A sequential transmission is one that only allows you to move up or down by a single gear at a time. They’ve always been the norm for motorcycles, because they’re lightweight and compact. And Formula One cars have sequential transmissions for the same reasons. But unlike motorcycles, which require manual shifting, Formula One cars have lightning-fast electronic systems. To recreate that for racing sims, Carlos Almeida designed this sequential gear shift controller.
Real Formula One cars have paddle shifters, so that drivers can shift while keeping their hands on their steering wheels. This is a little bit different and looks more like a conventional shifter at first glance. It is a large lever that the user can push forward to move up a gear, or pull back to move down a gear. A seven-segment display shows the current gear number.
Most of the mechanical components are 3D-printable and an Arduino MKR1000 WiFi board is the primary component. Moving the shift lever pushes a switch, which the Arduino registers. Almeida developed the sketch using PlatformIO. It sets the Arduino up as a standard USB HID that will work with any racing sim or game, because it sends key presses like any keyboard or gamepad. It doesn’t receive feedback from the PC, so it has to keep track of the current gear and let the user set the number of gears available using small buttons below the readout display.
If you want a physical sequential shifter for racing sims, this will make a great weekend project.
Google’s Arduino-powered devices provide soothing signals
Arduino Team — April 20th, 2022
Our days are full of devices trying their best to grab our attention, from a computer dinging when a new email hits to a smartphones vibrating every time an app wants to sell something. If you’re like most people, the vast majority of those notifications are irritating. But they are still necessary in many cases. To provide more soothing signals, Google turned to Arduino to build these unique devices.
Little Signals is one of Google’s “Digital Wellbeing Experiments,” which are technological concepts and prototypes designed to enhance our lives instead of adding stress to them. Each Little Signals device has a unique way of notifying users about an arbitrary digital event through “calm technology.” For example, one Little Signals device gentle blows air on a plant’s leaves, which could indicate the presence of a new email. Another gently taps on a prescription bottle to alert the user that it is time to take their medication.
Google won’t sell these Little Signals devices, but they did release the code so that you can build your own. Each unit uses a MKR1000 WiFi board to facilitate its function. There are six devices in total: Air, Button, Movement, Rhythm, Shadow, and Tap. Each has a distinct notification technique, but many of them share underlying components. The downloadable package includes STEP files for 3D printing, but it also has instructions for constructing the devices using common household materials if you don’t have access to a 3D printer.
Detecting shapes and gestures has traditionally been performed by camera systems due to their large arrays of pixels. However, Jean Peradel has come up with a method that uses cheap time-of-flight (ToF) sensors to sense both objects and movement over time. Better yet, his entire project is housed within a 3D-printed “Grumpy Hedgehog” that contains not only the sensors, but a highly-interactive 1.44” LCD screen as well.
Peradel’s smart home companion is capable of picking up several different kinds of movements and patterns to perform a wide variety of actions such as sending keystrokes to a PC, controlling a light, or actuating a servo motor. This is accomplished by taking VL53L1X ToF modules, which have a 16×16 scanning array and communicate over the I2C bus. Once the attached Arduino MKR WiFi 1010 has read this data, it can determine if the object (which appears closer on the grid) has moved up, down, left, or right.
In order to make this project a bit more friendly, Peradel designed a small enclosure/stand that houses the VL53L1X near the base. Near the top is a small LCD which shows animated hedgehog faces, the “sensor’s view” of the object, and the associated action being taken.
You can read more about the Grumpy Hedgehog gesture sensor here on Hackaday.io.
One of the first things many makers try to do when they receive a new piece of cool hardware is write a game for it. This is exactly what Johan Halmén did with his Breakout console that uses the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier board and an MKR1000 to both run and display the game.
Breakout typically involves moving a paddle horizontally along the bottom of the screen to bounce a ball that can destroy the bricks above it. However, since the carrier board’s color OLED screen is circular, Halmén had to create a different version of this, which he calls “BreakIn.” His game features a bunch of hexagonal tiles in the middle and a paddle that moves around the outside that is controlled by the onboard accelerometer. This lets the player tilt the device to move their paddle quickly and accurately.
Getting the circular display to work was a bit more of a challenge than a normal square one because coordinates had to be mapped using a bit of trigonometry first. Additionally, figuring out the angle of tilt and the collision geometry took some math as well. But once everything was up and working, the game was very fun to play, as can be seen in Halmén’s demo video below.
