Anyone have any cool Arduino projects you've completed?

I've just ordered all parts needed to complete an Arduino Kegerator temperature monitor. I want it to monitor the Air/Beer temps in the kegerator, as well as the air temp of my garage. Also, I'd like it to text/email me if the beer temp gets above a specified temperature.

What have you made lately?

3/2/2011 4:05:11 PM

one of my coworkers and a couple other devs we know in the charlotte area have done a few netduino projects. can't remember what all they've made except one guy made an automatic remote garage door opener

3/2/2011 4:33:12 PM

^based on what? GPS from his phone?

3/2/2011 4:36:32 PM

basically the idea was that he had two garage doors, and there was a partition in between that made it so when he looked into the garage from the kitchen door, he couldn't tell whether the garage door on the other side of the wall needed to be closed. so he had to walk into the garage every time, open a door in the partition, and look to see if the garage door needed to be closed

so, he put a sensor above the garage door that would be able to tell him whether it was open or closed. then through a pub/sub messaging system, the netduino could tell other devices (a PC inside the house or his phone or whatever) whether the door was open, then the other devices (PC/phone/whatever) could broadcast a message back to the netduino to either open or close the garage as necessary

that's my understanding of the project from what he told me anyways

3/2/2011 4:46:09 PM

That's a pretty sweet idea.

3/2/2011 4:46:23 PM

How much is the base Arduino? I'm going to be doing a pet fence pod in the near future but I'll probably work directly with the micro as I have all the stuff to do that anyway.

3/2/2011 5:01:20 PM

Eh, i ordered the arduino a few months ago. It was about $34 IIRC.

3/2/2011 5:05:01 PM

Someone rigged an Arduino to perform the console input into an NES, to make "Console-Verified" tool-assisted speedruns: http://tasvideos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=9580

3/2/2011 5:31:53 PM

I used an arduino and an iobridge to do real time power consumption monitoring in my old place. I followed some other guys tutorial and tweaked it as I went along. Worked well enough. I've been meaning to make an arduino powered led cube that I could use to project a clock or other cool shit in.

3/2/2011 7:20:36 PM

hackaday.com has always had a bunch of Arduino projects on there.

http://hackaday.com/category/arduino-hacks/

3/2/2011 7:25:19 PM

a friend of mine is doing a netduino presentation tomorrow at the next Triangle .NET Users Group meeting

http://www.trinug.org/

Quote :

"Next Main Meeting: Wednesday April 13, 2011 Topic: Netduino with the .NET Micro Framework Netduino is the newest option provided to developers who are interested in taking their knowledge of software and applying it to the world around using physical computing. Like Arduino, the Netduino is an open-source micro-controller that has the capability of controlling lights, servos, motors, a variety of sensors, and more in ways as limitless as the imagination of the developer controlling the direction of the prototype. Unlike Arduino and other micro-controller predecessors, Netduino allows the software developer the ability to to this using the power of the .NET framework. This presentation will introduce you to Netduino and will provide some instruction on environmental setup, demystifying the intimidating factors most software developers have with entering the world of physical computing, and getting started with programming against the Netduino using Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Micro Framework. In minutes you'll be introduced to how your knowledge of .NET can be leveraged to enter the world of physical computing. "

4/12/2011 11:33:37 AM

I really wish it were more well known that these are software AND hardware platforms that are slaved together. If you want to take code someone has written for Arduino and use it on a non-Arduino platform then you have to do a bit of legwork to make this happen.

Which is fine...but the Arduino folks set the platform up so it works in one direction. That is, if you don't want to get your hands messy with makefiles and understanding lower level stuff, you don't have to. But the developers of libraries end up writing code that works with Arduino and isn't so easily transportable to non Arduino platforms.

And it doesn't have to be that way.

4/12/2011 6:09:13 PM

Btw, this is what I'm stepping up to pretty soon for my mcu work

http://www.cutedigi.com/product_info.php?products_id=4407

4/12/2011 8:38:59 PM

http://blog.makezine.com/arduino

4/12/2011 9:30:19 PM

Has anyone bought any starter kits or know of any good places to buy parts?

