Nerf gun turret

I was working on a Nerf gun turret in my previous employment at a special needs school but never had time to finish it. There are a lot of very disabled children who don’t get to run around and wrestle like other kids do so I was trying to think of a way of them getting in on the ‘boisterous play’. The Nerf gun turret was meant to be something they could use with a small thumb joystick similar to one used to drive an electric wheelchair, or even controlled with eye gaze tracking. For this iteration I just hooked it up to a USB gamer joystick.

There are definitely some improvements to be made, the rig is flimsy, the tilt servo could do with some gearing, the gun often jams and I may have smoothed the input a little too much, but we are getting there! I’d love to hook it up to the Husky Lens and get some AI image tracking going on… face recognition to only attack a certain person?

Huskylens Easy-to-use AI Vision Sensor

 

I just received my DFRobot Huskylens having funded the Kickstarter a while back. Of course there is zero documentation at the moment, I couldn’t find anything much online and was having trouble reading serial from the device. In the end I searched on Github and found an Arduino library. If you download the zip, unzip it and then rezip the ‘HUSKYLENS’ folder inside the main folder then you can import it as a zip library as described here and then access the examples.

I had a quick play with the device and managed to get location data coming in to my Arduino for tracked objects and it seems pretty simple to learn new ones. Now if I can hook up some face detection to the nerf gun turret I am building we can have some fun…

Feather Huzzah32 - ESP32 OSC

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I was a fan of the old Huzzah board based on the ESP8266 chip, but it only had one analog input which made it unsuitable for some projects. The new ESP32 chip has loads of analog inputs, bluetooth/BLE and is pretty packed with GPIO and features! Check it out here at Adafruit. 

I have been using it to send button and fader/sensor readings over WiFi using OSC to my computer running Max MSP, it is a great tool. I have created a repository here with all the coding and information to set it up. 

Wifi RFID sender

I have been putting together an RFID reader that can send tag IDs over Wifi to a machine running Max MSP on the same network. I have used an RC522 reader which I have blogged about before, and the recent Adafruit Feather Huzzah board which is based on the ESP8266 chip and includes an onboard Lipo charger so is great for portable IoT projects. For once I managed to find an enclosure of pretty much exactly the right dimensions, it was tight but I crammed it in including switch and indicator LED. The hardware will be used for a project at Three Ways School that aims to give non/pre verbal children a voice, more details to follow...

Arduino / Xbee network

I will be running some workshops on the Creative Computing course at Bath Spa in January with kit supplied by Farnell Element14. I want the students to create a network of nodes that communicate with each other and have some element of generative algorithm to them. I have built a proof of concept as seen in the video, a single node generates an audio and LED output and sends the message to another node, that node displays the incoming message and then generates one of its own to signal another unit. Right now everything is generated pretty randomly and the nodes choose another one to send their message to at random. Things will get more interesting when we link colour and audio frequency and think of more interesting ways to generate our message. Perhaps some nodes will favour talking to others or malcontents will start interrupting the current conversation? I am interested to see what behaviour might emerge when there are 10 of these things going and each has its own 'personality'... 

RFID RC522 + Huzzah ESP8266

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This revisits the RC522 RFID reader that we blogged about here. I wanted to be able to use it with a Wifi connection to ping RFID tag IDs over the ether so I started hooking it up to a Huzzah ESP8266 board I had and after a bit of fiddling it worked! Its only sending over serial right now, but if I can get it going over Wifi, this is an incredibly cheap RFID tag beamer. The new sketch with a description of the pin connections can be found here.

Cloud lamp

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I've been wanting to make a cloud lamp for ages at Three Ways and there are a tonne of tutorials online if you want to follow one of them. I wanted to have a remote control for mine but didn't really want to bother with decoding IR or RF signals whilst trying to do lighting animations. I have used those key fob remote controlled relay modules before, but its massive overkill to control an Arduino pin. I spent a long time looking for a remote module that could control 5V pin logic and sure enough found one that is made by Adafruit, but unfortunately it is on 315MHz which is illegal to use in the UK. Seeing as it is the military channel I didn't want to mess with that really and couldn't find any UK options until I found this amazingly retro thing! 

I found it on the 'Flux Workshop' eBay shop for £5.29 which is great for the time and extra hardware it saved me. I have not tested it extensively yet, but it seems to do what I want it to, is on 433MHz which is UK friendly and is the only option besides rolling my own apparently.

Anyway, we now have a way of selecting between 4 presets remotely so I can hang the cloud out of reach, which is good because it would be shredded in seconds! 

I'm not sure what I am gong to do about dusting yet...

Paper craft electronics birthday card

It is my sons 7th birthday today and it has become a tradition to do a paper craft electronics card for him. These have tended to get a bit more complicated every year so there is a warning there to start simple! This one uses an ATtiny 84 chip programmed via an Arduino to run a seven segment display from a 3V button cell. I used very thin kynar wire and copper tape for the connections to make it count up to and flash his age. Definitely one to do before they reach double figures!! 

It would be great to print the circuit outline onto the card to scale and do some nice design on the computer, my drawing (and writing!) skills are somewhat lacking!