Posted May 11, 2014 by Chris

"Up until now I’ve been using a photogate sensor and the Camera Axe to take pictures of water and milk droplets. After some research I found many – people – online were using solenoid valves to create droplets and take pictures of them. The big advantage to this method is it’s easy to collide drops which is was very difficult and random using my old method."

Posted May 9, 2014 by Chris

"Trash Talk is a prototype for an inexpensive, mesh-networked, democratic public address system. Each node contains a speaker, a microphone, a radio, and an easy to use single-button interface. To send a message, simply walk up to any node, press the button, and talk."

Posted May 8, 2014 by Chris

In this week’s PyroEDU lesson in our new course: An Introduction To Microcontrollers, we will Build A Cyclops Eye using a microcontroller outputting PWM to some LEDs. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"Another internal module in microcontrollers generates what is called a PWM output. In this lesson, we will explore using these PWM output modules to make a cyclops eye with fading LEDs."

Posted May 7, 2014 by Chris

"The Esplora sketch was modified to poll the joystick (4 directions) and the right button cluster. When they are activated, an appropriate ASCII character is sent via serial to the XBee which sends it to the Uno which controls the head via a Motorshield."

Posted May 5, 2014 by Chris

"We’re exploring a whimsical project to collect breathalyzer data from various locations for use in visualizing local trends in intoxication. This weekend I completed the first step by prototyping simple hardware that reacts to various amounts of booze on the breath."

Posted May 4, 2014 by Chris

"Loki builds upon the software of Seeker and Mr. Roboto, including remote control and diagnostics over WiFi, but adds more capable vision processing, speech recognition, indoor pathfinding (Using A*), basic Artificial Intelligence, and general refinement of the architecture."

Posted May 3, 2014 by Chris

"I wanted to go for a mad science robot look. I really liked pictures of robot face prototypes with electronics sort of bursting from the back. I envisioned control wires coming out from behind a mask and running all around the room to control various things, looking like hair, or veins, or roots, depending on which analogy you wish to use. The face was easy enough to procure; Hobby Lobby sells basic androgenous masks. I also wanted a few animatronic features, like a moving mouth. For this, I took a geared DC motor out of a Billy Bass singing fish."

Posted May 2, 2014 by Chris

"This article describes how to implement a very low bandwidth one way communication channel between an Arduino and an Android device using nothing more than about a meter of magnet wire, a resistor and diode. Links to a software sketch for the Arduino and the Android source code is included."

Posted May 1, 2014 by Chris

In this week’s PyroEDU lesson in our new course: An Introduction To Microcontrollers, we will Build an LED Game using a microcontroller, push button, LEDs and a trimpot. Here’s an overview of the lesson:

"At this point, we have tons of knowledge about microcontrollers, let’s take a break and do something fun: design a game! This game will be a game of skill with push buttons and LEDs."

Posted April 30, 2014 by Chris

"I developed my EEG visualising pendant for use in social situations. The pendant uses EEG (Electroencephalography) signals, which are gleaned from a NeuroSky MindWave Mobile headset."