This Inspector Gadget hat actually responds to voice commands
Arduino Team — October 31st, 2020
If you ever watched the 1980s Inspector Gadget cartoon, you undoubtedly wanted a hat like his, which can pop out all kinds of useful tools under voice control. Although it won’t allow you to fly off after saying “go go gadget ‘copter,” DJ Harrigan’s replica does produce a spinning propeller and an emergency light with 16 RGB LEDs.
Underneath this 3D-printed hat is a pair of micro servos, with linkage systems that open the top flaps. A standard servo extends the actual gadget. Controlling the device is a MKR1000, and voice commands are registered via a MikroElektronika SpeakUp click board.
While many characters sparked DJ’s imagination for invention and quest for technical skills, one of the earliest was everyone’s favorite 1980’s cyborg policeman: RoboCop, er uh Inspector Gadget! While Inspector Gadget’s gadgets certainly obeyed the laws of cartoon physics rather than real physics, they’re just beyond the edge of plausibility. So in a year long preparation for Halloween 2021, DJ is setting out to make a voice activated hat that can summon real gadgets from his head. No plastic surgery necessary. Some assembly required.
Light[s]well is a voice-controlled custom lighting installation
Arduino Team — September 30th, 2020
Designed by Brian Harms of NSTRMNT, Light[s]well is a beautifully crafted 4’x8′ light installation for a triple-height living room that’s voice-responsive thanks to the Arduino Alexa skill.
Light[s]well is constructed out of 80/20 extrusions and fasteners, with individually addressable LED strips embedded in the channels of the structure. 74 sheets of laser-cut cardstock make up the undulating light-diffusing wave pattern.
According to Harms, 30 LEDs per meter strips were used to give each gap in the cardstock two LEDs per structural metal beam, for a total of six LEDs per gap. The LEDs are controlled by a MKR1000 (via a logic level shifter) along with the Arduino IoT Cloud.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we interact with people, things, and the world around us. We’re calling on the community to use an Arduino Nano or MKR board to build solutions that can help us practice better social distancing, improve queue management, or enable touch-free technologies.
Stepping out from our homes, to go to schools, factories, offices and pursue leisure pastimes all these will need to change as lockdown restrictions are eased. With terms like social distancing, remote learning and remote working becoming the norm, let’s see how your ideas can help the world move forward and rebuild everyday life based on a project in one of these two categories.
Category 1: Touch-Free
Create a solution that can be applied to devices that currently rely upon manually pushing a button e.g. elevators, pedestrian crossings, door entry systems, sanitizer dispensers, etc.
Category 2: Social Distance Enablement and Tracking
Create a solution that will allow individuals to maintain the recommended distance apart (1m to 2m) to safely work in the office, factory, commute to work on public transport, or socially interact in cafes and parks. The time people spend within close proximity to each other may also be a factor considered within the design.
N.B. The purpose of the competition is to create products and solutions that are ready to help people around the world to move forward with their lives and safely emerge from lockdown restrictions, rather than developing medical devices.
Contest Scope and Schedule
As any potential solution may be required to operate in a variety of environments, important factors to consider as part of the design process are reliability, durability, connectivity, and power management — hence the option to base your project on any Arduino Nano or MKR board.
The Arduino MKR Family represents the ideal solution for emerging battery powered IoT edge applications. All of the MKR boards share a common pinout for developers to easily shift between wireless communication protocols with minimal software changes, and in a cost efficient manner.
The Arduino Nano Family offers a tiny format, powerful processors and excellent reliability. All of the Nano boards can run embedded machine learning (AI).
Phase 2: Submit your project — Deadline July 14th, 2020: Submit your project for a chance to win up to $10,000 worth of prizes!
Prizes
We are giving away tens of thousands of dollars in prizes to the top five projects, including product assessment and marketing support to bring your project to market! Our judges are going to pick the best qualifying projects based on the judging criteria outlined in the rules section.
Grand Prize
$5,000 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store $750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation $5,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io
Touch-Free
1st Place — Touch-Free
$1,500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store $750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation $3,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io
2nd Place — Touch-Free
$500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store $750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation $2,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io
Social Distance Enablement & Tracking
1st Place — Social Distance Enablement & Tracking
$1,500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store $750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation $3,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io
2nd Place — Social Distance Enablement & Tracking
$500 voucher for hardware on the Newark online store $750 of pre-manufacturing assessment with Dragon Innovation $2,000 towards product marketing with Hackster.io
This is a guest post from Surrogate, a team of developers building games that people play in real-life over the internet.
