Who wouldn’t want an Arcade at home? Check out this neatly home-built dual player arcade machine powered by Raspberry Pi from rolfebox. This plays multiple types of retro games, including NES, SNES, Megadrive and MAME games. The author shares the details of this built on the original Instructables page.
Raspberry Pi-powered dual player arcade
We have seen Angelo making a homebrew USB condenser mic and piezoelectric power generator shoes before, both of which were kind of cool projects. Now he has come up with a remote motion sensing and triggering for a DSLR camera utilizing his favorite tool, Arduino. He proposed the applications of this project in wildlife photography, sports, and home security systems to take automatic photo shots when motion is sensed.
His project has two main units. The first one is a Motion Sensing Beacon, which is located at a remote area where the motion activities are to be monitored. It consists of a PIR motion sensor, Arduino, and a 433MHz RF transmitter module. When motion is detected, the Arduino informs the second unit, Remote Receiver and Controller, which consists of a 433MHz RF receiver, another Arduino, and camera trigger system. The camera is aimed at the same location that is being monitored for motion activities. When the Remote Receiver unit receives the go signal, it activates the camera to take multiple shots of the location.
Remote motion sensing and camera triggering device
I hope all of you had a wonderful and safe Halloween. Ours was great. We had a lot of fun taking out our 3-year old son, who dressed up like Curious George (his favorite cartoon character), for trick or treat in our neighborhood. The most difficult part of Halloween is choosing costumes for kids. We all want to do something different every year. And so did [melarky], who made a pretty neat animated robot mask for his oldest son to wear on Halloween this year. His robot mask uses Adafruit’s neopixel rings for robot eyes, an old iPhone running MouthOff app for its mouth part, and a cheap voice changer toy to add some audio effects. The neopixel rings are controlled by an Arduino board for creating animated eyes.
Animated robot mask for Halloween
Hard water contains more minerals (calcium and magnesium) than ordinary water. Although it is non-toxic, it is less desirable as it can clog water pipes and complicate soap and detergent dissolving in water. It also builds up scales in water heaters over time, thus shortening their operational lifetime. In residential units, hard water is usually softened by installing a water softener unit connected directly to the water supply line. The water softner exchanges salt for the dissolved minerals, which results in softer water. David Cook’s water softener appliance stores the salt supply in a brine tank, which requires refilling in every few weeks. Until now, the only way Dave could know that the tank is empty was when his wife complained that the dishwasher, soap or shampoo was not working. So, for uninterrupted water softening, Dave has made a salt level monitor for the brine tank. The device uses a 10-element LED array to indicate the salt level in the tank. He used an infrared sensor to measure the salt level in the tank. This data is processed by an AVR ATtiny861 microcontroller and displayed it on the LED bargraph. A light-dependent resistor is also implemented in the project as a smart switch to save battery power. The LED bar graph display is auto-turned off until the room lights are turned on or somebody approaches the monitor panel, which changes the room brightness level.
Water softener salt level monitor
Easy Matrix is an easily cascadable 8×8 monochromatic LED dot matrix display module with onboard MAXIM’s MAX7219 LED driver chip. The MAX7219 allows you to drive the LED matrix using only three I/O pins of Arduino or any other microcontroller. The LED matrix module used in Easy Matrix has a bigger dot size (5mm) and has the overall display dimensions of 60.2mm x 60.2mm (2.4″x2.4″). It is easily cascadable in series with the help of precisely aligned male and female header pairs located on the left and right sides of the display module. With lots of freely available Arduino libraries for MAX7219 chip, this module is easy to use in any Arduino project for displaying basic text and animation.
Easy Matrix: Cascadable LED matrix display module