My friends and family are always coming and going. I sometimes follow their flights, especially when they are showing up at my door, or departing on a life-expanding adventure. It’s easy to do if I stay in front of the computer with a web page open. However, when I’m at the computer I’m usually working on something else that gets in the way, and away from the screen there’s no information at all.
For today’s 7 in 7 project I created a Desktop Flight Tracker that physically indicates the altitude of a live aircraft flight from online data. The system includes an Arduino microcontroller with embedded Internet connection and a small servo motor attached to a model jet airliner. Once the airline name and flight number is loaded into the system, the model jet rises off the desktop just as the real flight takes off. The model continues to rise as the actual plane climbs to its cruising altitude, then holds its position. (I like to imagine that tiny cocktails are being served inside.) For descent and landing, the model lowers itself to the desktop, just as the real flight touches down at its destination. Please keep your seatbelts fastened until the aircraft has come to a full stop at the gate.
In the hour or so since I got the prototype working properly, I’ve tracked a couple flights as they cruised into the New York area, descended and touched down at JFK—both informative and entertaining. Bon voyage!
There’s plenty of clock projects that use the open-source Arduino microcontroller platform, but to my knowledge, none of those projects are themselves officially open-source. So as a quick one-day project for 7 in 7, I started creating clock code that anyone can use and extend for their own projects, under the GPL Creative Commons license. So far it’s simply code for tracking weekday and time in a cyclical pattern, along with some buttons to set the clock. There’s plenty of room for creative additions, and that’s just the point. Use the Open-source Arduino Clock code as a base to create something amazing!
For my first 7 in 7 project I created a prototype for a proximity maintenance device. This is a radio-enabled bracelet or necklace worn by two individuals who do not want to become separated in a crowd. As long as the devices can maintain radio contact, nothing happens. However if the individuals move far enough apart or lose radio contact, their devices begin vibrating. At this point they can seek each other out and reunite.
The prototype I made uses XBee radios paired with Arduino microcontrollers to manage the radio messages and produce the alerts. The challenge of a 7 in 7 project is to complete it in 24 hours, therefore these devices are still in a fairly rough state. Luckily they are fully operational and can easily be worn outside for real-world testing. Thanks to Kate for helping with a quickie sleeve mount and cool sealed vibrator motors with magnetic mounting snaps. One project down, six to go!
Just finished putting together Limor’s $22 Wave Shield for Arduino. This shield snaps on top of the Arduino microcontroller board, creating a ridiculously easy way to get audio playback into physical computing prototypes. The Wave Shield will play back uncompressed .wav files of any length from a regular SD card, either over headphones or through a small speaker. Now projects can chant, count, warn, soothe, mumble, moo, cajole, challenge, respond, sob and sing.
Like all of the Adafruit kits, Limor has made the ????????schematic and board files available for download, so once you’ve prototyped with the shield, you can adapt her design into a custom PCB. My favorite story so far is an NYC Resistor guy who combined a light sensor with a prerecorded scream. He made his Arduino afraid of the dark.
In case you hadn’t heard, we’ve made Botanicalls Twitter as a do-it-yourself example for people who like to–well–do it themselves. It’s the first step in making Botanicalls available to a wider audience, and the online press has taken note. In the last 48 hours, we’ve been graced by the attention of:
Make Magazine
CNet
Slashdot
Lifehacker
Gizmodo
Wired
…and even Business Week
Botanicalls Twitter would not have happened without both brilliant code and sage advice from Limor Fried. We also appreciate the support of Phil Torrone who inspired our Twitter venture and helped to make it a success. Botanicalls is a project from Kate Hartman, Kati London, Rebecca Bray and Rob Faludi.
People ask me all the time which battery they should use for their Arduino project, or how long an XBee will run on a specific type of battery. Rather than continue to give vague answers, I decided that it would be much more helpful to generate some real-world battery life results for Arduino projects and XBee mesh networking radios. There were a lot of surprises. The results depend of course upon which battery you choose, but everything else makes a difference too. Changing the duty cycle of a single LED doubled battery life on an Arduino project. Simply sleeping an XBee radio between transmissions generated a whopping 1470% increase in battery life. In a few cases specific types of batteries failed completely–probably the most helpful test result of all.
Use the real-world battery life results to help choose which setup is right for your project. You can also use my Battery Test program in Processing to run your own tests. Send me any well-documented results and I’ll gladly add them to the list.
On the Arduino microcontroller, the millis() function counts the number of milliseconds since the program started running. Unfortunately, this count resets to zero after approximately 9 hours and 32 minutes. I have written a millisRollover() function that detects these rollovers, so that programs can respond properly to the overflow event. This can solve problems with servo routines, steppers, timed pauses and a variety of other calculations. In addition, because my millisRollover() function counts the number of times rollover has happened, it is now possible to record total Arduino runtime with a counter that’s good for over 35 years.
You want to blink an LED only on Christmas during leap years? Totally possible now.
(yes, there really is a millis police department)