I have always wanted to tinker around with this kind of stuff but never got a chance to as a CHE. I can program and it looks like fun messing around with small electronic projects. First heard of Arduino awhile back listening to Techstuff but haven't looked at it again until today.

12/5/2011 5:32:47 PM

sparkfun, adafruit, radioshack

12/5/2011 6:15:09 PM

there any low-power, small form factor arduino boards with integrated Bluetooth that anyone knows of?

I'm talking around thumb drive size

12/5/2011 6:24:50 PM

Just part a start-up kit from adafruit. I thought about waiting until Christmas but I'd rather start tinkering now.

12/5/2011 6:49:26 PM

^^

http://www.mdfly.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=&products_id=81&zenid=utbj9ilt3r7fjnetbrlk64j783

[Edited on December 5, 2011 at 9:04 PM. Reason : not an avr but that shouldn't be a problem]

[Edited on December 5, 2011 at 9:05 PM. Reason : a]

12/5/2011 9:03:50 PM

that could be useful, but I was thinking more everything (mcu, bluetooth chip, etc) integrated onto a single board

basically an arduino version of http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/EZ430-RF2560

and realistically I only need bluetooth tx, though if there's a transceiver version for a few bucks more i'm not opposed to that.

12/6/2011 8:54:10 AM

What is it you are trying to do? If you haven't been able to google for it then it likely doesn't exist yet.

What size are you trying to fit it into? What are your capabilities - you trying to buy off the shelf or can you do some board layout/design?

12/6/2011 5:58:24 PM

It's fucking nuts how much processing power is available to the average joe these days for not much money at all.

I want to be part of the next wave of open source hardware development. The Arduino is old hat. I'm still trying to decide which board to leap to, I'm looking at these platforms (and more are sure to come online every day):

http://leaflabs.com/devices/maple/
http://www.st.com/internet/com/TECHNICAL_RESOURCES/TECHNICAL_LITERATURE/DATA_BRIEF/DM00037955.pdf
http://beagleboard.org/bone

1.5 billion Dhrystone operations per second and vector floating point arithmetic for $90?

[Edited on December 7, 2011 at 7:26 PM. Reason : a]

12/7/2011 7:24:34 PM

Cool. i recently started messing with some Xilinx FPGAs for work. I'm working with the MicroBlaze soft processor. Pretty cool, you can even run linux on it. There's all sorts of flavors of higher level soft and hard processors include ARMs, PowerPCs, etc that can be embedded into FPGAs. pretty interesting.

12/9/2011 11:26:51 PM

requested premie bump

10/6/2012 1:40:13 AM

Getting these errors when I try to verify/upload this sketch. Any ideas? I have downloaded the "Time" library.

"temp_time_pde.cpp: At global scope:
temp_time_pde:75: error: variable or field 'print_time' declared void
temp_time_pde:75: error: 'time_t' was not declared in this scope"

Here's my code:

Quote :

