Hack Job

You can communicate from Flash to an Arduino device by using a proxy. The proxy runs on a machine which is connected directly to the Arduino with a serial connection. Your AS3 code talks to the proxy over a TCP socket, and the proxy talks to the Arduino over the serial connection.This whole setup is made pretty simple by Erik Sjodin's as3Glue library:as3Glue is an ActionScript 3 library that enables communication between Flash/Flex/AIR applications and Arduino boards. It can together with one or several Arduino boards be used to monitor sensors (such as rotary encoders and motion detectors), control actuators (such as LEDs and motors) and interface other electronics (such as RFID readers) from Flash, Flex and AIR applications.The library includes Arduino sketches and ActionScript 3 code examples as well as custom version of the Standard Firmata Arduino firmware and a serial proxy.

After yesterday's fish blimp piqued my interest in quiet flying robots, I stumbled across this teleoperated blimp with a stereo vision system. Called YARB (Yet Another Robotic Blimp), the blimp is controlled remotely from another computer via a wireless connection and onboard firmware.

Raphael Abrams just posted a peek inside his portable hacking lab to the NYC Resistor blog :I like to hack on the go. So I made a charming little mini lab out of a cigar box and some electronic parts. It's got a breadboard, a built-in Arduino, a couple of places to put loose parts and a control panel on one side. The control panel is the best part with LEDs, potentiometers, a switch and a button all mounted on the side of the box. I love it so!

Berto Aussems wrote in again with another modification to the Zoom H2 recorder:Listening to soundrecordings made in the 360 degree surround pattern mode of the Zoom H2, I found out that the directional sensitivity is bad. Even the stereo recording sounds mono. The front/back channel separation is the same story. So I had to turn the microphones in 4 times 90 degree. With 2 crossed disk's on top of the H2, the directional resolution is now much better. Maybe there are other ways to get better results; this is one. I hope to have some discussion with other H2 owners about this theme.I'm not sure how much further you can push the recording quality of this little field recorder, but it's promising to see the results of warrantee voiding efforts like these.

Matthew Karas sent us a hack for creating an iGoogle homepage interface for physical measurement devices. Using an Arduino and a python script, he found a clever way to send real-time sensor data to a Google Gadget, and it doesn't even require having a web server.I managed to hack up an arduino to upload data to google docs in real time. I then created a real time data gadget and sent that to google home page. That way I can monitor a sensor network from anywhere, with minimal cash outlay. I don't need to have a web host. I did it in two evenings.The python code can run on a laptop connected the the Arduino. This script reads sensor data from the device and then posts it to a Google Spreadsheet using the python gdata API. From there, you can easily use the spreadsheet as a datasource for a Google Gadget which is then embedded in iGoogle or wherever you want to view your sensor data.

Trive wrote in about the robochild of a quite unorthodox LEGO/Arduino marriage:It's a self-balacing robot inspired to the well-known Segway. Its brain is Arduino and that's why it's called "Arduway". Arduino is mounted on a hand-soldered board which connects it to two LEGO NXT motors and an Epson gyroscope.Aduino Poet, the robot's creator and a student at the Politecnico of Milan, started a library called Arduino2Lego which aims to provide a simple API for the Arduino to talk to standard NXT sensors and motors. Currently, it looks like it only has an interface for motor control, but the project is open source and with any luck, others will chip in and add more features.

Jon Bennett created a nifty wireless telepresence bot out of a thrift store RC car, a Linksys WRT54GL router running the Open-WRT Linux firmware, a network camera, and a microcontroller. He's built two variations: one controlled by a PIC microprocessor, and the other controlled by an Arduino. You can use whichever processor you are more comfortable with, and make one of your own for very little cost using this guide.

"Ron" Tajima's Wii Balance Board Roomba looks like a fun way to clean the carpet. The idea is that you surf on the Balance Board, leaning forward or back to steer the robot. The video is a little short on details, but he's using a laptop to read the bluetooth data from the Balance Board and then send control signals to the Roomba bluetooth adapter.

