Planet Arduino

Since its launch in 2013, the Yùn–a small Linux machine and a microcontroller in a small Arduino form factor–found its way into hundreds of thousands of projects and professional applications. Last year, we decided that it was time for a refresh and began working hard to develop a true open-source design, with more compelling features and better overall software support.

The new board, which is expected to hit the market in the second half of April, will include enhanced functionality and compatibility with its predecessor.

Why a New Yùn

The Yùn enjoyed tremendous success; however, it ended up being affected by the internal issues we dealt with over the past couple of years and support has been quite intermittent.

For example, the board was never really an open-source product and the software had some challenges that we wanted to fix, especially from a security point of view.

What’s New in Rev.2

Hardware:  

• Much better, more robust power supply
• New Ethernet connector with a clever mounting solution that enables the use of all possible shields with no risk for accidental short circuits
• Horizontal USB connector to save vertical space
• Improved USB hub

Software: 

• Software stack updated to OpenWRT latest version, including all patches
• SSL support on the bridge Arduino / Linux bridge

Yùn Rev.2 is scheduled to begin shipping in April. Until then, you can stay up-to-date by clicking “NOTIFY ME” on our store. 

With some projects, your goal is to get it working to prove out a concept for a larger project, or simply to satisfy your curiosity. On the other hand, sometimes you want your creation to look great. That was the case here, as this electromechanical clock integrates several different types of metal along with a chain drive into something that’s as much a work of art as it is a practical timekeeping tool.

Upon startup, the device is able to auto-calibrate using a clever sensor setup on the hour hand wheel to make sure it’s at 12:00 noon/midnight, then uses the Arduino Yún‘s built-in WiFi support to check the time off of the Internet and configure itself accordingly.

This clock was designed, machined and assembled, every piece from scratch (apart from a couple of the small chain sprockets and chains themselves). The timekeeping and motor/position control software was also developed and programmed 100% from scratch as well. All the parts are made out of a combination of copper, brass, steel, aluminum, and stainless, and the assembly is driven by an Arduino Yún running a NEMA style stepper motor, and Honeywell automation Hall effect sensors for the mechanical position readings.

You can find more details in the video seen below, and on its creator’s Reddit post.

[Chris Grill] got his hands on a pet boa constrictor, which requires a fairly strict temperature controlled environment. Its enclosure needs to have a consistent temperature throughout, or the snake could have trouble regulating its body temperature. [Chris] wanted to keep tabs on the temp and grabbed a few TTF-103 thermistors and an Arduino Yun, which allowed him to log the temperature on each side of the enclosure. He used some code to get the temp reading to the linux side of an Arduino Yun, and then used jpgraph, a PHP graphing library, to display the results.

But that wasn’t good enough. Why not get a little fancy and have Amazon’s Echo read the temps back when you ask! Getting it setup was not so bad thanks to Amazon’s well documented steps to get custom commands set up.

He eventually lost the battle to get the Echo to talk to the web server on the Yun due to SSL issues, but he found an existing workaround by using a proxy.

“I’m a big fan of digital music, especially Spotify. The ability to dial-up a much loved song I’ve not heard for ages or discover new music are just some of the benefits I never tire of,” writes UK-based designer Brendan Dawes. “Yet the lack of physicality to this digital medium has always left me wanting. I still own vinyl and a turntable and I love the ritual of physically flicking through what to place on the platter and then wait for the needle to drop on the spinning vinyl.”

To bridge the gap between the digital and analog worlds, Dawes decided to create what he calls the “Plastic Player.” The playful interface features a Raspberry Pi running Pi MusicBox connected to his 50-year-old B&O stereo, and an Arduino Yún with an NFC shield.

The “albums” themselves are made from a box of slide mounts with tiny NFC stickers on the back. When Dawes drops one in place, the Arduino identifies the tag, matches it to a specific record, turns on a backlight, and then communicates via WiFi with the Pi MusicBox API to play the tunes.

Removing the cartridge from the device pauses the track. But that’s not all. There are also three buttons on top, which can be used to skip, go back, or stop a song.

It’s often easy to romanticise the past, convincing ourselves that things were better back then when really I think that’s just not the case. I’ve discovered way more music since moving to Spotify then I ever did in record shops. What I do like though is the physicality of choosing an album to play and this system is an attempt to blend the good parts of both worlds. The future will continue to be digitised and I embrace that, but I think there’s a space in between the digital and the analog to create interactions that are filled with the inconvenience of what it is to be human.

You can read more about the Plastic Player on Dawes’ website, and see it in action below!

(Photos: Brendan Dawes)

We’ve been waiting for this one. A worm was written for the Internet-connected Arduino Yun that gets in through a memory corruption exploit in the ATmega32u4 that’s used as the serial bridge. The paper (as PDF) is a bit technical, but if you’re interested, it’s a great read.

The crux of the hack is getting the AVR to run out of RAM, which more than a few of us have done accidentally from time to time. Here, the hackers write more and more data into memory until they end up writing into the heap, where data that’s used to control the program lives. Writing a worm for the AVR isn’t as easy as it was in the 1990’s on PCs, because a lot of the code that you’d like to run is in flash, and thus immutable. However, if you know where enough functions are located in flash, you can just use what’s there. These kind of return-oriented programming (ROP) tricks were enough for the researchers to write a worm.

In the end, the worm is persistent, can spread from Yun to Yun, and can do most everything that you’d love/hate a worm to do. In security, we all know that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and here the attack isn’t against the OpenWRT Linux system running on the big chip, but rather against the small AVR chip playing a support role. Because the AVR is completely trusted by the Linux system, once you’ve got that, you’ve won.

