Author Archives: R-B

Motion Control Rig for Time-Lapse Photography

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Tyler Winegarner and Chris Bordeleau have posted great instructions on their build of Arduino-based motion control rig for time-lapse photography on Makezine Weekend Project section.

Time l

Motion Control Rig for Time-Lapse Photography

If you dig around in your camera’s settings long enough, you’re almost assured to find that it has a mode to create time-lapse videos — those magical, time compressing movies that can turn any hillside or street corner into a lightning-paced dreamscape.

Time-lapse videos by themselves are easy enough to make, but if you do enough of them, you’re likely to get bored with the motionless camera framing. But what can you do here? Having a moving time lapse means moving a camera very predictably, and very, very slowly. You can build a simple panning rig out of a mechanical kitchen timer, but that’s only good if your time lapse is an hour or less, plus, the camera will rotate the full 360 degrees in that hour, further limiting your control.

DIY Arduino Pedometer Wristwatch

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Benhur.Goncalves shared his design of an Arduino-based Wristwatch that features Pedometer along with Temperature, Altitude and Compass sensors.

Arduino Pedometer wristwatch

Arduino Pedometer wristwatch

Hi folks! Last few days I’ve been obsessed with the idea to make my own watch from arduino parts, but something cool I could use and say I did it myself. So I found out there was a sensor board (commonly named GY-87) which had three sensors on it: HMC5883L (compass), BMP085 (pressure, altitude, temperature) and MPU6050 (accelerometer and gyroscope). With it, via I2C, I could add an Arduino Pro Mini, and an I2C Oled Display and make a watch capable of having all this information, plus a pedometer (by analysing accelerometer data).

Cool enough, it was incredibly easy to make, and you will just need some cheap parts, a small amount of Eagle PCB knowledge, some skill on making your own PCB board, and preferably a cheap watch to unmount and get the bracelet / carcass.

Before start, I’ll just post some pictures of previous versions I made so you can have an idea of the challenges you’ll face, and stuff you can add if you like. Let’s get going!

TAHMO to deploy a network of 20,000 weather stations in sub-Saharan Africa

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Team TAHMO is planning to build a network of 20,000 weather stations throughout sub-Saharan Africa for better weather forecasts, early warnings, and climate observations, which will eventually lead to improved food production in Africa.

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TAHMO aims to build a network of 20000 weather stations in Africa

TAHMO stands for “Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory”, a program that aims to design, build, deploy, and operate a network 20,000 weather stations in sub-Saharan Africa (www.tahmo.org). Presently, we have pilot stations in Senegal, Chad, Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa and “pilots at scale” in Ghana and Kenya.

TAHMO stations have to be be affordable and robust. For example, unlike standard weather stations, there should not be any moving parts as these are quickly affected by dust and insects. Maintenance so be limited to some simple cleaning. The network makes use of the availability of cell-phone coverage that has reached most of Africa over the past decade.

Presently, we work with stations developed by Decagon that come close to TAHMO specs. These stations cover all standard meteo measurements such as air temperature and relative humidity, wind speed and direction, incoming solar radiation, and barometric pressure.

 

Raspberry Pi Bandwidth Monitor

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Archie500 has posted instructions about how he built a Raspberry Pi-based monitor for his internet bandwidth into and out of his house.

Raspberry Pi monitors internet bandwidth

Raspberry Pi monitors internet bandwidth

This is a bandwidth monitor using a Raspberry Pi and an OLED display to graphically show the internet bandwidth into and out of our house.

A video showing it working is above.

Sometimes if the internet is slow or not working very well it can be hard to tell if it’s because three other people are watching YouTube videos of if there’s some other problem with the internet connection. By checking the bandwidth monitor you can see straight away the data rate into and out of the house and work out if the problem is with your internet connection or just too many people watching Mat and Pat on YouTube.

In a very brief summary it works as follows: The Raspberry Pi uses SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to get the WAN data rates from the router and then displays these graphically on the OLED screen.

The Raspberry Pi was already set up as our media player and is next to the television. The OLED display was inexpensive and can be bought from a number of places including eBay.

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