" #include <SPI.h> #include <Time.h> #include <Ethernet.h> byte mac[] = { MAC omitted}; byte ip[] = { IP omitted }; byte gateway[] = { Gateway omitted }; byte subnet[] = { Subnet omitted }; byte server[] = { Server omitted }; Client client(server, 80); float temp; void setup() { Ethernet.begin(mac, ip, gateway, subnet); delay(1000); Serial.begin(9600); requestTime(); //setTime(00,00,00,01,01,2011); } void loop() { int sec = second(); if(sec == 0) { temp = (analogRead(0) * 500.00)/1024.00; Serial.print("\nARDUINO: temperature: "); Serial.println(temp); Serial.print("ARDUINO: attempting to connect... "); if(client.connect()) { Serial.println("connected..."); Serial.println("ARDUINO: forming HTTP request message"); client.print("GET /arduino/temp_time_script.php?temp="); client.print(temp); client.print("&time="); print_time(now()); client.println(" HTTP/1.1"); client.println("Host: georgesattler.id.au"); client.println(); Serial.println("ARDUINO: HTTP message sent"); delay(3000); if(client.available()) { Serial.println("ARDUINO: HTTP message received"); Serial.println("ARDUINO: printing received headers and script response...\n"); while(client.available()) { char c = client.read(); Serial.print(c); } } else { Serial.println("ARDUINO: no response received / no response received in time"); } client.stop(); } else { Serial.println("connection failure"); } } } void print_time(time_t t) { client.print(year(t)); if(month(t) < 10) { client.print("0"); client.print(month(t)); } else { client.print(month(t)); } if(day(t) < 10) { client.print("0"); client.print(day(t)); } else { client.print(day(t)); } if(hour(t) < 10) { client.print("0"); client.print(hour(t)); } else { client.print(hour(t)); } if(minute(t) < 10) { client.print("0"); client.print(minute(t)); } else { client.print(minute(t)); } if(second(t) < 10) { client.print("0"); client.print(second(t)); } else { client.print(second(t)); } } void requestTime() { Serial.println("please enter year (e.g. 2011): "); while(Serial.available() < 4){ /*loop until 4 bytes received */ } int y = (Serial.read() - '0'); y = (10 * y) + (Serial.read() - '0'); y = (10 * y) + (Serial.read() - '0'); y = (10 * y) + (Serial.read() - '0'); Serial.println("please enter month (00-31): "); while(Serial.available() < 2){ /*loop until 2 bytes received */ } int mon = (Serial.read() - '0'); mon = (10 * mon) + (Serial.read() - '0'); Serial.println("please enter day (00-31): "); while(Serial.available() < 2){ /*loop until 2 bytes received */ } int d = (Serial.read() - '0'); d = (10 * d) + (Serial.read() - '0'); Serial.println("please enter hours (00-23): "); while(Serial.available() < 2) { /*loop until 2 bytes received */ } int h = (Serial.read() - '0'); h = (10 * h) + (Serial.read() - '0'); Serial.println("please enter minutes (00-59: "); while(Serial.available() < 2) { /*loop until 2 bytes received */ } int m = (Serial.read() - '0'); m = (10 * m) + (Serial.read() - '0'); Serial.println("please enter seconds (00-59): "); while(Serial.available() < 2) { /*loop until 2 bytes received */ } int s = (Serial.read() - '0'); s = (10 * s) + (Serial.read() - '0'); setTime(h,m,s,d,mon,y); if(timeStatus() == timeSet) { Serial.println("thankyou. Time is set"); } }"

[Edited on October 6, 2012 at 10:05 AM. Reason : .]

10/6/2012 9:53:46 AM

I'm an idiot. Got this all figured out and working.

Arduino changed the way you call some functions when they updated to the new version a while back.

10/11/2012 12:57:28 PM

Speaking of Arduino, I just ordered the Uno and the Ethernet Shield. Soon, it will be time to play.

10/12/2012 5:08:23 PM

Warning words. So I am trying to help my simulation lab out at my school and have decided to try my hand at an Arduino project. To sum it up. I was going have a simple Arduino project that would sense when I passed a wire through a tube and when it got to a sensor it would flash a heart rhythm on a computer monitor. Unfortunately the simlab director feels that instead of just 2 static jpg of heart rhythms on the screen. I am not really sure how I could code a heart rhythm generator. He would like a live simulation of the heart monitor on the computer screen. I have spent a number of hours on youtube and forums and have not came up with a whole lot. I was hoping there would be some code out there I could use. I am a very ametuer programmer so any help any you could provide would be great. My starting questions are what computer language interfaces the best with Arduino? I was going try this with processing but am open to suggestions. Thanks in advance.

9/28/2013 7:05:16 AM

http://www.instructables.com/id/ECG-Simulator/

9/28/2013 12:06:28 PM

^ Thanks for the help. Sorry I wasnt more specific. I need a computer program on the computer that shows the heart rhythm. Specifically 3rd degree heart block and a pacing rhythm, for the second one. I dont need the arduino to simulate the ecg on a hospital monitor if that makes any sense.

9/28/2013 1:50:52 PM

why does he want you to go that hardcore? You're trying to help a guy out and he's asking you for gold-plated features? Is the extra sim going to add any value to the project for the students, or is it just eye-candy?

9/29/2013 12:48:46 AM

Unfortunately, he does have a point. It would be much more realistic to have a live heart rhythm on the screen. I was just trying to avoid that since it is over my head. This project is something I came up with to help me learn arduino. I dont want to quit just because it is a little harder than I expected. I just need a little help on what step to take next. I have already found some info on where to begin but I just need to decide what is the best language to precede. You think processing would be a good choice?

