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Learning becomes interesting when you make it fun, interactive and entertaining. [Arkadi] built ShakeIt – an interactive game for the Mini MakerFaire in Jerusalem to demonstrate to kids and grownups how light colors are mixed. It is a follow up to his earlier project – Smart juggling balls which we featured earlier.

The juggling balls consist of a 6 dof sensor (MPU 6050), a micro controller, transmitter (NRF24L01+), some addressable RGB LED’s and a LiPo battery. An external magnet activates a reed switch inside the balls and triggers them in to action. The ShakeIt light fixture consists of an Arduino Nano clone, NRF24L01+ with SMA Antenna, buck converter, 74 addressable RGB LED’s, and a bluetooth module. The bluetooth module connects to a smartphone app.

[Arkadi] starts out by handing three juggling balls, each with a predefined color (Red, Green, Blue). When the ball is shaken, the light inside the ball becomes stronger. The ShakeIt light fixture is used as a mixer. It communicates with the balls and receives the value of how strong the light inside each of the smart balls is, mixing them up, and generating the mixed color.

The fun starts when the interactive game mode is enabled. Instead of just mixing the light, the Light fixture generates patterns based on how strong the balls are shaken. At first the light fixture shows all three colors filling up the central ball. The three contenders then fight out to get their color to fill up the sphere completely until only one color remains and the winner is declared.

The kids might be learning some color theory here, but it seems the adults are having a “ball” playing the crazy game. If you’d like to build your own shoulder dislocating ShakeIt game, head over to [Arkadi]’s github repository for the ShakeIt and the Juggling Balls. Check the video below to see the adults having fun.


Filed under: Arduino Hacks, led hacks
Apr
28

Smart Juggling Balls

arduino hacks, juggling, juggling balls Commenti disabilitati su Smart Juggling Balls 

For the 2015 Hack a Day Prize, [Arkadi] is working on an educational platform using the Arduino for Smart Juggling Balls.

His goal for this is to create an open-source platform which, beyond juggling, can be used to teach physics in both an interactive and fun way. The juggling balls feature a RGB LED, an Arduino pro mini, and some MPU’s. They can be programmed to change color based on acceleration, gravity, centripetal force, rotation, or even controlled remotely. As the project develops further, he also plans on creating lecture content to go alongside the project, which would make it an excellent and interactive project for a high school (or even college) tech or physics class.

It’s not completely done yet but he’s already posted all the source code and instructions for making your own set over on GitHub. Stick around after the break to see the prototype balls in action and don’t forget to get cracking on your own Hackaday Prize entry!

Alternatively you could just juggle digital balls using the Microsoft Kinect and this clever hack…


Filed under: Arduino Hacks


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