“Bilbo, look out for the Dragon!” cried Frodo. “Dragon? Nonsense! There hasn’t been a Dragon around here for a thousand years!” said Bilbo… but little did he know what some people are building in their dungeons. Presenting “Puff” the fire fighter Dragon. I bet Smokey the Bear will lose his job soon, as forest fire prevention mascot.
The Dragon, once it finds a fire, has it’s eyes fixed on it, closes in and puts the fire away with his breath. He he I know what your thinking but it’s napalm glands are only active in angry mode. If he fails to put down the fire after two sweeps, he backs away to save his skin.
This project is based on an Arduino processor and MotorShield. Two gear motors with 224:1 ratios and PolyMorph axle extensions are used for movement. Puff moves his head to left and right with the help of a servo and does that in a 60-120 degree range. His “eyes” are two light sensing resistors, each one placed at the end of a heat shrinking tube so that localization of the fire is more precise. Also you must isolate the back of the resistors as well, for the same reason.
Once his eyes are fixed on the fire his breath comes from a little fan and it’s motor. A Sharp IR sensor provides cliff and obstacle detection. You will have to angle it so that it’s focus point falls at 10cm away on the floor. The Dragon’s head is made of paper that you can print with your desired model.
The Arduino Mega shield isn’t available yet and already NKC popped a shield for it, this is great news because you can rely on the well known support and flexibility of the previous Arduino boards.
As you can see on the picture, this is basically a prototype shield with only the reset button mounted and since no SMD pads available, no complex circuitry will fit to this board. The enthusiasts looking for testing the real power of the Mega Arduino will probably have to wait until a matching, powerful shield is available.
Arduino fan’s pay attention, the Mega brother is coming soon. No price or official release date available yet, since the picture is out already you won’t have to wait long to get your hands on this powerful development board.
It’s build around the atmega1280 micro controller, no more excuses that the code won’t fit or isn’t enough RAM, with its 14 PWM channels no motion control application is to complicated and via the 4 USART channels any inter communicating system can be solved.
I can already imagine projects with this board and the ethernet shield: web server, home automation server, security system.
Classic case: all the interesting projects revolve around micro controllers, so you start to dig around and found a dozen of tutorials, how-to’s schematics compilers and so on, you manage to make a simple programmer circuit which is guarantied by some expert from some forum, go out and buy two pieces of atmega8. You have the .hex file, connect the programmer and in that moment your head is full with the data sheet and different settings, you probably remember something about wrong fuse settings could damage the micro controller, and those bits are actually cleared when written, but since you are in a frenzy you click on some fuse settings and load… and then it happens, error reading from device, what could it be, maybe the other IC will work, same fuse settings and load… again the same error.
No more read or write operation, just like the micro controller wouldn’t be attached to the programmer. Most of the thinkers start to measure the supply voltage check the connections and realize at the end that they loaded the wrong fuse settings, and the IC is doomed.
Don’t throw them away in a hurry, you can reset the fuse settings using this parallel high voltage programmer. If you already have the Arduino board this low cost shield can come handy.
This is a real DIY project, hack your old alarm clock, connect it to the Arduino board, write some Phyton script to access your Google calendar and download the data to the Arduino. This will result in a versatile alarm clock, which the author named Larmie.
The alarm clock uses the LM8560 , if your clock has other IC then you must adapt the project, otherwise with the step by step explication it is easy to replicate the Larmie. You can use any calendar software, but I think the Google calendar is the best choice, because you can set your alarm remotely.
The downside of this device is that you need to run your PC all the time, it would be nice to use the Ethernet shield with TCP/IP stack and access directly from Arduino the calendar. Also it would be great if beside the plain 7 segment display some LCD display would show the reason why you should wake up at 6am.
