Planet Arduino

Note: Google Drive is available to all users over the age of 14. This is so we adhere to the COPPA compliance requirements for students under 14-years-old.

Students and teachers can now sync Google Drive with their Arduino Science Journal experiments. This means you can access experiments from any device using your Arduino account. The brand new Google Drive integration is available now through the latest app update.

Benefits of using Google Drive

You can benefit from Google Drive sync immediately. Simply sign in with your Arduino account and authenticate the Google Drive connection. Then select the folder where you want to back up your experiments. From then on, all your experiments will be accessible from any devices whenever you log in.

Don’t worry. You’ll still be able to use Arduino Science Journal without logging in. But your experiments won’t be associated with your Arduino account, and will only be locally stored. 

What else is new?

You’ll also find new useful links on the sidebar of your app, so learning becomes even simpler. With just a few clicks, you’ll be able to access the free Science Journal activities, browse the help center articles, and learn more about the Arduino Science Kit straight from the app.

The Arduino Science Journal content platform welcomes seven new activities, as well as great new partners and content creators. The Tech Interactive, Alison Green and Isabella Liu have helped us create some amazing new lessons. Check them out here.

You will be able to experiment with motion and sound, as well as a step-by-step guide to help you access Google Drive on your Science Journal app!

We’re also delighted that the Arduino Science Journal is certified by the Educational App Store with a 4-star rating! 

We’ve helped hundreds of thousands of educators with remote teaching, and we strive to make data literacy and scientific thinking more accessible, wherever you are. If you’re an Arduino Science Journal user, you can help out by recommending the app to your fellow educators. And we’d love to hear how you are using the app in your classroom!

Tag us on social media to show us what you’re working on with #ScienceJournal.

If you don’t have the app already, join over 700,000 other teachers, students and makers by downloading it now!

The post Sync Google Drive with Arduino Science Journal projects appeared first on Arduino Blog.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the Arduboy. In just a few short years, [Kevin Bates] went from proof of concept to a successful commercial product without compromising on his original open source goals. Today, anyone can develop a game for the Arduboy and have it distributed to owners all over the world for free. If you’ve ever dreamt of being a game developer, the Arduboy community is for you.

Realizing the low-cost hardware and open source software of the Arduboy makes it an excellent way to learn programming, [Kevin] is now trying to turn his creation into a legitimate teaching tool. He’s kicking off this new chapter in the Arduboy’s life with a generous offer: giving out free hardware to educators all over the world. Anyone who wants to be considered for the program just needs to write-up a few paragraphs on how they’d plan on using the handheld game system to teach programming.

[Kevin] already knows the Arduboy has been used to teach programming, but those have all been one-off endeavours. They relied on a teacher that was passionate enough about the Arduboy to put in their own time and effort to create a lesson plan around it. So one of the main goals right now is getting an official curriculum put together so educators won’t have to start from scratch. The community has already developed 16 free lessons, but they’re looking for help in creating more and translating them into other languages.

While the details are still up in the air, [Kevin] also plans to travel to schools personally and help them get their Arduboy classes off the ground. He’s especially interested in developing countries and other areas that are disadvantaged educationally. Believing that the Arduboy is as much a way to teach effective leadership and teambuilding as it is programming, he thinks this program can truly make a difference.

Since [Kevin] first Rickrolled us with his prototype in 2014, we’ve seen the Arduboy project spread like wildfire through the hacker community. From figuring out how to play its games on other gadgets to developing an expansion cartridge for the real thing, the Arduboy has already done its fair share of inspiring. Here’s hoping it has just as much of an impact on the next generation of hackers once they get their hands on it.

It’s hard not to be impressed by the Arduboy. In just a few short years, [Kevin Bates] went from proof of concept to a successful commercial product without compromising on his original open source goals. Today, anyone can develop a game for the Arduboy and have it distributed to owners all over the world for free. If you’ve ever dreamt of being a game developer, the Arduboy community is for you.

Realizing the low-cost hardware and open source software of the Arduboy makes it an excellent way to learn programming, [Kevin] is now trying to turn his creation into a legitimate teaching tool. He’s kicking off this new chapter in the Arduboy’s life with a generous offer: giving out free hardware to educators all over the world. Anyone who wants to be considered for the program just needs to write-up a few paragraphs on how they’d plan on using the handheld game system to teach programming.

[Kevin] already knows the Arduboy has been used to teach programming, but those have all been one-off endeavours. They relied on a teacher that was passionate enough about the Arduboy to put in their own time and effort to create a lesson plan around it. So one of the main goals right now is getting an official curriculum put together so educators won’t have to start from scratch. The community has already developed 16 free lessons, but they’re looking for help in creating more and translating them into other languages.

