bookmark_borderI Meeting of Electronic Arts

It happened last week, starting on Monday 11th January and finishing on Friday the 15th, the I Meeting of Electronic Arts, where people from many differet places of Brazil came to see what was going on. Our first idea was a meeting (de)constructive, build, hack, modify, learn, teach, freedom of knowledge. Several workshops were presented, Basic Electronics, Processing, PureData, and others (the videos of the presentations will be distributed when people finish editing).

On Tuesday night we made a walking trip crossing the dunes till we find Joaquina’s beach. After swiming in the cold waters, we walked back on a thick rain, amazing, it was long ago since the last time I walked on the rain wanting it!

We learned/teched a lot in this event, one thing that we’ve noticed is that creative minds work much better after midnight. There was no point planning anything for the morning because no one could wake up before 11h.

On Thursday night a party was organized, where we put in for a test some projects developed during the event, for example a Breathalyzer using a Alcohol Gas Sensor MQ-3 sensor, LEDs and an Arduino. By the way, never seen so many arduinos in one place, in different sizes and colors, beautiful!

Here is also a Video from the Breathalyzer (I will make a post on how you can make one after the Campus Party next week)

Some more videos can be found on my Vimeo.

bookmark_border10 Cool things to do in OSX Terminal

The thing that made me buy mac is that it has a OS based on Unix, and programs like Photoshop and Microsoft Office (not a big OpenOffice fan yet). Like a good nerd, I can’t live without my beloved terminal, which makes my life easier. In this post I will show some commands so you can have fun on mac’s terminal. Hope you like it, and if you have any other ideas, please comment on the post!

1. Twitter Update

    Nothing more geek than updating your twitter from terminal. Just change the user e pass from the pre. Way cool.

    curl -u user:pass -d status="Tweeting from the shell" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml

2. Sing songs

    Release your creativity, sing along.

    sudo osascript -e 'say "Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum he he he ho ho ho fa lah lah lah lah lah lah fa lah full hoo hoo hoo" using "Cellos"'

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bookmark_borderUltrasonic Range Finder with Arduino

I recently got a Maxbotix LV-EZ4 Ultrasonic Range Finder to try understand how to use it with my little Arduino. Having a ultrasonic range finder can be very useful in many different projects, as it can detect objects, I can use it to make alarm systems (cars usually use this kind of sensor), Obstacle-Avoiding Robot and many other things that you may have in mind. It works better outdoors then the IR sensor, but the only thing I could notice is that it doen’t detects very well some thick carpets. Besides that, it’s a great sensor. From the datasheet we can read that it sonar range information from 6-inches out to 254-inches (15.24 cm – 6.452m).

ultrasonic range finder
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