Dominick Lee is a programmer, inventor who created the  “LifeBeam Flight Simulator“, a pneumatic-powered dual-axis motion flight simulator  using Arduino Duemilanove. After a few months of diligent work and the help of some generous collaborators he was able to mix physics, robotic and aviation into a motion platform that can make full rotations tilting at about 40 degrees.

The LifeBeam Flight Simulator is a full setup of equipment that runs simultaneously and collaboratively. The data is first sent from the Graphics or “Gaming PC”  through a custom software program that acquires game data. The game data is scaled and converted into specific coordinates for the roll and pitch (X and Y) axis. The program sends out the final signal which is received by an Arduino (Duemilanove). The Arduino has a complex program on it that combines the serial commands and parses certain values to calculate a voltage which is then converted into PWM and sent to a low-pass filter which smoothes the PWM into analog voltage. The analog voltage is connected to a Pneumatic Valve Amplifier which controls the pneumatic cylinders to make the platform move accordingly.

After watching the video below you can read the whole documentation on Instructables and make one yourself!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Friday, August 30th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, tutorials, video.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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This month we are going to work outdoor because Max is going to show us how  to make a DIY computer to customize our bicycle, collecting data of distances and speed. Watch the video tutorial in german language below and take a look at the schematics and the code.  Looking forward to your hacks!

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Diesen Monat geht es ab nach Draußen, denn Max zeigt uns wie man einen DIY Computer für ein Fahrrad bauen kann, welcher Daten über die Strecke und die Geschwindigkeit mit einem Arduino UNO ermittelt. Seht euch das deutschsprachige Video an und schaut euch den Schaltplan, die Komponenten und den Code an. Wir freuen uns auf eure Hacks!

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, August 28th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Tutorial, tutorials, Video.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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What happens to electronic components at cryogenic temperatures? That’s the main question Mikail tried to answer with his experiment using liquid nitrogen and Arduino: 65.3Mhz@-196°C. Check the video below to see the magic:

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Thursday, August 29th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, Hacks, Hardware.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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What defines a maker? A wish to make things , a quest for tools and ample creativity. They say that creativity has no bounds so what inspired this Ex-restaurateur to create a company Haxagonal Research with their much featured product Observos?  In people’s words words:

Observos, a box that can monitor the temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure of a space and shuttle this information across the net.

The company’s two founders Ronald Boynoe and Loren Lang both were pretty tech savvy, but it was the Arduino movement, which kickstarted their dream together.

“Arduino provided us an extraordinary platform for testing against, an invaluable repository of preexisting libraries and other code that would have taken an incredible amount of time to write, and a lot of community support,” he says. “It has decreased our time to market, and significantly reduced our startup costs, allowing us to more rapidly develop new prototypes.”

From having a restaurant as their first customer to diversifying into agriculture sector,  they define their biggest challenge as tuning the humidity sensor to a required precision.  Hexagonal at the moment has a presence here and here.

Via: [Wired][Twitter][Engadget]

This entry was postedby Priya Kuber on Tuesday, August 27th, 2013 and is filed under Enviroment, Hardware.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Some months ago we announced that we were developing a new product to meet the growing demand for wi-fi, linux based boards. The blogpost on the upcoming Arduino YÚN was our most read ever, and since then the attention has stayed high.

Recently, some of you have been asking why the YÚN hasn’t come out yet and why the Arduino Robot is not yet available for purchase.

Simply put, moving to a wifi-enabled linux board is a whole new step for Arduino and it’s taking longer than we expected. Arduino YÚN  is our most complex product ever and we decided to working on getting it right regardless of timing.

The early prototypes boards mounted 8MB of Flash and 32MB of RAM. While we managed to implement most of the YÚN features previously planned inside this amount of memory, we were forced to use optimized versions of the most common software packages: smaller in size but missing a lot of cool features available in the “full” non-optimized version.

We also quickly discovered that there wasn’t plenty of free space remaining for the user to install additional packages or to run complex programs without incurring in stability problems.

Considering this we finally decided to double both Flash and RAM, giving a comfortable 16MB of Flash and 64MB of RAM.

We try our best to get everything done as soon as possible while still providing the quality that we hope distinguishes Arduino products.

