Playing with Arduino

Recently I stumbled upon an old’ish blog post from the amazingly talented Rob Hawkes where he (and Redweb) created a “christmas spirit-o-meter” to measure peoples christmas spirit and display the results in the real world using a contraption that Rob built. Said contraption consisted of a christmassy-coloured backboard and a pointer attached to a servo that moved based on the spirit level. This in turn was then streamed live over the internet for all to see – pretty awesome I thought. Naturally, being the kind of person that I am, I wanted to know how it all worked and how he had tackled interacting with the data.

Rob had used something called Arduino – which is an open-source electronics prototyping platform, intended for use by artists, designers and hobbyists.

I came across a few other amazing people too that had used Arduino to produce some fantastic installations and prototype products. Without going too off-topic here are just a couple that I absolutely love.

Escape by Anthony Goh and Neil Mendoza

Arguably one my favorite Arduino projects that i’ve seen so far. Anthony and Neil take the often annoying and stressful mobile phone and create an fun and interactive installation which make people want to use their phones in a playful manner. Each of these birds consist of a load of broken phone parts and an Arduino Mini board. A brilliant example of the power and creativity Arduino can help achieve.

Big Dripper by Giles Hall

A robotic sculpture created by Giles Hall based on the concept of Harold Edgerton’s Piddler which uses a stroboscopic light source to highlight individual drops of water in a constant stream of liquid. Giles work expands on this idea by adding eight individually controllable pumps.

Spotify box by Jordi Parra

Jordi Parra created this beautifully designed prototype that enables you to listen to Spotify at home on dedicated device. Using RFID tags, a couple of push buttons, an LED matrix and a speaker (surely in addition to lots of other components!), Jordi has created this wonderful device for his final degree project. I would highly recommend checking out his blog which delves into much detail and great images and videos.

After being fascinated by all of the above I was inspired to create my own Arduino based project. I have been playing around with some basic components and for my first project I created a temperature monitor.

The temperature monitor is accurate to 0.5 degree celsius and uses an LCD to output the temperature data. In addition, I have also included a a simple bar graph and an LED “alert” for when the temperature rises over 23°C.

Hardly compares to the works of art above however I do have a goal in mind. Over the coming months – or perhaps year(s) – I’m going to research and attempt to build a surveillance robot. A web/remote controlled bot that is aware of it’s surroundings and reports realtime information back to the user (via a server most probably for data processing). Features I am thinking of thus far include a custom made pan tilt zoom camera, motion/face tracking, utilise ultrasonics and other motion sensors, GPS tracking of the bot and perhaps investigate mobile control.

I invite you on my journey of exploring the world of Arduino over the coming months and welcome any feedback and comments.

Posted at 9:12 am on April 7th, 2011. 2 comments