks at Makeblock constructed a “Music Robot” to showcase the versatility of its kit, using an Arduino Uno (powered by Atmel’s ATmega328), timing belt, sliding rail, step motor, electromagnet and motor driver.

“So far, the robot can be controlled by [an] application via USB cable installed on [a] computer, [or] by [a] smartphone [using] Bluetooth,” a Makeblock rep wrote in an Instructables blog post. “The special application for Android [devices] is in [the] planning [stage].”

Makeblock – which was recently covered by Makezine – is a startup located in Shenzhen, China.

Additional information about Makeblock’s xylophone-playing robot can be found here on Instructables and here on the official Makeblock forum.

HackEDA is a mashup tool for DIY electronics

HackEDA – powered by Atmel’s versatile ATmega328 – gives Makers the ability to automatically design complete and manufacturable circuits.

“At it’s core, HackEDA is a collection of reusable-sized pieces of electronic designs, along with the knowledge necessary to reuse them in new designs,” HackEDA creator Ben Wilson explained in a recent Kickstarter post.

“The library is available to browse online, you can download the individual bits, as well as create custom circuits by simply selecting the features your project needs. Think of it as a mashup tool for electronics. Now the next time inspiration strikes, there’s that much less between you and the hardware you need to make it a reality.”

Although HackEDA isn’t a tool capable of facilitating a completely original design, it can help to recreate classic projects and arrange them in a unique way.

“[True], there are many circuit designs already on the internet, but they can be difficult to use for a host of reasons. It can be hard to find what you need. They come in varying file formats, some more reusable than others,” Wilson continued.

“Many are incomplete, leaving out part numbers, using components that aren’t available any more, or don’t include good documentation. There may not be a way to give feedback or directly edit the design for the benefit of others. And even if all that weren’t the case, hooking a bunch of circuits together is still an error prone process that can take a while to get right. So here we are. That’s what we want to fix.”

According to Wilson, HackEDA all starts with a library of designs – cool stuff like wireless radios, sensors and motor drivers.

“Then our smart software knows how to make it all work together. Next, integrate with manufacturing to seamlessly transfer the designs to reality,” Wilson noted.

“Designs are [based on] three ingredients, a processor, a power supply,and up to 6 peripherals. Creating a design is as easy as going to HackEDA, dragging a few circuits onto a target board and letting us take care of the rest.”

Additional information about HackEDA can be found here on Kickstarter.

Creating a Hack Bot with Ryan Slaugh

Recently, the Make blog ran a piece on creating a “Hack Bot” by Maker Ryan Slogh.

Although the DIY device may appear to be a simple robotics platform, the ‘bot is fully capable of interfacing with a plethora of sensors and can be easily programmed with sketches, basic or advanced.

The Hack Bot is powered by an Arduino Mega (ATmega1280) securely attached to a Foamcore platform. It features a nice collection of servos, motors and yes, tuna fish cans wheels with rubber bands for improved traction.

Slaugh has also written a pair of software sketches that can be used to properly configure and expand the Hack Bot’s motors and sensors. Both can be downloaded here.

Building an Arduino-powered quiz gaming controller

Jeopardy-style games are fun, but it is always somewhat difficult to prove just who answered that question first.

Enter the Quiz Game Controller, a DIY project based around an Arduino Uno board, which can best be described as a microcontroller based on the ATmega328. It boasts 14 digital input/output pins (of which 6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6 analog inputs, 16 MHz ceramic resonator, USB connection, a power jack, an ICSP header and a reset button.

Aside from the Arduino Uno, additional key components include a project box, 4x LEDs (red, green, blue, yellow), 4x submini phone jacks, 5x 2.2K resistors, pins for soldering connections to the Arduino bin blocks and a hookup wire.

“The ‘lights and sounds’ buzzers need to be modified so that we can bring a ‘button’ pressed signal to the Arduino controller, and then, when appropriate, send a signal to the button to flash lights and play sound. We accomplish the button modifications by cutting the PC board and intercepting the button-press signal,” the ProjectNotions team explained.

“We then activate the lights/sounds by driving the other side of the ‘cut’ line. We bring the two lines (button press, and activate) along with a ground line from the button to the control box with a standard 2.5mm stereo male to male cable. Using a standard ‘project box’ we drill 4 holes to hold LED’s and another hole for the reset button. Then we drill smaller holes for the 2.5mm audio jacks. The Arduino controller is placed in the box, the whole thing is wired together, and we are done!”

Additional information about the Arduino-powered DIY quiz gaming controller can be found here on ProjectNotions.