Planet Arduino

Here at Hackaday, we love a good art piece, whether that involves light or sound. Combining both is a sure-fire way to get our attention, and [Eirik Brandal] did just that with his Void Extrusion piece.

The project is built around the Daisy Seed from Electrosmith. It’s an embedded platform designed for musical purposes, which made it perfect for [Eirik]’s project. Based on an STM32 chip, it’s very capable when it comes to DSP tasks. In this role, it’s charged with algorithmic music composition, providing the captivating soundtrack that emanates from the sculpture.

The sculpture itself looks almost like a fancy mid-century home from the Hollywood Hills, but it’s fundamentally a little more abstract than that. [Eirik] built it as an opportunity to experiment with using 3D printed forms in his work. To that end, it features a beautiful diffused LED wall and a speaker enclosure as an integral part of the build. The LEDs are run from an Arduino Nano Every.

[Eirik’s] work shows us that “generative” music can be intoxicating and compelling with a real sense of feeling and mood. The sculpture is a visually-capable pairing that works with the soundscape. It recalls us of some other great artworks we’ve featured from [Eirik] before, too.

Moore’s Law and the rapid progression of technological development have one very serious downside: e-waste. Because so many electronic devices become obsolete within just a few years, the world ends up with literal mountains of discarded devices that no longer serve any practical purpose. Fortunately, humans value more than practicality. Eddie Farr proved that when he turned an old and broken TI-83 calculator into this interesting Tee Eye sculpture that tells a story.

If you were in school any time in the last 25 years, then you probably used a TI-83 calculator. For a while, it was the graphing calculator and updated versions are still sold today. A friend of Farr’s found this particular TI-83 while out on a run. It was covered in mud and completely non-functional. Most people would have ignored it or thrown it away, but Farr has vision and wanted to revive the calculator. After days of cleaning, he was able to make it turn on. But it still wasn’t completely functional, as only have the screen worked and several of the input keys were dead.

Farr’s solution was to repurpose the TI-83 as sculpture that displays poetry. He used an Arduino Mega 2560 and an absurd number of optocouplers to press the TI-83’s buttons. The Arduino sketch takes an input string (like a poem) and pushes the corresponding TI-83 button for each character in sequence. A slight delay between each button press makes the text input slow enough to read. In this way, viewers can watch as poems and stories appear on the TI-83’s screen.

The rest of Eddie’s work went into the chaotic —yet beautiful — sculpture. The TI-83’s PCB and the Arduino mount to a nice wood plank, with the wires and optocouplers suspended in the air between. It looks almost disorderly, but that fits well with the project.

The post This Tee Eye calculator sculpture tells a story appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Artist David Cranmer's "Stakcgrox" is a 3.5 meter tall robotic crow with a rotating head and glowing eyes that shoot lasers.

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The post Giant Fog-Breathing Robotic Crow Shoots Lasers appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Hive (2.0) is the second iteration of an interactive sound sculpture consisting of fifty speakers and seven audio channels. The sensors detect the proximity of people and Arduino manipulates audio according to it.

It was created by Hopkins Duffield, a Toronto-based collaborative duo exploring ways to combine both new and familiar mediums with artistically technological practices. In this work they used Arduino Uno together with Max 6 / Max For Live.
Check the video to listen to the sculpture: