Planet Arduino

Regular icosahedrons are 20-sided polyhedrons formed out of equilateral triangles. As such, the geometry behind making one is slightly complicated, but the results in the case of this large light-up device appear to have been well worth it.

The project’s write-up does go over how to actually model these faces in CAD but also provides the 3D print files if you’d like to skip to building your own. Two versions were made, including a device that illuminates RGBW LEDs under Arduino Nano control, and a second icosahedron large enough to be used as a lamp shade! 

A demo/explanation is seen in the first clip below, along with a better look at the electronics in the breadboard video.

Clara is a smart lamp able to respond to your brain waves and subtly adjust your environment. The project, running on Arduino Uno, was created by  Marcelo Mejía Cobo, Belen Tenorio, and Josh Sucher for a class at the School of Visual Arts in NYC (US).

The team worked with the Neurosky MindWave Mobile, a Bluetooth EEG-reading headset in order to wirelessly detect “attention” and map the lamp’s color temperature and speaker volume accordingly:

At first, the lamp emits a warm, comforting glow, conducive to idea generation and creativity. But as you start homing in on a specific idea, the light becomes crisper and cooler, and the volume of the ambient noise flowing from the embedded speaker slowly increases, enhancing your ability to concentrate and block out external distractions.

In the picture below you can see the inside of the lamp with the Arduino Uno and Adafruit Music Maker shield:

Explore the Arduino Sketch on Github.

The location of the Casa Jasmina apartment will officially be inaugurated here in Torino (Italy) on the 20th of February, together with the celebration of  the 3rd birthday of local Officine Arduino and Fablab Torino.

The two following days (21-22 of February) we’re going to start producing the first connected things for the apartment in a workshop with the support of Jesse Howard, a designer focusing on new systems of making.

He’ll fly in from Amsterdam and run a 2-day session together with Lorenzo Romagnoli (Casa Jasmina Project Manager) and Stefano Paradiso (Fablab Torino Coordinator) with the goal of designing and manufacturing an Open Source Connected Lamp (OSCOLA).

The workshop is suitable for designers, artists, hackers, and everyone interested in Arduino and open source design and in order to stress the idea of open design, participants will be asked to reinterpret, modify and redesign an open source lamp proposed by Jesse Howard.
A minimum familiarity with of CAD drawings, digital fabrication techniques and Arduino are recommended but not strictly necessary.

By changing materials, shape, use cases, mechanics, and interaction, we are going to create a family of open source lamps.
Arduino Yún will be used to make the lamp interactive, enabling the user to turn it on or off remotely; change the light color; use the light to visualize data etc, or connect one lamp to an other.

The OSCOLA workshop (book your participation!)  consists of 16 hours of class taking place at Fablab Torino and a ticket is valid for two people.  At the end of the workshop, each couple of participants will bring home their IoT open-source lamp and a copy will be reproduced to stay at Casa Jasmina!

Based on open source technology and programming, LUZ is a lighting project that product designer Marina Mellado designed and targeted to those people who are physically and psychologically affected by the lack of sun or daylight.

Luz is a one meter diameter ring of light. It connects two LED stripes RGB SMD5050 to an Adafruit TCS34725 sensor ( which I use to get the temperature of colour (K) and the light intensity (Lux) Values ) and an Arduino Uno.

The electronic system is programmed to modify gradually the light-color sensibility of the lamp depending on the weather conditions when the sensor is positioned by the window.

Check the video below to see the lamp in action:

Satellite Lamps is a project investigating one of the most important contemporary infrastructures, the Global Positioning System or GPS. It’s a project curated by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall as part of the Yourban research project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and continues their previous work on revealing the materials of technologies that started in 2009 with RFID and Immaterials: Light Painting Wifi. The project uses Arduino extensively, and is also thoroughly documented:

GPS is widely used yet it’s invisible and few of us really have any idea of how it works or how it inhabits our everyday environments. We created a series of Lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of received GPS signals, and when we photograph them as timelapse films, we start to get a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.

They published a film that you can watch above, and published an article that details very thoroughly how it was made and why. If you are interested in the project, you can read more on how they explored GPS , how the visualisations were made, and about the cultural history of GPS.

This is a GPS receiver connected to Arduino that sends data to a piece of software running on a laptop. It is a quickly designed tool, a transparent plastic box that that allows us to observe the performance of the electronics, and still mobile enough to carry in hand or a backpack.

