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  • Author Author: tariq.ahmad
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Weekly Content Journal: 4th Week of August 2019

tariq.ahmad

Greetings Best Community Members in the Galaxy!

 

Here's this week's rundown on some of the exciting activities going on in and around the community.

 

Remote Monitoring & Control Winners Announcement!

 

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This one was really fun and inspired some really great projects. The Winner of the Grand Prize of a $200 Shopping Cart:  for Big Petro Maker Magic: $100 Datalogger That Can Save Millions. The following members receive First Place Trophy Badges and a $100 shopping Cart: for Micro Monster - Succulent Plants Monitoring System,  for Solar Panel Monitoring Using Particle Photon, and  for CatDogFoxBot !   Check out the winners here:

 

 

The great thing about this program is how member driven it is.   In the past, we've featured runner up projects in the winners announcement, projects that received votes from our first place winners, along with feedback from the judges, as one of the best things about this program is the feedback members leave for other members projects.

 

This theme produced a lot of exciting projects.  It was great to see all the interest in Remote Monitoring & Control by the Members and as you would expect some great projects came in and here are some of the amazing projects that were submitted:

 

Here's some of the best of the rest:

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What needed was an automated means to monitor the vital signs, such as soil moisture and amount of sunlight as well as other secondary signals, which may cause a plant to require more or less water, such as temperature. Other aspects related to plant health such as soil nutrients were deemed too difficult to measure with sensors and so were ignored. Then he needed a means to water the plant automatically if the vital signs dropped below optimum levels. As all this was rather new to him, and nothing was found online that defined exactly what the optimum levels were, he adopted a more stochastic approach by applying fuzzy logic to determine when to water and by how much. And so the fuzzy plant watering system was born:

 

 

takes a 20 year bike and updates it to take fitness info to the cloud:

 

's project LoRaXes is a loose reference to a Dr. Seuss character in a book about the plight of the environment during the industrial age. He's building a pair of outdoor LoRa sensors which he wants to use for GPS, temperature/humidity/pressure, ambient light, water level, and PIR.  He's made some outstanding progress so far:  image

 

wanted a SMART garden watering solution for the traditional garden which would be able to track irrigation cycles and the moisture levels of the system, a solution for indoor gardening with lighting and temperature control and monitoring. He wanted the ability to grow off season crops so he could plant in a small greenhouse or our own kitchen and for that we need to control additional elements of lighting and temperature inside.  It would also feature a hydroponics system which can be monitored and controlled via a GUI. Instead of a traditional hydroponics timer; the ability to set complicated rules for the control of our hydroponic growing system; a data logging facility to log the system data for analysis by expert should our garden begins to fail; a visual data display for all measured quantities; and a configurable alert system for events. Check out the full project in:

 

 

found a DHT-tester program as an example in the DHT-sensor-library-master.zip file. It was very simple to use.  She only had to wire the three leads (ground, +5 vdc, data) to an Arduino mega and plug in her USB cable. It worked the first time, right out of the box.  She's added a video log  to her Smarthab: Remote Sensing and Control project where she does testing of the DHT11 module:

 

did a really cool Combined Homebrew & Irrigation System. For his control and automation project this member automated a couple of processes in the Garage.  Being a keen home brewer he decided to upgrade his existing homebrew controller, the existing unit he had was getting old and he quite liked the idea of being able to control it from anywhere in the house using his mobile phone.  For this he used the node red framework and a raspberry Pi to do the control. On top of that he decided to integrate some irrigation functionality into the project so he can ensure his fruit patch is adequately watered during summertime.  He’s a big fan a home grown fruit and veg but in the summer months he wanted to be sure they were getting enough water since he’s far too busy brewing beer to keep track of that sort of thing. The projects are based on python and node red and operate on the raspberry pi platform. :image

 

provided some much needed content using Particle boards. For his control and automation project this member automated a couple of processes in the Garage.  Being a keen home brewer he decided to upgrade his existing homebrew controller, the existing unit he had was getting old and he quite liked the idea of being able to control it from anywhere in the house using his mobile phone.  For this he used the node red framework and a raspberry Pi to do the control. On top of that he decided to integrate some irrigation functionality into the project so he can ensure his fruit patch is adequately watered during summertime.  He’s a big fan a home grown fruit and veg but in the summer months he wanted to be sure they were getting enough water since he’s far too busy brewing beer to keep track of that sort of thing. The projects are based on python and node red and operate on the raspberry pi platform. :

 

Augmented Reality in Electronic Toys! 

