Arduino Projects: Pollution Maps and Gear-Cutting
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The interactive map highlights regional air pollution | Arduino Blog
Writer Jason Pargin coined the term “Monkeysphere” to convey Dunbar’s number, which is the maximum number of stable relationships that a person can maintain. It is difficult for people to feel true empathy for anyone outside of their Monkeysphere, which is around 150 people. The result is that we often fail to give the proper attention to injustices that happen outside of our personal Monkeyspheres. To combat that tendency, Ahmed Oyenuga created the Interactive Air Quality Map.
If you live in the United States, the United Kingdom, or almost any other Western country, your air quality is probably pretty good. You might know on an intellectual level that many foreign countries and cities have serious issues with air pollution that cause real health problems. But those areas are far enough outside of your Monkeysphere that you have trouble caring about them. That isn’t a problem with you; it is simple human nature. Oyenuga’s air quality map provides striking visuals to hammer home the point, so that you get a tangible feel for the air quality in far away locales. It is one thing to read a statistic or look at a graph, but quite another to see the conditions in real-time with your own eyes.
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This handy machine automatically cuts plastic gears | Arduino Blog
Many, many mechanisms require gears, but the good news is that plastic gears are very cheap. The bad news is that you have to buy a lot of them at once and that means you need to know ahead of time what gears you need. Being able to make gears on-demand would be very convenient, but most 3D printers lack the tolerance to do it well and CNC setups get expensive. But by following Mr Innovative’s recent video, you can build your own affordable machine that automatically cuts gears.
This might be able to handle very soft metals, but it is really meant for cutting nylon and other plastics. Users can set the diameter and the number of teeth, which together dictate the pitch. However, they can not change the tooth cut profile without swapping out the blade. They set the parameters on a Nextion LCD touchscreen and then the machine takes care of the rest. It rotates the gear by the calculated pitch, then moves the gear into the circular cutting blade according to the set diameter.