Planet Arduino

The Spresense development board is Sony’s debut into the Maker market for microcontrollers, and it’s an impressive one.

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[LittleTern] — annoyed by repetitive advertisements — wanted the ability to mute their Satellite Box for the duration of every commercial break. Attempts to crack their Satellite Box’s IR protocol went nowhere, so they thought — why not simply mute the TV?

Briefly toying with the idea of a separate remote for the function, [LittleTern] discarded that option as quickly as one tends to lose an additional remote. Instead, they’re using the spare RGYB buttons on their Sony Bravia remote — cutting down on total remotes while still controlling the IR muting system. Each of the four coloured buttons normally don’t do much, so they’re set do different mute length timers — customized for the channel or time of day. The system that sends the code to the TV is an Arduino Pro Mini controlling an IR LED and receiver, with a status LED set to glow according to which button was pressed.

With the helpful documentation from [Ken Shirriff]’s research into IR remotes — yes, that [Ken Schirriff] — [LittleTern] had the needed codes for their TV in hand and a programmed and ready Arduino. They were able to 3D print a project box, attach it to their TV near its IR receiver, and power it off its USB! Bonus!

[LittleTern] has provided their code in their blog post. There’s a little timing tinkering that needs to be done to ensure it works smoothly with a given setup, but otherwise, gone are the days of fumbling for the remote as your program resumes!

Who doesn’t love a good robot? If you don’t — how dare you! — then this charming little scamp might just bring the hint of a smile to your face.

SDDSbot — built out of an old Sony Dynamic Digital Sound system’s reel cover — can’t do much other than turn left, right, or walk forwards on four D/C motor-controlled legs, but it does so using the power of a Pixy camera and an Arduino. The Pixy reads colour combinations that denote stop and go commands from sheets of paper, attempting to keep it in the center of its field of view as it toddles along. Once the robot gets close enough to the ‘go’ colour code, the paper’s  orientation directs the robot to steer itself left or right — the goal being the capacity to navigate a maze. While not quite there yet, it’s certainly a handful as it is.

With the care of a maker, [Arno Munukka] takes us under the hood of his robot to show how he’s made clever use of the small space. He designed a duo of custom PCBs for the motors and stuck them near the robot’s top — you can see the resistors used to time the steps poking through the robot’s case, adding a functional cosmetic effect. The Arduino brain is stuck to the rear, the Pixy to the front, and the power boards are snug near the base. Three USB ports pepper the robot’s posterior — a charging port, one for programming the Arduino, and a third to access the Pixy camera.

What do you think — had a change of heart regarding our future overl– uh, silicon-based friends? Yes? Well here’s a beginner bot to will get you started.

Here’s a firmware hack that brings a video game to the Sony SmartWatch. It’s pretty impressive considering the limited screen real estate and the fact that it has to be shared with the touch input. But we find it equally impressive that a game of this quality followed so quickly on the heels of Sony announcing the ability to make your own firmware for the watch. The speedy development is thanks partly to the community driven effort to hack the Arduino IDE to load sketches on the watch.

The advent of this IDE hack means that taking your Arduino sketch writing abilities to this hardware now has a fairly low learning curve. And reading through [Asier Arranz's] game code will make it even easier. He calls his game Star Wars but it reminds us more of Astrosmash. There’s a little green semicircle which is your ground-based defense vehicle. You need to fire the laser to shoot falling items out of the star-strewn night sky while also collecting power-ups that fall to the ground. Game play video is below.

Just remember, if you come up with a cool firmware app for the SmartWatch we want to hear about it.

Well that didn’t take long. We just heard last week about the Sony inviting firmware hacks for their SmartWatch and here’s an early example. This image above is an animation running on the watch. It was written as an Arduino sketch which runs on a custom firmware image. [Veqtor] wrote the sketch, which is just a couple of nested loops drawing lines and circles. The real hack is in the firmware itself.

[Veqtor] took part in a workshop (translated) put on by [David Cuartielles] which invited attendees to try their Arduino coding skills on his firmware hack for the watch. It implements an Android parser, but the development is in very early stages. Right now there’s zero information in his readme file. But the root directory of the repo has a huge todo list. Dig through it and see if you can fork his code to help lend a hand.

Learn more about the SmartWatch firmware from the original announcement.

Next weekend Arduino Verkstad in Malmö  is organizing a one-day workshop in collaboration with Sony Mobile to experiment on programming from the Arduino IDE on Sony SmartWatch.

You don’t have to be a programmer to participate because this is low level hacking and if you, for example, are interested in graphic design or interaction design this might be something for you. Participants will work in groups and get tutoring throughout  to test the watch and modify it  on custom ideas.

The hands-on event will take place saturday 15th of June from 12 to 18 at STPLN in the city of Malmö (Sweden) . There is a limited amount of spots for the event and you can sign up by sending an e-mail to s.zetterdahl [at] arduino.cc no later than Friday the 14th of June.

In order to prepare grouping, please add some info on your technical background and language spoken (English/Swedish/Spanish). Attendance is for free and they will serve lunch and coffee.

The event is hosted in association with STPLN and Fabriken