The connected birdhouse is a project prototyped during a workshop ran by Massimo Banzi at Boisbuchet, last August in France. It was developed using Arduino Yún, by Valentina Chinnici, who shared with us the project, and two other students taking part to  the week of learning-by-doing around the theme of  the Internet of Trees.

They redesigned a traditional object, a wooden birdhouse to be placed outdoor, and connected it to a lamp shaped like a nest, to be placed indoor:

The connected birdhouse was in fact an interactive object able to communicate to the nest/lamp the presence of a bird inside the house, and accordingly to a color coded signal was giving also some informations about the size of the bird itself. In the event of a bird entering into the house, the nest/lamp remotely controlled via WiFi by an Arduino Yún, was turned on. The nest/lamp received the notification from the birdhouse translating it firstly with a rainbow effect. After few seconds the light changed according to the weight of the bird (green, yellow or red).

The LED strip used for the nest lamp was an Adafruit Neopixel strip controlled by an Arduino Yún.

On this blog you can find the sketch to make it work and create one yourself.

(in english below)

Se avete avuto l’occasione di visitarla, concorderete che la Fondazione Achille Castiglioni sia uno dei luoghi più magici di Milano, un luogo vivo, brulicante e allegro dove si respira l’amore per il design, per il progetto e per le persone.

Il 15 e 16 giugno prossimi in una delle stanze della sede della fondazione in Piazza Castello 27 a Milano, Massimo Banzi terrà un workshop di base intitolato “Arduino e la luce”, portando 15 partecipanti alla realizzazione di una lampada interattiva fabbricata digitalmente a partire da un design di studio Habits.

Dopo l’introduzione alle potenzialità di Arduino e ai fondamenti dell’interattività, Massimo guiderà i partecipanti attraverso esercizi guidati alla scoperta dell’abc di Arduino e di alcuni sensori. Nel resto del weekend Massimo lavorerà con gli studenti per rendere interattive le lampade e ogni partecipante porterà a casa la propria creazione al termine del corso.

Il workshop si svolge nell’ambito della mostra dedicata alla lampada Gibigiana disegnata da Achille Castiglioni presentata con bozzetti e prototipi proposti in una nuova chiave sperimentale. Il ricavato del workshop andrà alla Fondazione Achille Castiglioni.

Il corso è dedicato a principianti; non è necessaria alcuna conoscenza di elettronica e di programmazione. È richiesto a ogni partecipante di portare il proprio laptop con sistema operativo Windows, Mac (10.5 o superiore) o Linux. Su richiesta, sarà possibile pranzare in studio Castiglioni (a un costo di 20 euro per il sabato e la domenica).

Iscrivetevi cliccando qui e per ulteriori domande scrivete a fondazioneachillecastiglioni [at] press-office.co.

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Experimenting on light and interaction with Massimo Banzi

If you had the chance to visit it, you’d agree that Fondazione Achille Castiglioni is one of the most charming site of Milan, a lively and inspiring place, where you can breathe the love for design and for the people.

On the 15^th and 16^th of June Massimo Banzi will hold a two-day workshop (in italian) titled “Arduino e la luce” hosted in the rooms of the foundation in Piazza Castello 27 in Milan, bringing 15 participants into creating an interactive digitally-fabricated lamp, designed by Habits studio.

After introducing Arduino and the basics of interactivity, Massimo will guide participants into exploring the sensors and how to make their lamp interactive. Each of them will work on one lamp and is going to bring home the final result at the end of the second day.

The workshop is organized as part of the exhibition dedicated to the Gibigiana lamp, designed by Achille Castiglioni and presented in a new experimental version with sketches and prototypes. All proceeds from this workshop will go to Fondazione Achille Castiglioni.

The workshop will be in italian language and open to beginners, without any knowledge of electronics or programming.

Book your participation at this link and if you need more info write to achillecastiglioni [at] press-office.co

On his blog, Miguel presents one of his latest projects:

This project shows the operation of an RGB lamp using a digital LED strip. After activating the bluetooth connection, the user can open the GUI on the PC to control the lamp. The program shows a hue palette divided into 30 rods, one for each LED of the strip.
By clicking & dragging the mouse cursor it is possible to make your own patterns,. To remove a color, the user can simply click on a rod while pressing the spacebar, which switches off the selected LED.

Part list: wooden support, RGB digitally-addressable LED strip, microcontroller (Arduino Pro Mini, for example), Bluetooth or USB wire.

More information on this project can be found on Miguel’s blog, while a brief video about its operation can be found here; the code of the project can be found on Github. The project’s page on Thingiverse can be found here.

[Via: Miguel's blog]