While the details are still up in the air, [Kevin] also plans to travel to schools personally and help them get their Arduboy classes off the ground. He’s especially interested in developing countries and other areas that are disadvantaged educationally. Believing that the Arduboy is as much a way to teach effective leadership and teambuilding as it is programming, he thinks this program can truly make a difference.

Since [Kevin] first Rickrolled us with his prototype in 2014, we’ve seen the Arduboy project spread like wildfire through the hacker community. From figuring out how to play its games on other gadgets to developing an expansion cartridge for the real thing, the Arduboy has already done its fair share of inspiring. Here’s hoping it has just as much of an impact on the next generation of hackers once they get their hands on it.

[Alex] needed a project for his microcomputer circuits class. He wanted something that would challenge him on both the electronics side of things, as well as the programming side. He ended up designing an 8 by 16 grid of LED’s that was turned into a game of Tetris.

He arranged all 128 LED’s into the grid on a piece of perfboard. All of the anodes were bent over and connected together into rows of 8 LED’s. The cathodes were bent perpendicularly and forms columns of 16 LED’s. This way, if power is applied to one row and a single column is grounded, one LED will light up at the intersection. This method only works reliably to light up a single LED at a time. With that in mind, [Alex] needed to have a very high “refresh rate” for his display. He only ever lights up one LED at a time, but he scans through the 128 LED’s so fast that persistence of vision prevents you from noticing. To the human eye, it looks like multiple LED’s are lit up simultaneously.

[Alex] planned to use an Arduino to control this display, but it doesn’t have enough outputs on its own to control all of those lights. He ended up using multiple 74138 decoder/multiplexer IC’s to control the LED’s. Since the columns have inverted outputs, he couldn’t just hook them straight up to the LED’s. Instead he had to run the signals through a set of PNP transistors to flip the logic. This setup allowed [Alex] to control all 128 LED’s with just seven bits, but it was too slow for him.

His solution was to control the multiplexers with counter IC’s. The Arduino can just increment the counter up to the appropriate LED. The Arduino then controls the state of the LED using the active high enable line from the column multiplexer chip.

[Alex] wanted more than just a static image to show off on his new display, so he programmed in a version of Tetris. The controller is just a piece of perfboard with four push buttons. He had to work out all of the programming to ensure the game ran smoothly while properly updating the screen and simultaneously reading the controller for new input. All of this ran on the Arduino.

Can’t get enough Tetris hacks? Try these on for size.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, led hacks

It isn’t exactly WALL-E, but [Bithead's] affordable introduction to robots – Talkbot – is made out of a trash can. This little guy runs off an Arduino and comes packed with features, including a voice chip, a motor shield, and a pair of bump sensors. Talkbot will cruise around until a bump sensor slams into an obstacle. One of his prerecorded messages will then play through the speaker while he backs up, turns, and tries to find a clearer path.

According to [Bithead's] build log, tracking down the right bargain voice chip was a bit of a hassle; he skipped over the text-to-speech options only to be stalled by vendor issues. He finally settled on a clone of Sparkfun’s WTV020SD chip sourced from eBay, which allows you to access pre-recorded WAV files stored on a Micro-SD card. The robot’s body comes straight off the hardware store shelf, with PVC pipe for arms and a polystyrene base to hold all the parts.  At the bargain price of $110, [Bithead's] students will have a true hacker experience cobbling the Talkbot together rather than using a prefab kit.

Be sure to see Talkbot  in a video below, performing either his green-eyed “friendly mode” or red-eyed “grumpy mode,” which dictates how pleasantly he responds to obstacles. Need something more advanced? Check out the tentacle robot, just in time for Halloween.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks, digital audio hacks, how-to, robots hacks

After 13 years, Classe Virtuale project is once again an interesting opportunity for students to experiment a bridge between school and work. “Classe Virtuale” is a partnership between Loccioni and technical educational institutions started in 2001 when the group started offering to young students training periods and internships in the company giving the chance to work on a real project together with very skilled people and technicians. In 2012 they worked on a flow meter and this year the project focused on a similar project called People Meter, using Arduino Uno, wi-fi and rfid modules, and a 3d printer.

Below you can find more information (in italian) about the team, the project and the results!

In his blog, Andrea (a student in computer science from University of Napoli “Parthenope”) describes how to make a smart door plate with Arduino.

The goal of this project, which is part of the larger “Sebeto Project” (more information can be found on its homepage), is to provide dynamic information to the user, which can be updated remotely by using an Arduino ethernet shield and a modified Fonera wireless router.

A detailed tutorial on how to build your own Tuco (in Italian) can be found here.

[Via: Andrea Esposito's blog]