Filed under: misc hacks It might not be as elegant or technologically-advanced as a Segway or a motorized unicycle, but this easily constructed 2-wheeled robot might be a fun project for a free afternoon. The heart of the balancing mechanism is an SPDT switch with a button cell attached that reverses the motor when the robot begins to tip in one direction. It's not controllable and it tends to fall over quite a bit, but it's a good starting point and could be refined by lowering the center of gravity or figuring out a simple way to change the motor speed based on how far the robot has tipped over. There are no accelerometers or tilt switches so the components could be sourced from a parts bin, and its simple design definitely leaves a lot of room for improvement.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

We posted David Cranor's Arduino card reader the other day, and today he wrote in with an even better magstripe hack: a way to simulate a card swipe using an iPod an electromagnet. David writes:When the card is swiped past the card reader, the changing magnetic field of the passing flux reversals induce a current in the reader element, which is then decoded into binary bits, and the original data stored on the magnetic stripe is reconstructed.So, in order to emulate a particular magnetic stripe, all we need to do is find a way to recreate the pattern of the way its magnetic field changes as it's being swiped past the reader. How are we going to do this? With an electromagnet!

Instructables user powerpants created a quick and dirty card reader interface with an Arduino. The Arduino decodes the data from the swiped card and transfers it to a PC over a USB serial connection.This instructable shows how to use some freely available code, an arduino, and a standard magnetic stripe reader to scan and display the data stored on magnetic stripe cards such as credit cards, student IDs, etc.I was inspired to post this after reading the intro to magnetic stripe reading and Stripe Snoop that is found in MAKE magazine Volume 1. That tutorial details how to interface a stripe reader to a game port interface, but I have a mac laptop, so I don't have a game port interface!

Check out Daniel Andrade's binary LED clock built using the Arduino. It's well thought out, including controls for setting the time and hibernating with the LEDs off. Each hour and minute digit is represented in binary form, so it's actually fairly easy to read once you get accustomed to it.

Filed under: contests, news[Matt] let us know about the New York City Soldering Championships. They'll be happening during the Ignite talks on July 29th at 7pm. 25 people will race head to head to assemble a fully functional electronics kit. Participants have to register in advance and are encouraged to bring their own iron. The kit hasn't been chosen yet so people can't practice. We hope they at least consider using a few SMD parts just to keep things interesting. Shout out if you're planning to attend or compete!

By passing Nunchuck data to a PC via an Arduino, Melka figured out a way to convert the accelerometer output into a MIDI stream that can be read directly by 3D Studio Max's motion capture engine:

Filed under: misc hacks, daily[Cliff] sent in [N5ESE]'s junk box project page. Most of the projects are amateur radio specific, but one that caught my eye was his capacitance checker. If you've ever been looking through a pile of small, unlabeled caps, you know the value of a capacitance meter. This one is fairly simple and uses the AC setting of your multimeter to indicate the capacitance of the unknown component.Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Filed under: misc hacksUPDATE: EMSL has four more boxes ready to go. If you are in the silicon valley area, pick one up.The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk is essentially a virtual swap meet. A mysterious USPS flatrate box arrives on your door step filled to the brim with random electronics. You remove some pieces that you find interesting or useful. Write about them. Add some items from your own collection, and then ship it off to a recipient you deem worthy. [John Park] was kind enough to send us the box code named Rangoon and here's what we found inside:

Filed under: misc hacks, dailyIf you've ever tried ironing laser printed paper to transfer the toner, you know that it can be slightly frustrating. [Dave] sent in an interesting twist on this method. The laser printer is used to print onto paper from a magazine and then the board and paper are both run through a laminating machine six or seven times. From the writeup, it looks like this technique works great. (You'll probably need a printer with a manual feed tray to get it to print on the magazine paper)Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

I've become so familiar with using standard DC and servo motors for my electronics projects that I've been neglecting a resource that I seem to have an unlimited supply of. There is a mountain of old floppy drives growing in the basement chock full of stepper motors waiting to do a robot's bidding.The benefit to using stepper motors, besides the abundant availability in all sorts of junk electronics from printers to floppy drives, is that they can be controlled in precise increments. The only downside is that they are a little more complicated to use. For the electronics gurus in the room, controlling a stepper motor is probably old hat. For the rest of us, here are some handy links that'll help you resurrect some old peripheral guts.

The original YBox was a nifty little electronic gewgaw that made it easy to make a network appliance that displayed itself on a TV, all fit into an Altoids tin. The kits have been sold out for quite a while, but I'm excited to hear that it's been given a second life in the YBox2 platform.Robert Quattlebaum undertook the task of creating the new version and teamed up with ladyada to help bring the new kits to the hacker masses. It's built around an 80MHz 32KB Propeller chip, supports NTSC and PAL, and comes prepackaged with a bootloader that allows you to upload new firmware over ethernet instead of requiring you to use a programmer cable.