We introduced this concept last year, and have launched three games so far. Our final game of 2019 was SumoBots Battle Royale — where players from anywhere in the world can fight real robots in a battle royale-style arena. The aim of the project was to have the game run semi-autonomously, meaning that the bots could self-reset in between the games, and the arena could run by itself with no human interaction. This was our most complex project to date, and we wanted to share some parts of the build process in more detail, specifically, how we’ve built these robots and hooked them online for people to control remotely.
Robot selection
We’ve started our process by choosing which robots we’d want to use for the game. There were a couple of requirements for the robots when making the evaluation:
Are able to withstand 24/7 collision
Easily modifiable and fixable
Can rotate on the same spot
Must have enough space to fit the electronics
After looking at a lot of different consumer robots, maker projects, and competitive fighting bots, we’ve decided to use the JSUMO BB1 robots for this game. We liked the fact that these bots have a metal casing which makes them very durable, all parts are easily replaceable and can be bought separately, and it has 4 independent motors (motor shields included), one for each wheel, which allows it to rotate on the same spot.
We were pretty skeptical of being able to fit all the electronics into the original casing, but we decided to go with this robot anyways, as it had the best overall characteristics. As this robot is easily modifiable, we can always 3D print an extra casing to fit all the parts.
What is the board?
Now that we’ve decided on the robot, it was the time to define what electronics should we use in this build. As usual, it all starts with the requirements. Here’s what we need for the game to run smoothly:
The robot should be able to recover from any position
Can stay online while charging
Supports WiFi network connection and offers reliable connectivity
Easily programmable and supports OTA updates
Can control four motors simultaneously
Based on these requirements we had the following electronics layout in mind:
We had to find a board that is energy efficient, can send commands to motors, supports parallel charging and has a small footprint on the robot size. With so many requirements, finding the perfect board can be a challenge.
Arduino to the rescue
Fortunately, Arduino was there to help us out. They offer a rich selection of boards to fit every possible robotics project out there and have very detailed documentation for each of the boards.
More importantly, Arduino is known for its high quality, something that is crucial for semi-autonomous types of applications. Coming from an embedded software background and having to work with all sorts of hardware, we often see that some features or board functionalities are not fully finished which can lead to all sorts of unpleasant situations.
After looking at the Arduino’s collection of boards we quickly found a perfect candidate for our project, the Arduino MKR1000 WiFi. This board fits all of our main requirements for the motor controls, is easily programmable via Arduino IDE, and due to its low power design is extremely power efficient, allowing us to have a lower capacity battery. Additionally, it has a separate WiFi chip onboard, which solely focuses on providing a reliable WiFi connection, something that is very important in our use case.
Now that we’ve decided on the “brain” of our robot, it was time to choose the rest of the components.
Robust hardware means working software
Something to keep in mind is that when working with hardware, you should always try to avoid any possible risks. This means that you should always over-do your minimal hardware requirements where possible. The reason is — if your hardware doesn’t work as intended, your whole software stack becomes unusable too. Always chose reliable hardware components for mission-critical applications.
Some of our electric components might look a bit overkill, but due to the nature of our projects, they are a critical requirement.
Avoiding the battery explosions
As there is a lot of robot collision involved in the game, we decided to go with a high safety standard battery solution. After evaluating multiple options on the market, we decided to go with the RRC2040 from RRC (Germany). It has a capacity of 2950 mAh that allows us to run the robots for up to five hours on a single charge. It has an internal circuitry for power management, protection features and it supports SMBUS communications (almost like I2C), and is certified for all of the consumer electronics battery standards. For charging, we used RRC’s charging solution designed specifically for this battery and that offers the possibility to feed power to the application while the battery is being charged.
Note: the Arduino MKR1000 has a pretty neat charging solution on the board itself. You can connect the battery to the board directly as the main power source, and you charge it directly through the MKR1000’s micro USB port. We really wanted to use it to save space and have a more robust design, but due to the large capacity of our battery, we couldn’t use it at full potential. In our future projects with smaller scale robots, we definitely plan to use the board’s internal charging system, as it works perfectly for 700-1800 mAh power packs.
