March is for Makers

March is for Makers is a movement started by Saron Yitbarek of Code Newbie and Scott Hanselman of HanselMinutes for their respective podcasts. All month long they will be interviewing makers and discussing hardware. Though Complete Developer Podcast is not officially part of the movement to show support we dedicated IoTease to fun family projects that can be done each week. Here are the projects discussed on the show and a few that didn’t make the cut this year.

A list of family friendly IoT projects

JavaScript Talking Plant

This project comes from an article in Smashing Magazine’s website titled Hardware Hacking with JavaScript. The plant, named George uses sensors to gather data about the soil quality and moisture and has an 8x8 LED face with expressions. It uses the HTML5 Web Speech API to answer questions and ask to be watered.


Hardware Needed

  • 1 x Arduino UNO
  • 1 x solderless breadboard
  • 1 x standard LED
  • 1 x 220 Ohm resistor
  • 2 x jumper cables


Software

  • Node.js
  • Johnny-Five

Home Monitoring System

Continuing our month of family projects is another from Smashing Magazine. This week we’ll be making a home monitoring system similar to Nest or Hive using an Arduino and Node.js server with WebSockets.

HardWare

  • 1 x Arduino UNO
  • 1 x solderless breadboard
  • 1 x TMP36 temperature sensor
  • 3 x jumper cables

Software

  • Node.js
  • Johnny-Five
  • Express
  • Socket.IO

Squeezable Musical Instrument

Using tin foil, grocery bags, and a breadboard to build a sqeezable musical instrument. This project is a good science lesson for teaching about capacitance, the ablity to store a charge. You’re instrument is a basic capacitor made from two pieces of conductive material (tin foil) separated by a thin layer of non conductive material (grocery bag). It is used to control the audio output of a 555 timer.

Squezable Musical Instrument

Hardware

  • 1x Roll of aluminum foil
  • 2x Plastic shopping bags
  • 1” x 15” Corrugated cardboard
  • 1x Roll adhesive tape
  • 4x Alligator patch cords
  • 1x 9v battery
  • 1x Low-current LED
  • 4x Resistors: (100 Ohm, 1k Ohm, and 2 4.7k Ohm)
  • 1x Trimmer potentiometer, 50k Ohm
  • 1x 0.01&0956;F ceramic capacitor
  • 1x 100&0956;F electrolytic
  • 1x 555 timer
  • 1x Breadboard and wires

Blüp: The Bubble Notifier

A fun family project, this week highlights Blup: The Bubble Notifier. Instead of being notified via sound, vibaration, or blinking lights use bubbles in a liquid mixture of water and soap. This neat project uses some building skills with networking, Software, and IFTTT.

blup

Hardware

Software

Family Messaging Board

A LED matrix that displays a message to family members at home. Messages can be sent using a mobile phone and can be acknowledged with a button on the board. It even has a sensor to detect if someone is infront of the board. This project uses a Raspberry Pi and AWS IoT to send SMS push notifications. The project is more for teenages or older kids and will require some soldering.

Family Messaging Board

Hardware

  • iPhone
  • Raspberry Pi Model B+
  • RGB Hat
  • LED matrix
  • Arcade Button
  • Alimentation Mean-Wheel
  • Ultrasonic Sensor HC-SR04

Software

  • XCode 7
  • Python IDE
  • MQQT.fx
  • Bitwise SSH Client

Do It Yourself Smartwatch

With Smartwatches being the new thing in the realm of wearable technology this is a fun project for older kids to build their own smartwatch. It syncs with an Android or iPhone via bluetooth.

DIY Smart Watch

Hardware Needed

Software

Arduino-Powered Candy Vending Machine

A great pre-Halloween project for the family. This is a “magic” candy despenser. The creator tells a story of a neighbor that built a similar “machine” that involved him sitting hidden behind the machine. Using an Arduino Leonardo microcontroller and a few Adafruit libraries he built a truely automatic version with his kids. The really cool thing is they used Legos to build the housing for the electronics.

Candy Vending Machine

Hardware

Software