Will this amount to anything in practice? Probably not. There are tons of systems out there with much more easily accessed vulnerabilities: hard-coded passwords and poor encryption protocols. Attacking all the Yuns in the world wouldn’t be worth one’s time. It’s a very cool proof of concept, and in our opinion, that’s even better.

Thanks [Dave] for the great tip!

Twitter is not only a convenient way to consume daily news and converse with friends online, it has become an excellent platform for gaining insight on what’s important at any particular moment in time. With this in mind, Maker Chadwick John Friedman has decided to harness the social network’s data into web-connected physical representations with the help of Arduino and Temboo.

PrecogNation uses three 3D-printed geometric masks as real-time sci-fi future forecasters, which illuminate and change colors to reflect sustainability trends throughout the world.

The three geometric 3D-printed masks are wirelessly connected to the Internet via an Arduino Yún. The masks were printed using a Zortrax 3D printer and white Z-ABS filament. The masks are a remixed version of Stephen Kongsle’s “Low Poly Mask.” Each mask took approximately 16 hours to print. The masks are constantly scraping data from Twitter in real-time via Temboo Choreos. Temboo assigns special API keys for Arduino devices that allow the user grab real-time data from Twitter that would otherwise be difficult to gather. That live data is then fed to the Arduino Yún, which illuminates a specific 10mm super bright LED, connected to the masks.

One of the largest challenges in representing this overload of data physically was finding the correct terms and/or keywords that activate a specific color/thought in the Precog’s faces. The three colors present in the faces are scraping the Twitterverse for terms relating to sustainability, environmental threats, and political involvement. PrecogNation has its very own Twitter account, which allows the masks to scan through data specifically submitted by sustainability related users, corporations, and initiatives.

As seen in the video below, progress in sustainable development (green) is represented by keywords such as renewable energy, clean coal, water treatment and wind turbines. Threats to sustainability (red) include deforestation, global warming, record heat, extinction, pollution, pandemics and so on. Meanwhile, blue denotes an overload of data and contradicting results.

The overload of data in the color blue works like this… say the word ‘polar’ is found, but then the words ‘melting-polar’ are found, followed by the words ‘polar bear.’ This is an unreadable thread of information – it’s not really giving us threats or progress related to sustainability so the face reflects the color blue to signify that confusion. Coming up with the correct terms to represent the overload of information was especially tricky, and writing the code to reflect that confusion was equally as challenging. I eventually found a series of keywords and demands that elicited the response I was hoping for in this category.

It is important to highlight the fact that although the colors red and blue may be perceived as negative (and usually appear more than the color green), they also mean that there are discussions about those negative sustainability issues happening every time those colors are activated. This is, in fact, a positive outcome, as one of the main goals of this project is to highlight the importance maintaining a dialogue – even if that dialogue surrounds daunting threats to sustainability. It is important that the masks provoke a highlighted continuation of focus surrounding social and political sustainability issues.

You can read all about the project on PrecogNation’s page.

The purpose is clear. You don’t want your kids to steal your food from the cupboard, or from the fridge, or someone to open your locker. Or maybe you want to take pictures of your pet stealing food. Or maybe you are Dwight Schrute and you want to finally unmask […]

Read more on MAKE

The post You Can’t Touch This! Arduino Yún Alarm System appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Riffing off of the word clock idea, this Maker created a backlit display for the local weather forecast.

Read more on MAKE

The post This Backlit Display is Like a Word Clock for Weather appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

What happens when a creative technologist wants his family to know he’s thinking about them? He creates a project with Arduino Yún! IMissYou is a simple project transforming a picture in a connected object thanks to a capacitive layer made with Bareconductive Paint and inserted behind the photo. The ‘touch’ is detected by the Arduino through the glass of the frame by a spike in the values (with a basic Capsense library), sent to the internet via wi-fi and delivered to a phone with Pushover.

Martin Hollywood, the Arduino user who made  the project, wrote us:

Looking at the photograph of my family that I have on my desk one day, I missed them and wanted to be home. I touched the photo and realised that somewhere between those was the germ of the idea…

I wanted my family to know I was thinking of them, but I didn’t want to create two products; think GoodNight Lamp – I do love that project. In any case, there was no guarantee they would even notice a ‘blinking’ photo frame responding to my signal. Making the Receive a PUSH notification seemed like a no brainer, but the last time I developed for mobile was iOS 1! There are a number of service apps out there: Pusher, Pushingbox but I decided on Pushover. It had a 7 day trial period and good API support (I’ve since bought a license).

There are many different ways to keep your plants watered on a schedule. [Luca Dentella] just created a new one by building the irrighino watering system. He used standard off the shelf, hardware to keep it simple. Irrighino is a complete watering system based on the Arduino Yun, featuring a user friendly AJAX interface. This allows scheduling in a manner similar to creating appointments in Outlook. It’s also possible to manually control the various water solenoids. The code is fully customizable and open source, with code available from [Luca’s] github repository. The web interface is divided in to three tabs – “runtime” for manual control, “setup” to configure the scheduling, and “events” to view system logs.

The Arduino Yun activates solenoid valves via a relay shield. A switch panel has indicator Status LED’s and three position switches. These allow the outputs to be switched off or on manually, or controlled via the Yun when in auto mode. [Luca] describes how to read three states of the switch (On-Off-On) when connected to a single analog input of the Arduino. He’s also got another tutorial describing how to connect a USB WiFi adapter to the Yun. This is handy since the Yun is mounted inside an enclosure where the signal strength is very weak. While the Yun has on-board WiFi, there is no possibility to attach an external antenna directly to the test SMA socket.

One interesting part is the commercial rain sensor. It’s a switch surrounded by a spongy material. When this material absorbs rain water, it begins to expand and triggers the switch. The Arduino sees the sensor as a simple digital input.

Check a short demo of his system in the video after the break.