Arduino Ideas

Last week, I asked the students in the arduino class to think of ideas for something to build with an arduino. I had hoped they would post their ideas in a website I'd set up but, unfortunately, they seem to think that this is too much like homework to try. I pointed out that, if we can move that discussion to outside of class, we can have more time inside class to build stuff.

A few of them had thought up an idea: one student had the idea of some kind of music synthesizer. An arduino really isn't what you'd want for that: there are music ICs that are much more capable. Still, you could use an arduino to control a mechanical drumset or something. Daniel had an interesting idea: a mobile device that could start fires, or "arsonuino". People thought it was just silly until I pointed out that forest or prairie managers need to start fires for controlled burns and that something like that might actually be useful. We talked about a few other kinds of robots (like for search and rescue finding people trapped in burning buildings or in rubble). Or a robot that could extinguish fires.

The teachers had ideas too. I mentioned my idea: a cloud-shaped mobile or sculpture that could use the weather forecast to change color -- maybe with flashes to warn of approaching storms. Peter, the co-teacher, had a challenge: a device to stop racoons from harvesting the figs in their fig tree.

I remember one really cool interactive electronic sculpture I saw one time (I think it was on the Secret Life of Machines, that always had a bunch of these things). It used a stock market feed and, among other things, had a dollar bill on a string that it would raise up and lower into a trash can.

It might be fun to make something like the Weasley Family Clock, that always knew everyone's location. We could have something that detected when people's devices were detected by a local network and so could indicate whether people were around or not. If we wanted to get really fancy, we could combine it with an app you could run on your phone that would ping a webserver with your location, so it could actually tell where you are. With that, you could make a map that showed your realtime location, but a steampunky device with a dial that pointed toward "Work", "School", "Home", and "Mortal Peril" would be a lot more fun.

My long range plan for the class is for us to come up with some really cool idea for something we'd all like, build a prototype, and then make a video for a kickstarter to raise money so that we could build enough to satisfy orders and have enough parts left over that each of us could have one.

Afterwards, we didn't have much time to build things. Peter and his group worked on setting up a transistor to control a toy motor. My group set up a light resistor to control an LED. We took the sample code and munged it together with some other code to change the behavior from controlling the brightness of the LED, to controlling the rate of flashing.