Mario the Maker Magician’s Robot Bunny

Mario the Maker Magician made a Robot Bunny that can be magically pulled out of a hat.

 

The bunny is made from flexible PLA.  LED Matrixes were used for the eyes and a couple of servos were used for the paws.

Mario said the what he learned most from the project was how to multi-task with the Arduino platform – taking the delay function out of his code, but still being able to control 7 LEDs and make 2 servos work at the same time.  The size of the Teensy was perfect for this magical bunny.

Wake Up Wake Up Video Meme Alarm Clock

Fuzzy-Wobble published an Instructable for a Meme Video Alarm Clock.   This custom clock plays a video of your choice for the alarm, but of course the “Wake Up Wake Up” clip featured in the video makes for a pretty awesome alarm.

The Instructables page provides all the code and instructions for making your own, including instructions on formatting your own custom video and the files for laser cutting the enclosure.

TGA Pro : Guitar Audio Shield

Forum user Blackaddr developed a guitar audio shield .

The TGA Pro is  stereo-sound capable and designed specifically for use with guitars providing an onboard preamp specifically designed for the wide range of voltages and impedances encountered when dealing with guitars, pedals and guitar amps. It also provides onboard MIDI connectors for use with the Arduino MIDI library, and optional external SRAM for additional data storage. This shield makes it very easy for musicians to add effects while playing guitar.

You can read about the board’s development over on this forum thread.

In this video demo the only gear used is a guitar, the TGA, a MIDI expression pedal, and a tube amp.  The expression pedal is used to open the input to the SOS channel and feed in the same chord in two different octaves to get a nice blended background ambience.

Be sure to check out blackaddr’s Tindie page for all the details on this shield.

TeensyStep Fast Stepper Control Library

Forum user luni couldn’t find a stepper motor library to meet his needs, so he wrote his own.  The library is able to handle up to 300,000 steps per second.

This video shows two steppers running up to 160,000 steps/sec.

There is a great write up and explanation on luni’s GetHub Page.  The page includes excellent explanations and diagrams on the three types of movements.

The library handles the three different movement modes when controlling more than one motor – Sequential Movement, Synchronous Movement, and Independent Movement.

Luni published performance metrics running 1 and 3 motors on 2 different boards.

 

 

Little Helper Hardware Multi-Tool

Phillip Schuster built a handy little mult-tool for working on hardware.

This neat little gadget can do things like generate PWM or DAC signals, read serial output of your microcontroller project, as well as several other useful functions.  The design of the Little Helper was inspired by the iPod interface.  It’s custom touch wheel allows for fast one-handed operation.

The project is open source.  You can find the code on Github.

There is some additional discussion of the project on HackADay.