The power of Arduino

Some days ago I received the new Arduino VideoGame Shield. It comes with instructions on how to solder the parts, and to build it yourself is surely a pleasure. Today, I could test the tv output, and it works really great! With compatibility with Wii Nunchuk (up to two) and sound output (currently not working in my case, but I think it is a software issue), the shield represents an open platform for game development... I hope to get back soon with some of my homebrewed solutions and hopefully fun!
Tinker on!

Back to tinkering...

This message just to inform you that after an extremely busy period at work, I'm back to tinkering! Currently working at designing my own joystick for playing arcade games...

Arduino + NXT: it's alive!

Yesterday I finally tested my way to have Arduino control a LEGO Mindstorms Intellingent Brick. The possibilities are endless, once a proof-of-concept is made. And this is what I did exactly.
First, I developed a voltage reader for NXT using the instructions provided in the book "Extreme NXT". It is not hard, the tricky part is to build the cable, at the end - and some soldering. Then, I used the same principle to read the output from an Arduino digital port, so that it was interpreted by the NXT brick and used to drive some sound.
Currently, the system recognized "high" and "low" voltage as an input "virtual touch" sensor. I'll make experiments to understand how far it is possible to go, but the road is open... :-)
As soon as I'll package a good sketch + NXT code, I'll post it for your convenience.
Stay tuned!

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part III

I finalize the instructions and published them on Instructables!


Displaying Twitter feed without a PC! - More DIY How To Projects

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part II

Finally, I could finalize the project with a nice proof of concept (thanks to my wife who found a good box). This is what it is in a formula: Arduino + Ethernet Shield + LCD Display = Twitter LCD Reader! Practically speaking, you can use this object to read a public Twitter feed and display the last message on the LCD. It's plug-and-play, you just need to connect it to your home router (and select the RSS feed related to a Twitter account). Clearly, there's a lot more you can do, like making it completely wireless (with WiFi Shield and batteries, but the price will go up quite a lot), or read whatever RSS feed you like (with minor software modifications)...
Here is the final result, I'm going to prepare a full instructable and publish on the web soon...

Towards smarter Mindstorms...

Tonight I made another pass towards maximizing the capabilities of my LEGO Mindstorms! After some days to collect the material, I was able to realize a "RJ-12-like" connection cable compatible with the sockets of the NXT Brick. I used the instructions on the book "Extreme NXT: Extending the LEGO MINDSTORMS to the Next Level" by M. Gasperi and P. Hurbain. At the end it was not as difficult as I imagined, and now I have one "open" cable that I can replicate easily... the possibilities for usage are endless. The first idea coming to my mind is Mindstorms+Arduino. I'll keep you posted on further developments!

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part I

Some days ago, I found several websites mentioning the possibility to use Arduino microcontroller to drive a LCD display to show Facebook and Twitter updates, or the like. I considered this a good idea, but in almost all the solutions, updates are read from a PC and then fed to the Arduino via serial connection. I only found a stand-alone RSS reader without PC available, but I couldn't make it work.
Therefore, I thought: "It would be great to make a twitter LCD displayer without the need for a PC, so that it possible to build it and use it in complete freedom!". And I started tinkering... and checking on the Arduino website for the available libraries.
The solution that I designed is the following: to use Arduino + Ethernet Shield as the basic platform, and a LCD display as output. Arduino libraries provided me what I needed: Ethernet libraries would enable me to connect to Twitter website and download the RSS feed of a user, TextFinder libraries would enable be to conveniently locate the tag of the most recent tweet, and LCD libraries to drive the LCD. Between yesterday and tonight, I developed a simple proof of concept, finding worst difficulties in having a reasonable output on the LCD, but now everything is working!
In the next posts I'll provide further information, schematics and the code; for the time being I'm not using DNS, displaying the last tweet only and the code needs some polishing - but the system works impressively well... and WITHOUT PC!!!

Recycling and repurposing

It's some weeks that I'm thinking to whether there's a good usage for the stuff we send to trash. Differentiating is the way the region I live in proposes to reduce the amount of waste we generate, but I'm interested in something beyond such concept: is it possible to recycle such stuff AT HOME? Through several brainstorms and googling on the Internet, I found that there's a lot of interesting uses we can make of the materials we throw away.
Let's start from computers and electronic devices. A first thing that we may do is to take electronic components and use them for DIY projects. In such scenario, a good source of information is surely MAKE magazine, with several projects requiring different skills. But one can also design its own solutions, usually with the help of some microcontrollers, such as the ARDUINO. Here you can find the homepage of the creator of such a wonderful device!
For computers, I found a good resource here.
Indeed, the keyword in several uses we may have of useless devices and materials is recycling and repurposing. The website I mentioned above proposes several ways to re-use parts of old PCs for a different purpose. But still the concept can be applied to several other devices that we used to employ on a day-by-day basis and now they're broken or substituted by newer ones. In several cases, the design of old devices was by far more inspiring and pleasant of the corresponding "new" versions.
This concept opens the floor to a whole new world of interesting ideas, several of those which can involve kids, too! For example, papercraft: we destroy tons of paper each year, while paper is the most "repurposable" material of the world! Look at this websites, like Papercraft Museum or the wonderful Flying Pig (yes, they can be animated!!!), and you'll get the idea.
And while writing this post I started to feel the need for taking back the old electronics I had when I was a child... but this is another story. Stay connected for more!

Low cost guitar amplifier

I was actually very curious to understand how it is possible to build a low-price guitar amplifier, and browsing through my old numbers of MAKE I found some good schematics of simple designs to build such amplifiers with around 5$ of budget.

Yesterday I implemented a cracker box amplifier, such as the one described here on MAKE website. I decided to use a breadboard to be more flexible, overall it took me three hours - but it was worth: the clean sound is very good, distortion is reasonable. Everything is built on the low power LM386 amplifier, which does a real good job nearly for free!

Globally, the cost is around 17 euros (I bought the stuff from a nearby electronic market, probably it is possible to get lower prices...). Design depends from the people implementing it, on the left you can see mine! :-)

If you are interested in some additional figures, go check my website.

My first post

Hi! This is my very first post to my newly opened blog.
Here I'll post my ideas and activities for my free time, including DIY projects, online gaming, Internet services and networking.
Stay tuned!