Planet Arduino

[Duncan McIntyre] lives in the UK but participated in a secret Santa gift exchange for his Dutch friends’ Sinterklaas celebration. In traditional maker fashion, [Duncan] went overboard and created a miniature gym gift box, complete with flashing lights, music and a motorized lid.

[Duncan] used [TanyaAkinora]’s 3D printed tiny gym to outfit the box with tiny equipment, with a tiny mirror added to round out the tiny room. An ATmega328P was used as the main microcontroller to drive the MP3 player module and A4988 stepper motor controller. The stepper motor was attached to a drawer slide via a GT2 timing belt and pulley to actuate the lid. Power is provided through an 18V, 2A power supply with an LM7805 providing power to the ATmega328P and supporting logical elements. As an extra flourish, [Duncan] added some hardware audio signal peak detection, fed from the speaker output, which was then sampled by the ATmega328P to be able to flash the lights in time with the playing music. A micro switch detects when the front miniature door is opened to begin the sequence of lights, song and lid opening.

[Duncan] provides source on GitHub for those curious about the Arduino code and schematics. We’re fans of miniature pieces of ephemera and we’ve featured projects ranging from tiny 3D printed tiny escalators to tiny arcade cabinets.

Video after the break!

[Sam Horne] adapted an old school landline phone to deliver clues to birthday party guests. When guests find a numerical clue, they type it into the keypad to hear  the next clue, which involves decoding some Morse code.

The phone consists of an Arduino Pro Mini, a MP3/WAV trigger, and the phone itself, of which the earpiece and keypad have been reused. [Sam] had to map out the keypad and solder leads connecting the various contact points of the phone’s PCB to the Arduino’s digital pins. He used a digitally-generated voice to generate the audio files, and employed the Keypad and Password Arduino libraries to deliver the audio clues.

This seems like a great project to do for a party of any age of attendee, though the keying speed is quick. Hopefully [Sam]’s guests have a high Morse WPM or are quick with the pen! For more keypad projects check out this custom shortcut keyboard and printing a flexible keyboard.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.

In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, switches, and a wire maze that requires the player to navigate without bumping into the wire (think 2D Operation).

In addition to the code and hardware diagrams, there is a PDF file on GitHub describing more about the game. It is in Portuguese, though, so most of us will probably need a little translation help. However, a Brazillian site did have an English post about the game, which might be a good place to start.

You might not want to replicate the game, but it is a great example of how much an Arduino can do with some simple externals devices and some attention to packaging.

Sadly, most of our projects look more like this game (no offense to that hacker). Projects like this are way more likely to spark young people’s interest than a blinking LED or a capacitor meter. If you are more in the mood for arcade play, you can also check out Arduinocade.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

by Jose Daniel Herrera @ arduino-cool.blogspot.com:

I present this new Arduino project: A full MP3 player based on Arduino.
As you can see in the photo, the idea was to build a standalone player, in the style of antique radios or ‘tapes’, in the age of Iphones ….
The player uses a small module based on the VS1002d chip (now discontinued, but who had a drawer). The module in question I bought at Futurlec . Currently you can get similar modules on ebay for a bit more than 10$, although the chip is the VS1003 o VS1053. You can also use a SparkFun MP3 shield, but significantly more expensive (this shield already includes an SD slot).
The three chips are quite compatible in terms of programming, and indeed almost all initialization the I have taken from the library to the SparkFun MP3 Shield

[via]

Arduino standalone MP3 player - [Link]

Arduino WebRadio player is an inexpensive WebRadio player that can plays internet audio streams up to 64-kbps and is based on mp3, aac and wma audio formats.

The main components are:

• Arduino Pro mini board
• ENC28J60 ethernet module
• VS1053B mp3, aac, wma decoder
• 84×48 dot matrix LCD module (Nokia 5110)

Arduino WebRadio player - [Link]

Last August Arduino Tour landed in Singapore, hosted by The Hub Singapore. Davide Gomba held a workshop there and met a lot of cool people during the hackathon happening in the same days. Ted, one of the participants, submitted to our blog the Indoor Localization (see video below) project  he prototyped with his team during the 24 hours CodeXtreme hours:

Our idea is to convert existing speakers inside shopping malls into an indoor localization beacon. This allows malls to track the location density without adding extensive infrastructure since it uses embedded inaudible sound signatures in music that shops play in the malls. In short, instead of tracking Joker, we use Arduino (with WiFI Shield & MP3 Shield) and Android to track people (customer) inside a mall.

 

They used Arduino Uno with Sparkfun Mp3 Shield to make the audio playback and Arduino Uno with Arduino WiFi Shield for the server. They are now working on fine-tuning the code as they’ve just bought Arduino Yún and trying to port the code over. Once they finish with that the code will be available on their  blog. In the meanwhile you can enjoy two other projects they are sharing on their website, and email prank and a wi-fi controller.

The new Lilypad MP3 board is out and it looks pretty sweet! Lilypads are washable Arduinos designed for wearable electronics. You can sew them onto your clothing and wire them up with conductive thread. The new MP3 board is basically an Arduino — it’s got the standard ATmega 328p with […]

Read the full article on MAKE

This little box not only plays tunes, but it lets you control several aspects of playback without touching a thing. [Thomas Clauser] calls it the LighTouch and we like it because it uses inaudible sound to control audible sound.

We think the pair of cylinders sticking up through the top of this project enclosure will be recognized by most readers as the business end of an ultrasonic rangefinder. This is the only control interface which [Thomas] chose to use. Although he didn’t write very extensively about the specific control scheme he implemented, the video embedded in his post shows some of the gestures that cause the Arduino inside to change its behavior. For instance, a swipe of the hand at higher level starts playback, swiping at a lower level pauses it. When adjusting the volume the box responds to how close his hand is to that sensor. With this control in place, the music side of these things is simply handled by a music shield he is using.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, digital audio hacks

A full Arduino MP3 player using a SD card and a MP3 module based on a chip from VLSI (VS1002d, VS1003 VS1053). The player includes a small amplifier and two speakers, making it a small Jukebox in the age of Ipods. The project includes a small library for the management of the MP3 and the SD chip. A Funny Arduino project ..

via [arduino-guay]

Here’s an inexpensive Arduino-based MP3 Jukebox (translated) which [Jose Daniel Herrera] put together.

He spent some time making sure that it looked great sitting on a shelf with his other audio equipment. This started with a wooden box which is some reused packaging. We’re not familiar with the ‘iNFUSiONES’ product; perhaps it’s tea or tobacco? At any rate, to this he added a custom face plate to host the character LCD, rotary encoder, two buttons, and to act as a grill for the two speakers.

The speakers and their accompanying amplifier circuitry were pulled from a portable speaker set. He combined them with a VS1002d MP3 decoder module, SD card breakout board, and the Arduino itself. In addition to the overview post linked above, there is also a collection of assembly photos, and a post discussing the way he arranged the code for the control systems (translated). See and hear the unit in action in the clip after the break.

Filed under: arduino hacks, digital audio hacks