Bot recovery
For the bot to be able to recover from falling on its head, we’ve implemented a flipping servo. We didn’t want to have any risk of not enough torque, so we went with DS3218, which is capable of lifting up to 20KG of weight. Here’s how it works:
Hooking everything together
Now that we’ve decided on all of the crucial elements of this setup, it was time to connect all the elements together. As the first step, we figured what would be the best step way to locate all the pieces within the bot. We then 3D-printed a casing to protect the electronics. With all of the preliminary steps completed, we’ve wired all of the components together and mounted them inside of the casing. Here’s how it looks:
It was really convenient for us that all the pins on the board could be connected just by plugging them in, this avoids a lot of time spent on soldering the cables for 12 robots and more importantly, allowed us to cut out the risk of bad soldering that usually can’t be easily identified.
Arduino = Quick code
Arduino MKR1000 offered us the connectivity we needed for the project. Each sumo robot hosts their own UDP server using MKR1000 WiFi libraries to receive their control commands for a central control PC and broadcasting their battery charge status. The user commands are translated to three different PWM signals using Arduino Servo library for the flipping, left and right side motor controllers. The board used has support for hardware PWM output which was useful for us. Overall we managed to keep the whole Arduino code in a few hundred lines of code due to the availability of Servo and Wifi libraries.
The out of the box ArduinoOTA support for updating the code over the WiFi came in handy during the development phase, but also anytime we update the firmware for multiple robots at the same time. No need to open the covers and attach a USB cable! We created a simple Bash script using the OTA update tool bundled in Arduino IDE to send firmware updates to every robot at the same time.
To summarize
It’s pretty amazing that we live in the age where you can use a mass market, small form factor board like the Arduino MKR1000 and have so much functionality. We’ve had a great experience developing our SumoBots Battle Royale game using the board. It made the whole process very smooth and streamlined, the documentation was right on point, and we never had to hit a bottleneck where the hardware wouldn’t work as expected.
More importantly, the boards have proven to be very robust throughout the time. These SumoBots have been used for more than 3,000 games already, and we haven’t seen a single failure from the MKR1000. For a game where you literally slam the robots in to each other at a high speed, that’s pretty impressive to say the least.
We look forward to working with Arduino on our future games, and we can’t wait to see what they will be announcing in 2020!
GesturePod is a clip-on smartphone interface for the visually impaired
Arduino Team — November 6th, 2019
Smartphones have become a part of our day-to-day lives, but for those with visual impairments, accessing one can be a challenge. This can be especially difficult if one is using a cane that must be put aside in order to interact with a phone.
The GesturePod offers another interface alternative that actually attaches to the cane itself. This small unit is controlled by a MKR1000 and uses an IMU to sense hand gestures applied to the cane.
If a user, for instance, taps twice on the ground, a corresponding request is sent to the phone over Bluetooth, causing it to output the time audibly. Five gestures are currently proposed, which could expanded upon or modified for different functionality as needed.
People using white canes for navigation find it challenging to concurrently access devices such as smartphones. Build ing on prior research on abandonment of specialized devices, we explore a new touch free mode of interaction wherein a person with visual impairment can perform gestures on their existing white cane to trigger tasks on their smartphone. We present GesturePod, an easy-to-integrate device that clips on to any white cane, and detects gestures performed with the cane. With GesturePod, a user can perform common tasks on their smartphone without touch or even removing the phone from their pocket or bag. We discuss the challenges in build ing the device and our design choices. We propose a novel, efficient machine learning pipeline to train and deploy the gesture recognition model. Our in-lab study shows that Ges turePod achieves 92% gesture recognition accuracy and can help perform common smartphone tasks faster. Our in-wild study suggests that GesturePod is a promising tool to im prove smartphone access for people with VI, especially in constrained outdoor scenarios.
As previously announced, the Arduino IoT Cloud is an easy to use Internet of Things application platform that enables developers to go from unboxing their board to a working device in just minutes.
To help you get started, we’ve put together a quick project that’ll walk you through connecting a MKR1000 (or MKR WiFi 1010) to the Arduino IoT Cloud.
By the end of the tutorial, you’ll be able to control and monitor your board over the Internet using the Arduino IoT Cloud site.
