As the Arduino surges in popularity, people keep dreaming up crazier and more complex ways to use it. We’ve rounded up five of the most impressive Arduino projects on the web to show what’s possible with such a versatile and inexpensive platform. Be warned – these projects aren’t for beginners, but if you’re looking for a challenge and something to brag about, they could be just the ticket.
A new Kickstarter project aims to provide a low-cost, open source platform for building a GPS tracking device. The author, Wayne Truchsess of DSS Circuits, explains that a few years back, his brother in law had a PS3 stolen during a long power outage in the depths of winter. Not wanting to repeat history, Wayne bought a fake PS3 case on eBay and developed his own prototype position tracker to put inside it.
The tracker consists of a GSM cellular modem, a GPS unit, and an accelerometer, all tied to an Arduino and a LiPo battery to provide brains and power, respectively. Normally, the device lies in wait, asleep to save power. If it detects motion, it turns on the modem and alerts a preconfigured phone number via SMS. The owner can then respond with various commands to turn position tracking on or put the device back to sleep.
Tom Igoe’s blog code, circuits, and construction has posted a tutorial on how to log data from your Arduino and put it into your platform or format of choice. As Tom explains, there’s a few common pathways once you’ve read a sensor or accepted some other form of input:
- Serial transmission to a personal computer, and serial capture to a file.
- Saving data to an SD card mounted on the Arduino.
- HTTP upload to pachube.com via an Ethernet shield or Ethernet Arduino.
Hello there and welcome back! Faster code Fridays is our weekly series that doesn’t ever fall on a Friday, unless our laziness becomes so strong that it interferes with our disregard for naming conventions. We figure we’ll forgetfully publish one of these things on a Friday at some point. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?
If you’re a first-time visitor, Faster code Fridays highlights code optimization techniques that are useful for embedded systems. Embedded applications often deal with time critical applications that require maximum performance and minimum execution time. In fact, good coding practice is often more apparent when working with microcontrollers, because you don’t have four 4GHz cores and 8Gb of RAM to get you out of trouble. We’ll use Arduino-compatible code for most of our examples, though these techniques are applicable to AVR, PIC, or any number of platforms.
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In a previous post, we highlighted a DIY oscilloscope project that used an Arduino Pro Mini and an old Nokia cell phone LCD to create a quick and dirty oscilloscope. That build is great for a portable solution. However, what if you want a bit more power and polish?