What sort of projects do people want to hack with at HowduinoLeeds? You're more than welcome to bring your current project along with you, but we expect lots of you will be looking for something to do. Use this page to brainstorm ideas about what we could build.
Inspiration
There are loads of hardware hacking projects around on the Internet. Add links to your favourite projects here to show the rest of us what's possible...
Beginners Projects
Ideas for projects that someone with little or no hardware or software experience could get up and running. We'll probably run at least one of these projects in a workshop format to help people get started.
- Basic toy hacking. Bring along a simple electronic toy and make it respond to twitter like the one in my Alertuino talk [suggested by Adrian McEwen]
- LED throwies. If we can get hold of some of the strong magnets, these are a pretty simple but cool project [suggested by Adrian McEwen]
- A Bristlebot
- Camera Triggers - most decent cameras have a remote trigger function which is usually quite easy to wire up to an Arduino, then the camera can be triggered by a whole host of different kinds of sensors, or be triggered in sync with some other action
- IR Control - many gizmo's, including some cameras, TV's, Toys ... have an Infrared remote control. If we can find what to send, an Arduino can drive the IR LEDs. It's 60p in parts, is not invasive, and can use sensors to control gizmo's. We've data for Nikon DSLRs. Look at TV-Be-Gone. Google for gizmo's IR.
Is it possible to...?
Got a rough idea of something you'd like to make real, but no idea of how to make it happen? Let us know what you're thinking and maybe someone can point you in the right direction
Comments (6)
Stuart Childs said
at 4:12 pm on Mar 2, 2011
I'm going to get my LED ping pong screen out again - and also have an 8x8 RGB LED matrix that i'd like to get working / displaying something. Always too many things, not enough time!
Hoping to demo our new FriiSpray cans too - they use an Arduino in basic receiving circuit to get data from the latest wireless cans.
Emmi said
at 10:09 am on Mar 24, 2011
I'm hoping to start building a proof of concept for my University installation project. I'm working on an interactive light installation that responds to people's movement. It is like a sea of LEDs hanging from the ceiling, and when a person walks underneath it the individual LEDs lit up creating a wave of changing lights. The brightness of the lights is dependent on the speed of the motion; when the movement is slower the lights are soft, when walking faster the lights lit up brighter. I'm hoping to do some experiments with motion tracking this weekend, sensors & video. As I said on the other page I haven't got much experience on this stuff generally, but I'm willing to learn. + I'll be asking a lot of questions.
thom said
at 12:26 pm on Mar 25, 2011
Hi Emmi, this sounds interesting, if you can bring a laptop and webcam we might be able to get something up and running in flash or processing.
alice said
at 10:34 am on Mar 24, 2011
I've written up some specs of what we'd like to build https://gist.github.com/881147
But I've also written an Arduino Redis client I'd like to test with some available hardware. https://gist.github.com/883191
thom said
at 12:28 pm on Mar 25, 2011
Hi Alice, I don't know how far along you are with this, might be worth picking up a cheap wireless doorbell and we could try hacking it so the arduino can detect when it's ringing.
alice said
at 7:31 pm on Mar 25, 2011
To me it sounds like a really simple project, wire a doorbell up to the arduino circuit and have it send an http post whenever the button is pressed. We can then handle most of the processing in PHP (a language we're more comfortable with).
That said, I've been thinking about a digital version of the Weasley's clock in Harry Potter today. It should be pretty simple to connect an LCD display to Google Lattitude via Arduino and maybe some PHP.
Or maybe network-connected devices which can be paired so you can press a button and the other one will light up. Really simple, but a nice toy for you and a distant lover to share to know you're thinking of each other. Getting some audio going with that would be good too so you could send short messages, though I wonder if this is beyond the capabilities of Arduino.
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