Arduino Open Source Report and Projects
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Walk-Bot helps people with visual impairments navigate safely | Arduino Blog
It is no secret that visual impairments — even those that don’t result in complete blindness — make it very difficult for people to live their lives. White canes can help people get around, but they require physical contact. Seeing eye dogs provide very valuable assistance, but they’re expensive and need care of their own. That’s why Nilay Roy Choudhury designed the Walk-Bot device to help people with visual impairments navigate safely.
Walk-Bot is a wearable navigation device that uses audible cues and haptic feedback to give visually impaired people a sense of their immediate environment. It has a host of sensors that let it identify nearby obstacles at any height from the floor to the ceiling. Walk-Bot performs onboard trigonometry to determine the distance to any obstacles that might interfere with its user’s ability to walk safely. And it is affordable and easy to build with common components.
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The 2022 Arduino Open Source Report is out | Arduino Blog
In our last annual report we described 2021 as one of the busiest and most productive years in Arduino history in terms of open source development (if you missed that report, go read it now as it contains so many nice things). Well, we didn’t rest in 2022 either!
The Arduino team has been busy releasing new important open source projects, both hardware and software, while the community continues to release and maintain libraries at an incredible pace.
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Arduino resurrects a washing machine that failed for silly reasons | Arduino Blog
The maker movement often focuses on creation, but we should never overlook repair. In a consumer market increasingly moving towards planned obsolescence, manufacturers often fail to devote any resources towards the repair of their products. In many cases, replacement parts are unavailable or prohibitively expensive. But the maker skill set can provide recourse, as demonstrated by Balakrishnan Prashanth’s Arduino-based solution for a washing machine’s failed timer display.
Like many modern washing machines, Prashanth’s Whirlpool has a digital readout that displays the time remaining in a cycle. It’s a handy feature, but not one that is absolutely necessary to wash clothes. Unfortunately, this Whirlpool disagrees. They designed this model’s control board so that the entire machine’s functionality comes to a screeching halt if the digital display stops working. The control board sends data to the display and expects an acknowledgment. If it doesn’t receive that acknowledgment, it won’t let the washing machine run through a cycle. That’s what happened when Prashanth’s machine’s display failed.