Posted February 22, 2013 by Chris

“I spent part of an afternoon developing a hardware RSS reader (most of my time was spent on the python side of things). It’s pretty simple and uses an AVR microcontroller connected to a computer via a serial cable.”

Posted February 21, 2013 by Syd

“In this article, we will be looking once again to lessen the burdens of every day life by automating some of the tasks which take up our precious time. We will be using Cron, a time-based job scheduler in Linux to periodically run scripts to do things we would normally have to do manually.”

Posted February 2, 2013 by Chris

“Every time I talk about the All Spark Cube people ask ‘so what does it do?’ The features of the All Spark are the reason it was built and sponsored by Adaptive Computing. The Cube was built to catch peoples’ attention and to demonstrate how Adaptive can take a chaotic mess and inject order, structure and efficiency. We wrote several examples of how the All Spark Cube can demonstrate the effectiveness of a complex data center.”

Posted January 27, 2013 by Chris

“The DIYLILCNC project is a free & open-source set of plans for an inexpensive, fully functional 3-axis CNC mill that can be built by an individual with basic shop skills and tool access.”

Posted January 24, 2013 by Chris

“In this article we’ll explore how to use a commercial motor controller board to tell a stepper motor what to do. We’ll also explore some additional functionality of the board including how to setup limit switches as interrupts.”

Posted January 20, 2013 by Chris

“I had always wanted to create a robotic arm and control it with a joystick or something. I had also recently been playing around with the open source 3D program, Blender 2.49 (this does not work in Blender 2.5+). After realizing the potential of Blender’s built in Python scripting capabilities, I figured why not let Blender control it!…So I did!”

Posted January 19, 2013 by Chris

“You may have seen my recent blog post about building a Phone-controlled Robot using Twilio. Since then, I’ve had ideas for new Twilio + Arduino mashups pouring in from the community. Today is the second post in our new series of Twilio Hardware mashups – build your own home automation solution using Twilio SMS, PowerSwitch, Arduino, and PusherApp.”

Posted January 9, 2013 by Chris

“A while back, a few friends and me were joking about what people would do when all the sudden, instead of going back and forth, the cat’s arm would start moving sideways. The idea had been stuck in my head ever since then, and now, we’re about to find out. So, let’s hack a beckoning cat.”

Posted January 4, 2013 by Chris

“The purpose of this project was to create a simple, portable device that would periodically read sensors and then store the sensor data so it could be retrieved later.The result is the HexiLogger, ‘hexi’ because it can support up to six different sensor inputs and ‘logger’ because it will store the input data on a removable SD memory card.”

Posted December 16, 2012 by Chris

“The system uses accelerometers to detect the user’s head tilt in order to direct mouse movement on the monitor. The clicking of the mouse is activated by the user’s eye blinking through a reflective sensor. The keyboard function is implemented by allowing the user to scroll through letters with head tilt and with eye blinking as the selection mechanism.”