 

Having spent some time thinking about a possible activity for the Electronic Toys  competition,    decided to try and make some sort of augmented reality game. Augmented Reality, as far as this project is concerned, is taking a video stream  and processing it in some way and adding additional information on screen as an overlay.  He's connected a PixyCam to his laptop and run the supplied PixyMon programme. He's trained the Pixycam to recognise yellow objects, in this case Lego men. Rather than sticking a complete laptop on the headset, he's used an LCD display connected via a HDMI cable. The trial LCD display is quite large but a much smaller one, probably 3.5 inches or maybe 5 inches, check out the video and first project blog post:image

 

Rounding up the projects so far:

 

decided to build a project for kids who were discovering Arduino for the first time.  His objectives for the project were to make it easy to assemble and understand by a class of kids and to make the project components replicable as a medium-difficult assembly kit.   As you would expect from a project from , every box should have something original:

 

is working on a wearables project that that will involve C/Python programming, sewing, soldering, Autodesk Fusion 360, and Circuit Design.  It will utilize a CO2 powered Gauntlet Webslinger, a Spidey Sense Rear Proximity Sensor to flag close objects, a Spidey Sense Rear Camera to use Microsoft Azure Machine Vision to report objects seen, and (In testing) Small vibration motor that will rest on the neck and vibrate whenever the sensors report a danger:

 

has once again created a very beautiful and original project that stretches the creative imagination.  Best of all, it involves something dear to most of our hearts, music. For the music generation, he uses an Arduino UnoArduino Uno aiming to create a general-purpose mp3 with a reusable design in other projects. In this particular context the Arduino mp3 player should reproduce the classical musical-box sound; to build the circuit he has an Arduino Prototype Shield. The circuit is not particularly complex and also an Arduino NANO will work fine. The core of the mp3 music player includes all the features you would find in a commercial mp3 player such as a six level equalizer preset, track selection, volume control, amplified speaker output, and earphone output:

 

shows you how to build a DIY >$15 DIY Park Controller Plane using an ESP8266 and the Arduino IDE:

 

Energy Harvesting Competition Update!

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The Grand Prize in the Energy Harvesting Competition is an energy harvesting board and a Giant Gecko starter kit.

 

The Grand Prize is an Energy Harvesting Kit from Würth Elektronik who is also running the following roadtest:

 

Will be launching an energy harvesting poll to find out what types of energy scavenging technologies are of greatest  interest to the community.   Although, admittedly it needs to be updated, projects that are produced for worthwhile projects like this are in part, the inspiration behind the  Design for a Cause space.   Great discussion so far in the monthly theme doc.   The thought behind these theme docs is to inspire great discussion to inspire people to build projects:

 

What type of energy harvesting technique do you find most interesting?  Let us know in:

 

Also,  is doing a roadtest along with giving away 7 extra kits from that roadtest:

 

Mesh Network Takes an Early Lead in the Monthly Poll!

 

After Animatronics got off to a head start,  Mesh Network has overtaken it for the lead in Project14 | You Decide the Next Monthly Project Competition!:

 

Be sure to vote if you haven't already and to keep submitting your ideas in the comments of either poll doc or under Project 14 Topics which has posted.

 

David Edwards X-Box One Trailer on YouTube!

 

Really great comments in the element14 presents giveaway so keep sharing your awesome hacks for a chance to win an Xbox One S All-Digital Edition:

 

Also, check out this cool trailer that was posted on YouTube in support of the contest:

 

 

UFO Invasion in Honor of Upcoming ISELED Webinar with NXP!

 

NXP will be doing a webinar on ISLED Technology is now available On Demand:

 

Why would you be interested in ISELED technology?   ,  whose done some awesome work with video for the dev team and who many of you know as the guy that fixes things when there is a problem, took notice of the upcoming ISELED webinar and shared this really cool video with me:

 

 

A bunch of his friends put ISELED strips on this plane and you can see them light up at 1:30 into the video.  The title of the video is UFO/Alien Invasion over the gliding centre - Market Harborough.  Got love any titles with the word UFO in it!

 

Getting Started with Autodesk Series Concludes!

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The final webinar in the Getting Started with Autodesk EAGLE: Webinar Series is up:

 

Check it out if you haven't seen it before and be sure to also check out each of the other webinars in the series if you haven't already.   I just found out that one of our element14 presents hosts use to work for AutoDesk.   Would definitely be cool to give to get him as a special guest the next time we do something with Autodesk.   What do you guys think?

 

Also, in the world of webinars, we've pushed the date for the Hanhaa series to give some time for some more promotion:

This is something that is in flux at the moment but I will give you more details in a later update.

 

Really, excited about the upcoming USB-C webinar with On Semiconductor:

 

I will be working on some documentation to give to suppliers to fully take advantage of the On24 platform.   I'll also be asking for feedback from members on how we can make webinars more exciting and engaging and fully take advantage of the video capabilities, as well as live video capabilities of our new webinar platform.

 

DJ Builds the Ultimate Raspberry Pi 4 Laptop!

 

Speaking of , you knew it was going to happen eventually,   he built the  The Ultimate Raspberry Pi 4 Laptop in the latest episode of element14 presents :

 

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Also, this week does a pair of teardowns in The EIectronics Inside 06: Big Trak 1979 Vs. 2010 Teardown! on the The Electronics Inside .

 

That's all for this week.   Got a bunch of things need to do and may update this later if I have time.     So long for just a while....