First, we’ll add the board to the Arduino IoT Cloud as a Thing — a representation of the board in the cloud. We’ll then give the Thing a set of Properties which represent sensors, LEDs, motors, and many other components in the project that you’ll want to access from the cloud.
InfiniTouch: Interact with both sides of your smartphone
Arduino Team — October 19th, 2018
Besides, perhaps a longer battery life, what would make your smartphone experience better? If you said a more versatile interaction method than poking one side with your thumb, researchers in Germany may have just the thing.
InfiniTouch morphs two LG Nexus 5 phones into one, with their touchscreens stacked back-to-back. This allows for not only thumb interaction, but also program control with the four fingers that normally only grip the device. It can even tell what finger your using via a convolutional neural network.
In order to save space, most of the electronics are housed in a separate hardware container, including the phone boards as well as an Arduino MKR1000.
More info is available in the project’s research paper, and a short demo can be seen in the video below.
Control your GoPro wirelessly with an Arduino MKR1000
Arduino Team — July 2nd, 2018
As Arduino boards have revolutionized what people can make at home, you might say that GoPros have done the same thing for portable cameras. Later generations of these devices even feature WiFi capabilities, so with the proper programming, Arduinos like the MKR1000 can be used for control!
In this project write-up, maker Randy Sarafan (AKA “randofo”) takes us through how he was able to set up a MKR1000 to communicate with a HERO4 as well as a HERO5 Session, including sending a “magical” Wake-on-LAN signal to power up the Session camera.
While he’s not the first to control a GoPro using an Arduino, it’s certainly more elegant than methods like hot-wiring a remote or even recording your own voice to speak commands to it remotely!
Arduino goes to college with the new Arduino Engineering Kit!
Arduino Team — May 12th, 2018
We’re excited to announce the Arduino Engineering Kit, the first product released as a result of our new partnership with MathWorks, to reinforce the importance of Arduino at the university level in the fields of engineering, Internet of Things, and robotics.
The Arduino Engineering Kit, which will be available for purchase starting today on the Arduino online store, consists of three cutting-edge, Arduino-based projects and will teach students how to build modern electronic devices – challenging them intellectually and helping them develop physical engineering skills that will better prepare them to enter the commercial market following graduation. In addition to the hardware, after registering online, students and educators will have access to a dedicated e-learning platform and other learning materials. The kit also includes a one-year individual license for MATLAB and Simulink, providing the user with hands-on experience in system modeling and embedded algorithm development.
Following the global success of Arduino CTC 101, a program tailored for upper secondary schools, the Arduino Engineering Kit enables college students and educators to incorporate core engineering concepts like control systems, inertial sensing, signal and imaging processing, and robotics with the support of MATLAB and Simulink programming. These software packages are the base of industry-standard tools for algorithm development, system modeling, and simulation, all of which will be required in their future careers.
Each Arduino Engineering Kit comes with a durable and stackable plastic toolbox for easy storage and years of reuse. Inside the box is an Arduino MKR1000 board, several customized parts, and a complete set of electrical and mechanical components needed to assemble all three projects:
Self-Balancing Motorcycle: This motorcycle will maneuver on its own on various terrains and remain upright using a flywheel for balance.
Mobile Rover: This vehicle can navigate between given reference points, move objects with a forklift, and much more.
Whiteboard Drawing Robot: This amazing robot can take a drawing it’s given and replicate it on a whiteboard.
“We designed the Arduino Engineering Kit the way we would have liked to have learned mechatronics, control algorithms, state machines, and complex sensing when we were in our first years of engineering school: in a fun and challenging way,” said David Cuartielles, Arduino co-founder and Arduino Education CTO. “It’s all about hands-on activities built on top of well-grounded theoretical concepts. But more importantly, after finishing the basic materials, there’s plenty of flexibility to experiment, for the students to deviate and test their engineering creativity.”
What could be better than a lamp that expands with the pull of a control cord? How about one that looks like the Death Star and is controlled with your voice?
That’s exactly what maker Adi Singh created using a popular IKEA lamp and embedding it with an Arduino MKR1000 to take voice commands via Alexa. A stepper motor is tasked with opening and closing the exterior segments, and a solid-state relay turns the light on and off. It also features a spectacular custom paint job, making this lamp/superweapon stand out even more.
You can see the results in the video below as it changes shape and blinks to the soothing sounds of the Imperial March!
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