Juan Ferrer and Jorge Cases built a liquid tester, with only two wires and a resistor, which can measure the resistance of a liquid. Because every liquid has a different resistance you can separate different drinks like water or orange juice. With some Processing code you can do something nice with those values.

How to make your own liquid tester:
You need an Arduino, some wires and a 10K resistor.
Upload the standardFirmata to the Arduino, read this for more info.

// Detector de Liquidos (Liquid Detector)
// By Juan Ferrer and Jorge Cases
// open this file in Processing and upload the Standard Firmata to your Arduino
// connect the wires to the analog input port number 0

import processing.serial.*;
import cc.arduino.*;

Arduino arduino;

color off = color(4, 79, 111);
color on = color(84, 145, 158);

color blueColor = color(0,0,250);
color orangeColor = color(255,128,0);

int heightVal = 280;
int widthVal = 470;
int adjust = 20;
PFont fontA;

void drawGraph() {
  line(adjust,adjust,adjust,heightVal-(adjust*2));
  line(adjust,heightVal-(adjust*2),widthVal-(adjust*2),heightVal-(adjust*2));
}

void setup() {
  size(widthVal, heightVal);
  arduino = new Arduino(this, Arduino.list()[0], 115200);
  fontA = loadFont("CourierNew36.vlw");
  textFont(fontA, 32);
}

void draw() {
  background(off);
  stroke(on);

  drawGraph();
  int value = arduino.analogRead(0);

  if (value < 980 && value > 900) {
    fill(blueColor);
    text("this is water", 200, 90);
  } else if (value<800 && value > 700) {
    fill(orangeColor);
    text("this is orange juice", 200, 90);
  }
  else {
    fill(off);
    text("", 200, 90);
  }
  println(value);
  rect(adjust,heightVal-(adjust*2),50,-(heightVal-(adjust*2))*value/1024);
  delay(500);
}

download processing.org code

Campus party is the biggest technology event in the world, it is sort of an oversized LAN-party with more than 6000 geeks. Besides sitting in front of your computer and playing games you can also attend some workshops and listen to various speakers. The Campus Party was held in one of the beautiful buildings from ‘Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias ‘ (city of arts and sciences).

The part of Campus Party where the interactive installations were shown was the ‘Campus Futuro‘ section, there were some other cool interactive projects like the Wiispray, Move and some robots. The entry was free to this section so a lot of people entered.

The building was open from 10:00 till 21:00 seven days a week. It was a good test case to see how Gyro worked under these ‘extreme’ conditions. Although it still is a prototype, it worked quite well and was easy to fix the problems which occurred.
It was a great week and I’am full of ideas and improvements for the next version of Gyro.