9/29/2013 10:42:47 AM

I dabbled briefly in arduino a few years back however something came up recently that I figure could be done fairly easily and wanted to know if it sounded feasible or if there's something commercially available on the cheap that could do the same function. Gonna have some first world problems here so bear with me.
I want my Samsung smart TV remote to power on the soundbar and TV at the same time, using just that one remote. I've read up on IR codes and with today's arduino shields and forums think it would be nice to have an integrated IR receiver sense the power on signal for the TV, which would beam out the power-on signal for the soundbar. Seemed like it would be a fun project but also practical. Does this already exist? The chief reason why a universal remote is out is that the smart TV remote is pretty simple but most remotes can't/won't be able to control the signals for the smart functions unless its a high dollar remote. Plus it seems like overkill for just two systems. I've tried every way possible to integrate these things in the wiring and configuration but while there are several, none work perfectly correct and either aren't a good solution or requirss two remotes.

[Edited on December 28, 2013 at 2:29 PM. Reason : .]

12/28/2013 2:07:21 PM

Do you have HDMI CEC enabled? Your TV should be able to talk to your sound bar and turn it on automatically. Assuming you're connecting with HDMI.

1/12/2014 8:12:56 PM

^^ I was thinking of doing something similar.

At my work we created a bunch of libraries for the arduino that could control any IR signal that used the major protocols (which is nearly all of them). We were controlling different TVs using an arduino to switch inputs and set volume levels automatically. This was two years ago and I have forgotten nearly everything we did for that project, but when I resurrect it I will post the results here.

This may just be the motivation I needed to actually do it.

1/12/2014 8:28:07 PM

^If you run across any of that it sounds like thats exactly what I'm needing and a good place to start info/database-wise.

^^Tried it already, the different settings attempted:

1) when both TV and Soundbar CEC settings are disabled it plays the audio through both the TV speakers and the dig optical cable to the soundbar speakers and echoes like crazy but does turn the soundbar on/off automatically. The TV remote only controls the TV audio and the soundbar remote only controls the soundbar in this mode.

2) When only one is turned on it's the same as having both turned off, no change in function from #1 above.

3) When both are on, I have to either manually go into the TV settings and tell it to connect to the receiver or use both remotes to turn on each system. Either way within a few seconds the CEC 'handshake' completes and all is well with the world. It's funny there's a setting to auto turn off when TV powers off but no auto turn on when TV powers on.
I've verified using multiple cables that my HDMI is v1.4 (ARC compatible) and my dig optical audio cables are new and good. HDMI cable by itself wont play/carry any audio no matter what any settings are. Since my HDMI outputs arent explicitly labeled w/ ARC I'm assuming my low-to-mid tier smart TV doesnt come with that capability.

1/12/2014 11:12:00 PM

I believe this guys library is the one that is officially included with an Arduino install

http://www.righto.com/2009/08/multi-protocol-infrared-remote-library.html

I haven't looked at it in awhile but if I recall it isn't exactly high performance in that it uses poling to do the bit width timing where-as the code I wrote a couple years ago uses input capture ISRs to allow something more akin to full duplex.

You don't necessarily need to know what protocol your remote implements. If you run this code and just look at the bit width timings then you should be able to set it up to send out the sound bar command fairly easily.

I could be coaxed in to helping on this.

1/16/2014 5:37:55 PM

went to a NodeBots meetup tonight, played around with https://github.com/rwaldron/johnny-five a javascript arduino framework

1/29/2014 9:49:11 PM

Have any of you used the mbed.org platform? I needed some more umpth (FPU) for my robot brain and have been playing with an LPC for the past week. Its an ARM Cortex M4 w/ FPU running at 120MHz. Its pretty awesome. Also has a built in Xbee connector which is what i use for my wireless controller, perfect.

So far i'm liking it. The online IDE/compiler is responsive and works well. Built in rev control is cool. The sharing and importing of libraries, programs, and random code works well and is easy. It's cool to be able to login from any computer and go to work.

It's a notch lower level after dealing with Arduino's wrappers for a bit, but its fun get in there.

2/3/2014 10:50:43 AM