Planet Arduino

  We were glued to our screens last month as NASA successfully landed the InSight module on Mars. (Bet you were, too.) What an amazing sight a Martian sunrise turns out to be! Now, we’ve got the bug. The bigtime Space Bug. Accordingly, our final Humble Bundle ebook deal of […]

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What do you do when you find your old Game Boy? Most of us try to boot it up and reminisce the days of playing Tetris, Super Mario and Pokémon. Others like Gautier Hattenberger decide to turn it into a drone controller.

In order to do this, Hattenberger modified the Game Boy’s Game Link port with an Arduino Nano and an FTDI chip, which converts the Game Link signals to USB. Using a small piece of software on his laptop, he is able to control his Parrot ARDrone 2.0 via the classic device— A and B buttons for up or down, and the directional arrows for maneuvering.

Hattenberger has detailed his entire build here, and shared the code on GitHub.

Gyroscopes and accelerometers are the primary sensors at the heart of an IMU, also known as an internal measurement unit — an electronic sensor device that measures the orientation, gravitational forces and velocity of a multicopter, and help you keep it in the air using Arduino.

Two videos made by Joop Brokking, a Maker with passion for RC model ‘copters, clearly explain how to program your own IMU so that it can be used for self-balancing your drone without Kalman filters,  libraries, or complex calculations.

Auto leveling a multicopter is pretty challenging. It means that when you release the pitch and roll controls on your transmitter the multicopter levels itself. To get this to work the flight controller of the multicopter needs to know exactly which way is down. Like a spirit level that is on top of the multicopter for the pitch and roll axis.

Very often people ask me how to make an auto level feature for their multicopter. The answer to a question like this is pretty involved and cannot be explained in one email. And that is why I made this video series.

You can find the bill of materials and code here.

Massimo Banzi is among the judges on “America’s Greatest Makers” a reality competition from Mark Burnett (the reality-TV king behind “Survivor,” “The Apprentice,” and “The Voice”) in partnership with Intel which debuted last week on TBS.

In a first of its kind competition, the tv show takes 24 teams of makers from across US and puts them in head-to-head challenges to invent disruptive projects and win $1 million. The team are composed by unique people from 15 years old to 59 with ideas going to inspire a whole new audience of potential makers.

 

In the first two episodes, each team pitched their device idea to the judging panel composed by Intel CEO Brian Krzanich; business and financial expert Carol Roth; comedian, serial entrepreneur and co-host of truTV’s Hack My Life Kevin Pereira; and one of the celebrity guests.

At the end of April during 4th episode guest judge Massimo Banzi joins the panel as the remaining makers compete in the “Make or Break” rounds for $100,000 and a spot in the million dollar finale. If you are not in the USA, watch the episode at this link after April 27th.

In the meanwhile you can also watch a beginner maker project to learn how to do obstacle avoidance using Arduino 101. Cara Santa Maria is the trainer who’s going to guide you into the tutorial about this really important topic for projects involving moving objects like robots and drones:

 

Follow the show on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and use hashtag #AmericasGreatestMakers

 

We love Star Wars and you probably do, too. So here's every Star Wars project we've posted over the last 10 years.

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The post Every Star Wars Project Featured on Make: So Far (Over 100!) appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Comelicottero is a quadcopter based on Arduino Yún created during the Master in Computer Science at the Universita’ degli Studi of Milan (Italy) by Simone Castellani, Giovanni Intorre and Andrea Toscano:

The idea was to build a drone able to be controlled through WiFi from any PC, tablet or smartphone . Comelicottero is equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope for the stability obtained by a PID-based control system. Since Servo library is too slow for the quadcopter dynamics, an hardware PWM was implemented to obtain a 400Hz PWM signal.

The communication between the ground station on a PC and the quadcopter relies on WiFi and, in order to get better results, Bridge library was replaced with an efficient python script on OpenWRT-Yun. On top of that all the code was written to maximise Arduino Yún capabilities. The Navigation System has been designed, simulated on PC, implemented and tested. The autonomous navigation is going through an additional testing due to magnetometer interferences with motors’ magnetic field.

The user can control and monitor data coming from the drone using a gamepad attached to a laptop with a custom software installed.

The sketch and all the documentation will be soon available on GitHub and released with GNU license. In the meanwhile follow their Youtube Channel for updates.

 

Ready to level-up your robot skills? ArduRoller is a self-balancing, inverted pendulum robot that’s also capable of autonomous navigation indoors or out. I created it as an entry for the annual SparkFun Autonomous Vehicle Competition: The goal was to create a nontraditional vehicle capable of quickly navigating an obstacle course […]

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A quadcopter made from pool noodles. Surprisingly practical and good looking (from a distance)!

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