If you haven’t seen videos of those awesome Christmas light shows that sync lights to music then you haven’t ever been on the internet. The software used to create those shows is actually pretty simple to use. Load up a music file, setup number of channels and go to town creating complicated fades, sparkles and other animations with ease. A show or light ‘sequence’ is really just an array of values feed to a controller when played back. I wanted to use a popular (and free!) light show creator called Vixen to create a short light show to be embedded in a project run by an Arduino. This is the script I wrote to do just that so you can too. This tutorial will walk you through using Vixen to create a light show and then how to use my script to embed it in your next micro-controller project. Here’s what I did this it: The Electronic Wedding Wishing Well

The Sparkfun MP3 Player Shield for Arduino is a inexpensive and easy way to add MP3 playback capability to your Arduino project. But it was lacking an easy to use Arduino Library to go along, so I fixed that. Introducing the SFEMP3Shield library just for this shield. Now playing an MP3 files is as easy as MP3player.playTrack(5); and all the work is done behind the scenes.

Like most real engineers and at-home hackers, I find myself in situations where no existing Eagle Library has the part I need, so I have to design an Eagle Part for the device. My library is starting to grow, so I figure it’s time to post it for anyone else that needs it. Most parts are tested, the few that aren’t say so in the description. Please drop me a note if a part is wrong or if the library came in handy for you.

The purpose of this library is to make it easy for the everyday Arduino user working on projects with multiple Arduinos communicating with each other and sharing data. I had many people ask me for the code I used in my PS2X library example that sent PS2 Controller values wirelessly to my SAGAR robot. It got to be tiresome answering the questions and I had an idea to write a library to help the inexperienced with micro controller communications. This is a easy to use and no frills way to send data between two Arduinos.

Ok, if you are here, you are having trouble getting your Arduino talking to your PlayStation 2 Controller via my Handy Dandy PS2X Library. Well, never fear, I stand by my leet coding abilities (Ha! who am I kidding? Really though, the library works, there’s tons of examples using it.) and I’m here to help. The problem is there’s not much I can really do unless you live near North Florida and want to come pay me a visit. It’s hard giving help over the internet! But maybe I can guide you in the right direction with this troubleshooting guide.

Nothing means more to someone then a gift that took more time to make than money to buy. This is an example of such a gift. Set your way-back-when machines to 2002. Getting ready to finish high school, I had built up some hacker level of electronic knowledge. My parents; both nautical people; have a large lighthouse fountain in their backyard. My mother’s only wish for Christmas that year was for me to build something that would illuminate the lighthouse as if it were a functioning beacon. I obliged, with a circuit consisting of a 555 timer and a 4017 decade counter.  It resulted in a simple device that did the job.

The Kill A Watt is an awesome product; it measures volts, amps and power factor of an individual appliance which can be used to calculate power, cost to run, etc. It’s also quite hackable. But I wanted something that would give me the same data for my whole apartment. After some Googling, the best I could find was this project from picobay, but I didn’t want to invest in an expensive network IO platform. There were also some off-the-shelf solutions, but they too were expensive and limited. Well, time to design my own solution then.

I wanted to be able to get information back from Google Earth. It’s already easy to plot information on Google Earth, but getting information back, like the GPS coordinates under the mouse pointer, was another story. Well, I slaved myself to my desk for a few days and figured it out. I created a sample VI program that displays the GPS coordinates of the Mouse over the globe, and captures the coordinates on a left mouse click. It then feeds them back into Google Earth as a point.

Want to interface a PlayStation 2 Controller with an Arduino Microcontroller? You have come to the right place. Below you will find a link to download an easy to use library that takes care of all the interfacing for you, so you can start using the controller right away for your project. Don’t forget to link your cool projects in the comments, I’d love to see what you do with the library.

Outdated. Go to new library HERE

A while ago, I spent countless days trying to interface an Arduino and a Play Station 2 controller. I wanted to build a controller for my SAGAR robot, and figured PS2 + Arduino would be perfect. However, no matter what I did, no existing library would work for me. I shelfed the project for a while, but recently found this forum post with some code by a member named Shutter. I tried out the code, and to my surprise, IT WORKED!!! Well, mostly anyway. It didn’t really have analog stick support, nor was it formatted into an easy to use library.