I wanted my Arduino on the internet.
There are lots of new internet-friendly, Arduino-esque objects, such as the Spark Core. And those are cool.
But getting a plain ol’ Arduino Uno onto the web has been hard. I’ve tried repeatedly. And I have failed. Repeatedly.
This week, I gave it one last try. And I won.
“Let’s have people send pictures!”
This idea comes up a lot where I work. And we’ve done some great photo-crowdsourcing projects.
But how best to get pictures from an audience? Telling people tag us on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook can work, as in WNYC’s Bodega Cats project. But people have to be using those services.
Most folks can email a picture, especially when the email address is easy to remember. That’s what we did for WNYC’s Abandoned Bikes project.
What about texting pictures?
The phone/texting service I like to play with, Twilio, recently added MMS, or Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is what you’re using when you text a picture or video.
So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I wanted to figure out how to text a picture to my server, via Twilio, and then upload it to Flickr:
Phone -> Phone number -> Twilio -> My Server -> Flickr
I can sniff the air and know if you are near.
Your phone’s wifi system transmits periodic “pings” in search of connection points. Those pings contain a set of numbers unique to your phone — its MAC address, or media access control address.
And I can see them.
Solenoids turn code into action.
They’re little pistons triggered by an electrical charge. I’ve seen them play drums and unlock drawers, and I’ve wanted to tinker with them for some time.
Turns out using solenoids means using electrical parts I hadn’t used before.
How would you build a digital candle someone could actually blow out? My 11-year-old daughter and I tried to answer that one evening, just for the fun of it.
We looked online to see if there were ways to detect breezes without a set of spinning cups. We quickly learned about hot-wire wind detectors, which monitor a warm wire and detect tiny changes of voltage as air passes over it.
Even better, we found a $17 device that does exactly that and has Ardiuno code to go with it. Score!
We bought it that night, and, quite honestly, it has been sitting in my bin of parts for months. (In the meantime we built a whole bunch of candles you extinguish by tipping over.)
So for this week’s #MakeEveryWeek, I gave the blow-out candle a try.
As the kids hustle to get out the door, the question always pops up: What’s the weather going to be?
So this week’s #MakeEveryWeek project is an internet-driven forecast bot for our entryway.
It combines kid drawings, cool LEDs, a wifi-connected chip and an online weather service to display the forecast.
The short story: This week I made a blinky-buzzy toy to occupy our cat with a random sequence of teases. And he loved it!
The longer story starts just over a year ago, when Team Blinky friend Liza Stark gave me an 8-legged computer chip the size of a peanut and said, with wide eyes, “You can do amazing things with these!”
So for #MakeEveryWeek No. 3, I learned how to play with this minuscule computer.
The little chip was an ATtiny (pronounced like an author, A. T. Tiny), which is essentially a super-simple Arduino.
Its legs correspond to a some of the familiar Arduino pins: power, ground and five input-output points. More details are on the Sparkfun site.
Just like an Ardunio, you can code it to light LEDs, read simple sensors and buzz buzzers. You program it using Arduino desktop software and the Arduino language. You even use an Arduino as a kind of “mother ship” to load programs into the ATtiny — because it's missing all of the connectors Arduino boards have.
We never know where to get lunch.
Oh, we know where we can go. But the moment our team steps outside, no one can answer “Where should we go?”
So for my second #MakeEveryWeek project, I made a bot to pick a place.
At work, we use Slack to message each other. A feature of Slack allows other programs to post messages in our chat windows using “incoming webhooks” — web addresses that accept data and then pass it into a Slack window.
Any computer on the internet can use the incoming webhook, you just need to know your team's secret webhook URL. Which I do. :-)
Making makes me happy.
Whether it's a map, a blinking hoodie or a Twitter bot, I get a thrill from making things. Yet I don't partake this euphoric drug often enough. Which is ridiculous.
So every week this year, I'm going to make something.
Could be small, could be simple, could be silly. Some should be tricky and/or blinky. And best if I learn something new in the process.
But at least one thing. And I'll blog about each one here.
So without further ado ...
For a while I've owned a little tool called a “third hand” to carefully hold tiny things while I solder other tiny things onto them. Looks like this:
Welcome robots! I'm leading my daughters and a friend through some summer fun building simple robots.
This is live prototyping at its finest (by all of us). I'm tweaking the hardware and software by night, and running "camp" at the kitchen table by day.
The main learning concept I'm aiming for: "If A is detected then B happens," like IFTTT does so well. It seems to be a good, base robot function. Also: Making robots is fun.
My hope is that the kids get to express hands-on creativity, and that I can get Arduino to help me bring their creations alive. As Liza Stark advised me, make sure they have their hands on the project more than I do. Let's see if that happens.
I'll keep posting here as we work through the week. The fun begins today!
The Plans
Given a set of "if" sensors (light, temperature, movement, distance, buttons) and a set of "then" actions (LEDs light, servos rotate), the girls each came up with a plan for a robot: