Last updated on September 29, 2015
It has been a little over two years since we speculated that Arduino boards might become a common component of library Maker Spaces. As we explained back then, “It looks like a small circuit board, and can receive input from sensors and then control things around it based on that input.” With everyone thinking about the Internet of Things (IoT) these days, and keeping in mind that Arduinos are made to control Things, Arduino boards are beginning to find a place in products from at least one mainstream computer company. (And there never seems to be any shortage of interesting and creative Arduino projects.)
- Arduino at the Brown County Library “Arduino is a credit-card-sized, programmable microcontroller that can read sensors and will turn on lights, run motors, and more, based on the code you write. Want to see the Arduino in action? Click here for a YouTube playlist of some of our favorite projects!”
- Acer’s Arduino-based Cloud Professor wants to get kids into the IoT (Ars Technica | Mark Walton) “Buried deep within its stand at IFA 2015 in Berlin is a unique development kit called Cloud Professor. It contains the obligatory Arduino board, as well as a variety of accessories, including a USB to GPIO adaptor, a control LED, and even a dust sensor. But rather than just offer yet another way to program things on an Arduino board, the Acer kit also contains a separate module that allows the board to talk to other devices over the Internet. Essentially, it’s an Internet of Things development kit that links into Acer’s cloud platform, allowing tinkerers to control various aspects of their connected device via a smartphone or tablet.”
- Putting the “automation” in home automation with Arduino (Embedded Computing Design | Eli Mordechai) “Looking for a solution to the problem and driven by ‘stream’ technology, I decided to build my own smart home IoT system to collect and monitor temperature, humidity, and motion in my house. As a platform, I chose the Arduino Uno board, and in less than a few days, I had a running system to collect the sensor data and visualize it in realtime. However, visualizing the data was not enough. I needed a system that would track the data, understand normal patterns, and notify me when abnormal patterns emerged.”
- Man uses Arduino set to bring the wild to his pet’s feeding routine (TechSpot | Devin Kate Pope) “Like most modern cats, Monkey didn’t have anything to hunt other than random bits of lint or crinkly wrappers so [Ben] Millam decided to use his cat’s instincts for their mutual benefit. Millam hacked an automatic feeder with the help of an Arduino set to respond when a little wiffle ball was dropped into a bowl. The wiffle balls are each embedded with an RFID tag and have to be dropped into the bowl hooked up to the feeder a certain way. When it’s done correctly, the ball passes an Adafruit RFID reader which triggers food to come out of the machine, and the hunt is complete.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- As objects go online. (Foreign Affairs, March/April 2014, p.60-67 | Neil Gershenfeld and J.P. Vassuer)
- The big future for little machines. (Fast Company, Feb. 2015, p.62 | Om Malik)
- IoT board looks like Pi and feels like Arduino. (Electronics Weekly, 4/29/2015, p.3)