The delay in the Arduino Robot is connected to that of YÚN and our distribution processes.

We are really happy about the new Arduino YÚN and we hope the community will be as well.

The board is going to be available on the Arduino Store from September the 10th, while being delivered to our distributors late this month. In the video below you can watch a  preview of the board with me and David Cuartielles giving some more details about it.

From the product pages on the Arduino Store,  for the YÚN and Robot, you can activate an alert that will send you an email when the product is available from the distributors.

This entry was postedby Massimo Banzi on Wednesday, August 21st, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, arduino, Yún.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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ArduSat was successfully launched in space last Sunday 4th August and it’s now on its way to the International Space Station (ISS):

Ardusat is the first open satellite platform allowing general public to design and run their own applications, games and experiments in space, and also steer the onboard cameras to take pictures on-demand:

Ardusat offers the chance for everyday people to control a satellite for different purposes such as exploration, entertainment and experiments. It takes advantage of the existing technologies and platforms so that more and more people can participate in the space technology. With more and more people participating, the space industry is likely to go on through countless innovations.

Learn more from DIY Space Explorations.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Monday, August 12th, 2013 and is filed under arduino, science.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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For a little over a year, I’ve been working on an open-source, DIY cellphone as part of my PhD research at the MIT Media Lab. The current version of the phone is based on the Arduino GSM shield and Arduino GSM library. It sports a deliberately low-resolution screen (8 characters, each a 5×7 matrix of LEDs), a laser-cut wooden enclosure, flexure (living hinge) buttons, and a ~1000-line Arduino program that powers the user interface. The phone can make and receive phone calls and text messages, includes a phone book and caller id, and keeps the time. Everything you’d expect from a 20-year old Nokia! (Except snake.) I’ve been using various iterations of the project as my primary cellphone for the past six months or so.

The phone is open-source and the design files are available on GitHub (hardware, software). Assembly instructions are on my website, although I wouldn’t recommend making your own unless you have experience with soldering surface mount components.

Of course, it’s not just me that’s been building these phones. I’ve run two workshops in which other people have made them for themselves. A few people have been building them on their own, including someone who posted his result on Twitter.

Here you can see some the variations on the enclosure that my friends have made. On the left is a 3d-printed case by Ben Peters, the middle is a CNC-milled purpleheart wood case by Dena Molnar, and on the right is a hand-cut cardboard case by Jeffrey Warren.

The phone has undergone numerous revisions as I’ve tried to get it into a robust, useable form. Here you can see some of those variations. I started with an LCD screen like those found on old Nokia phones, but it would break after a month or so in my pocket, so I switched to the more-robust LED matrix. The enclosure has had a few tweaks as well, primarily to find a good design for the flexure buttons.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the current incarnation. It seems to be relatively robust, simple enough to assemble by hand, and functional enough to use everyday (although a long way from a smart phone). That’s my DIY cellphone.

This entry was postedby mellis on Monday, August 12th, 2013 and is filed under CNC, Eagle, Matrix, Wireless, workshop(s), workshop(s).You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Some people call it the “Etsy for hardware”, some other “the indie marketplace for open source hardware”, even if being open is not a requirement. Tindie’s mission consists of connecting the world’s small, hardware businesses with customers all over the world and today starts a cool initiative called Open Designs and Kickbacks. When sellers create a new product, they will be able to select a project the product is a derivative from, and enter the % of sales that will go to the open hardware project.

“Businesses can manufacture the open design as is, or create products derived from it. Those sellers can then kickback a portion of their sales back to the designer. Tindie will handle the disbursement of funds so it’s absolutely painless. For designers, there are no fees, no hosting costs, just a simple way to reap the benefits of their hard work”

Some weeks ago Arduino announced in a blogpost about donating every year to projects which are part of the open source ecosystem because we are grateful to these efforts and want to support them and now we are happy to announce of being Tindie’s first partner in the Open Designs’ initiative.   Businesses that have built on top of Arduino boards can now send a portion of their sales back to Arduino, and help us further growing our efforts in supporting the open source community. Take a look at the products derived from Arduino.

For more info and insights, take a look at the Tindie’s website.

This entry was postedby Zoe Romano on Wednesday, July 31st, 2013 and is filed under Announcements, arduino, Open Source.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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