Arduino Spot Welder

This prototype is an amazing arduino spot welder born at Made makerspace (Barcelona).

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oneTesla: a DIY Singing Tesla Coil

OneTesla is a singing dual resonant solid state Tesla coil (DRSSTC) project and I’m happy of being one of the almost 1000 backers who pledged for one at kickstarter.

The coil is sent disassembled, but in a few hours you can solder all the components and have it working. The design is great for beginners, as all components are DIP and easily identified. OneTesla also provide great information about Tesla coils, different types, how they work and how oneTesla has been designed. All the boards include a manual/tutorial with a great troubleshooting and oscilloscope screenshots of the different components.

The coil is drive through a fiber optic to isolate it. And you can play midi files from a sd card using an arduino based board.

The final result is awesome!

(Videos are with coil at 30% of power)

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Arduino 8×8 LED tetris

In the next weeks we will be doing a new Arduino workshop at MADE Barcelona makerspace:

While preparing all the material Xavi discoverered that Dan Royer from imakerobots has done some Tetris for the 8x8LED matrix: https://github.com/MarginallyClever/ArduinoStarterKit/tree/master/LED8x8tetris

Unfortunately, the code is incomplete and he was not answering us, so I finally had to write some lines myself. I removed joystick interface and changed it for UART interface. It works quite well with CoolTermWin software.

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Arduino Conway’s game of life

New miniproject using spare parts from last arduino course:

I wanted for a long time to use laser CNC to do some stuff. So finally I have done this small Conway’s game of life. In case you don’t know, it consist of an universe, in this case pretty small (8×8) cells. Each cell can be dead or alive and the state of each cell interact with the state of the neighbors cells state as follow:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The result is a self evolving universe displayed on a 8×8 LED matrix.
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Little ikea hack

The result:

The process:

Polishing table

Ready to paint

Caution wet paint

Urban chiling

This year Barcelona is in a never ending summer. Second harvest of the year!

Habaneros, jalapeños and a small ghost pepper being born…

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Clase de Arduino (nivel principiante)

El pasado sábado dimos con Xavier Tisaire una clase de iniciación a Arduino para principiantes que duró poco más de 6 horas y en la que se explicaron los conceptos básicos de este entorno.

En el grupo de alumno tuvimos gente que no había usado nunca Arduino y que provenían de diferentes ámbitos, la mayoría sin relación alguna con la electrónica o programación. También hubieron asistentes de todas las edades.

El curso se planteo de manera que pudiera ser seguido por todos sin necesidad de tener ningún conocimiento previo.

A cada participante se le proporcionó el material necesario para ejecutar ejemplos prácticos durante el curso: Arduino I, breadboard, led set, resistencias, 8×8 led display y un juego de cables.

Comenzamos con una introducción de ejercicios básicos para entender el IDE y el lenguaje. Continuamos con la explicación de las salidas de Arduino poniendo el ejemplo práctico de control secuencial de leds al estilo luces de “El coche fantástico”. En la segunda parte se explicó el control de la matriz.

Pese a ser muchos conceptos muy condensados en el tiempo de duración de la clase, los asistentes no tuvieron problemas en seguirlos y se mostraron muy motivados por seguir descubriendo el potencial de Arduino. Creo que fue muy interesante para todos.

Aquí podéis ver las fotos y vídeos.

Este es el link del github que creamos para seguir los contenidos del curso: https://github.com/tisaire/arduino/wiki

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Como usar el DS1307 con Arduino

Para aquellos que quieran utilizar un Real Time Clock (RTC) y más concretamente un DS1307 de forma rápida y fácil con Arduino aquí dejo un código básico listo para usar.

Para empezar hay que conectar el DS1307 al arduino tal como se indica en la referencia de la librería wire:

Para la mayoría de la placas (Arduino UNO y Nano):

• SDA (línea de datos):  pin analógico 4
• SCL (línea de reloj) : pin analógico 5.

En Arduino Mega:

• SDA (línea de datos):  pin digital 20
• SCL (línea de reloj) :  pin digital 21

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GBcamera ImageSaver

I have just found an old code I wrote, some time ago, to get Game boy camera images from the cartridge and save them in a computer. Probably nobody cares anymore about Game Boy and Game Boy Camera, I can imagine. But I was born in the 80’s, and for me that’s still funny.

Ok! I know GB Camera has only 23kpx monochrome sensor, but in 1998 Casio just launched Casio QV-10 with 250kpx sensor and one year later Nikon released Nikon D1 (2.8Mpx). Unfortunately at that time I was too young for a 6k$ camera.

So GameBoy Camera was a pretty awesome toy in the late 90’s. With GB camera you could take pics and check them without waiting for any chemical process. There is a menu for editing the photos with endless options, and another one to make funny animations. You can even rotate the lens to make selfies!

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