Planet Arduino

[Amitabh] was frustrated by the lack of options for controlling air pressure in soft robotics. The most promising initiative, Pneuduino, seemed to be this close to a Shenzhen production run, but the creators have gone radio silent. Faced with only expensive alternatives, he decided to take one for Team Hacker and created Programmable Air, a modular system for inflatable and vacuum-based robotics.

The idea is to build the cheapest, most hacker-friendly system he can by evaluating and experimenting with all sorts of off-the-shelf pumps, sensors, and valves. From the looks of it, he’s pretty much got it dialed in. Programmable Air is based around $9 medical-grade booster pumps that are as good at making vacuums as they are at providing pressurization. The main board has two pumps, and it looks like one is set to vacuum and the other to spew air. There’s an Arduino Nano to drive them, and a momentary to control the air flow.

Programmable Air can support up to 12 valves through daughter boards that connect via right-angle header. In the future, [Amitabh] may swap these out for magnetic connections or something else that can withstand repeated use.

Blow past the break to watch Programmable Air do pick and place, control a soft gripper, and inflate a balloon. The balloon’s pressurization behavior has made [Amitabh] reconsider adding a flow meter, but so far he hasn’t found a reasonable cost per unit. Can you recommend a small flow meter that won’t break the bank? Let us know in the comments.

Arduino community on Gplus is pretty active and many people share their experiments, projects and prototypes to receive comments and tips. Yongho Jeong from Seul (South Korea) published a video called Uncanny, a breathing plant installation creating unusual sensations and made with Arduino Uno + air pump:

The uncanny (German: Das Unheimliche, “the opposite of what is familiar”) is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be both familiar yet alien at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.  //
The subject of this project is interaction between human and plant. My First thought is that Do plants breathe like we human do? I was amazed after learning that plants breathe and that their breathing is very similar to ours. So I want to show that plants breaths llike human do and reacting to touch of human.

Watch the plant in action below and explore Jeong blog  for the other technical details.