nothing says ‘I love You’ like an old vending machine, and if it is a restored and working vintage Vendo V-80 cola dispenser then you have yourself a winner. [Jan Cumps] from Belgium was assigned the repair of the device in question by a friend. He started off with just a working refrigerator and no electronics. In a series of repairs, he began with replacing the mechanical coin detector’s switches with optical and magnetic sensors to discover the movement of the coin. These sensors are in turn connected to an Arduino which drives the dispensing motor. The motor itself had to be rewound as part of the repair. because the project is on a deadline, the whole thing is finished using protoboards and through-hole parts. The final system works by dispensing one frosty bottle each time a coin is inserted.

In contrast to many vending device repairs, this project was a easy one. instead of using an off-the-shelf coin detector, a easy LED and photodiode pair brought the hack to life. This could easily be adapted to any device and even be used to create a diy vending device on the cheap. 

In his blog, [Jan Cumps] demonstrates each working step in a video and share the Arduino code and schematic as well as other interesting details. You can see the final working version in the video below.

It has been a long time because a Vending device Prototyping project was commissioned and we would love to see what this project inspires.

[Windell] from Evil mad scientist Laboratories took one of their Peggy 2 kits and gave it a little upgrade. The Peggy 2 is a programmable 25×25 LED display. It’s Arduino compatible and can accommodate big 10mm LEDs. many people assemble them using just one color, but [Windell] chose to create huge RGB pixels by placing discrete red, green, blue, and white LEDs next to each other in the board. This creates a 12.5×12.5 grid of full color pixels. It’s an interesting effect and you ought to certainly check out the video embedded below which shows how the transition can be smoothed using a diffuser.

An oasis in the desert is the quintessential picture of salvation for the wearied wayfarer. At Burning guy 2016, Grove — ten biofeedback tree sculptures — provided a similar, interactive break from the festival. Each tree has over two thousand LEDs, lots of feet of steel tube, two Teensy boards utilized by the custom breath sensors to produce celebration magic.

Grove works like this: at your approach — detected by double IR sensors — a mechanical flower blooms, meant to timely investigation. As you lean close, the breath sensors in the daffodil-like flower spot whether you’re inhaling or exhaling, equating the input into a dazzling pulse of LED light that snakes its method down the tree’s trunk as well as as much as the bright, 3W LEDs on the tips of the branches.

Debugging as well as last minute soldering in the desert fixed a few issues, before configuration — no job is without its hiccups. The entire grove was powered by solar-charged, deep-cycle batteries meant to least from sunset to sunrise — or close sufficient if somebody failed to remember to hook the batteries as much as charge.

[Samuel Clay] is the chronicler of this art installation build. In fact, [Sam] as well as many of the others on the team worked on the Pulse & Bloom installation at Burning guy 2014 — a bouquet of lotus flower sculptures that would react to your heartbeat. He’s provided the code as well as schematics on GitHub to guide any type of other artist-makers available that are likewise inspired.

When [Andrei] first got his Raspberry Pi he wished to make it a standalone computer best away. This implies the normal input gadgets like a mouse and keyboard, but also some type of display. To avoid waiting for shipping he ended up using a low-cost car backup video camera screen from the local big box store. It worked great, and recently he chose he would try to convert it to run off of 5V power to simplify his setup. While snooping around inside the device he found an unused resistive touch overlay and figured out how to get it to work.

What tipped him off is the small four-conductor connector which wasn’t hooked as much as anything. He thoroughly soldered wires onto the flexible circuit traces, then generously covered them in hot glue to help avoid movement from breaking the stiff connection. To get this working you need to measure the resistance between the conductors. many of the time we figure the RPi GPIO header can be used directly, but for this task an intermediary is necessary. [Andrei] went with a small Arduino clone board. A bit of trial and error was all it took to get the connections best and to iron out the code which equates the values into coordinates.

Here’s an Android powered pen plotter that does it all. It was built by [Ytai Ben-Tsvi] to take with him to maker Faire. He’s the developer of IOIO, a hardware interface module developed to communicate with an Android device through USB (host or OTG are both supported).

The physical hardware is easy enough. He draws on a pad of white paper using a felt-tipped marker. Located at the top of the easel are two wheels with stars etched on them. They are reels which spool and dole-out string to control the pen’s movements. The pen suggestion can be lifted by a ball bearing mounted just below it.

But the project really takes off when you view [Ytai’s] demonstration. The Android tablet controlling the device captures a picture of an object — in this case it’s a toy truck. The app then processes it using edge detection to establish how to plot the image.

If you go to the university of South Florida, you can take the “Makecourse.” The 15-week program promises to instruct CAD software, 3D printing, Arduino-based manage systems, as well as C++. Don’t go to the university of South Florida? No worries. professor [Rudy Schlaf] as well as [Eric Tridas] have made the entire program offered online. You can see a number of videos below, however there are numerous more. The trainee job videos are great, too, like [Catlin Ryan’s] phase of the moon job (see below) or [Dustin Germain’s] rover (seen above).

In addition to a lesson plan as well as projects, there’s a total set of videos (you can see a few below). If you are a routine Hackaday reader, you most likely won’t care much about the fundamental Arduino stuff as well as the fundamental electronics–although a great evaluation never hurts anyone. However, the much more advanced topics about interrupts, SDCards, pin modification interrupts may be just the thing. If you ever wished to discover Autodesk Inventor, there are videos for that, too.

If you don’t requirement any type of of the direction offered, this would still make a fantastic program to offer at a regional hacker space or anywhere else where you want to instruct develop to build. You can see from the range of trainee jobs that it is well-balanced as well as lets trainees focus on areas where they are many interested.

So much academic material is on the internet now that it is difficult to discover time to see even a fraction of it. We like EdX, for example, however who has the time to take even a fraction of the classes offered? We always like seeing trainee projects–they provide us ideas. [Bruce Land’s] classes, in particular, are always inspirational.