Take a moment to go and look up some photos of the cockpits of airplanes and spacecraft. All of them are packed full of instruments and controls. So why do we feel like we can play a flight simulator with a regular gamepad? If you’re doing so, then you’re missing out on a lot of the experience. To get that deep immersion, Beko Pharm constructed a DIY cockpit for space sims like Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen.
Beko Pharm runs their sims on a Linux PC and that limits the compatibility with off-the-shelf rigs. But most of those are expensive and lackluster anyway, so Beko Pharm built a custom controller. Front and center is an LCD panel to display all kinds of data. Surrounding that are a multitude of indicator lights, buttons, and switches. The cockpit also includes a joystick and head tracking, so Beko Pharm can have complete control over their virtual spaceships.
An Arduino Mega 2560 drives all of the lights, which are WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs. It also monitors the joystick and buttons. The Arduino communicates with the simulation software using a custom interface developed with Node-RED and Rust. This lets it send commands and receive status data. It can, for example, illuminate a specific LED indicator if the simulation reports something like an engine failure.
All of those components mount onto a custom frame made of wood. That sits below Beko Pharm’s triple-monitor setup, creating the illusion that they are sitting in a real cockpit surrounding by controls and looking out of the windows.
Generators are expensive pieces of equipment. You can get a small low-quality model for a few hundred dollars, but powerful high-quality generators cost thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Old cars, on the other hand, can be very cheap — especially if they aren’t roadworthy anymore. Jake von Slatt has a video series explaining how you can convert an old car with a working engine into a powerful generator.
Most of the cost of a generator is from the engine, and alternator or dynamo with inverter. In this case, the engine is in a Toyota Sienna minivan. The vehicle isn’t worth keeping on the road, but the engine still runs well. And that engine has plenty of power for a generator. The alternator came from a Harbor Freight generator that had a bad engine. To keep the AC voltage output at the steady 60Hz needed for household appliances and tools, von Slatt utilized an Arduino.
The Sienna has a cruise control system that actuates the throttle in an attempt to keep wheel speed consistent. But in this case, von Slatt needed it to keep the engine steady at 3600rpm to maintain 60Hz. So he built a simple circuit around an Arduino Nano Every board and an H-bridge. The Arduino controls the cruise control actuator’s servo motor through the H-bridge while monitoring the alternator output voltage (stepped down to 5V) frequency. If the frequency is too low, the Arduino rotates the cruise control actuator to increase engine speed until the frequency is exactly 60Hz. If the frequency is too low, it does the opposite.
When dealing with indoor climate controls, there are several variables to consider, such as the outside weather, people’s tolerance to hot or cold temperatures, and the desired level of energy savings. Windows can make this extra challenging, as they let in large amounts of light/heat and can create poorly insulated regions, which is why Jallson Suryo developed a prototype that aims to balance these needs automatically through edge AI techniques.
Suryo’s smart building ventilation system utilizes two separate boards, with an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense handling environmental sensor fusion and a Nicla Voice listening for certain ambient sounds. Rain and thunder noises were uploaded from an existing dataset, split and labeled accordingly, and then used to train a Syntiant audio classification model for the Nicla Voice’s NDP120 processor. Meanwhile, weather and ambient light data was gathered using the Nano’s onboard sensors and combined into time-series samples with labels for sunny/cloudy, humid, comfortable, and dry conditions.
After deploying the board’s respective classification models, Suryo added some additional code that writes new I2C data from the Nicla Voice to the Nano that indicates if rain/thunderstorm sounds are present. If they are, the Nano can automatically close the window via servo motors while other environmental factors can set the position of the blinds. With this multi-sensor technique, a higher level of accuracy can be achieved for more precision control over a building’s windows, and thus attempt to lower the HVAC costs.
When Matt saw the 2.1-inch HyperPixel Round Touch Display in the Pimoroni shop, he decided it looked perfect. “This screen is designed for use with Raspberry Pi, so I used a Raspberry Pi Zero W.” Matt explains that he needed the wireless capabilities to download the photos from NASA. His approach would be similar to that used in his ‘Game Boy Camera Fast Wifi Adapter’ project (featured in The MagPi issue #110), which saw Matt find a way to pull the photos from the handheld console onto his smartphone.
Rounded approach
Although Raspberry Pi Zero W is “way overpowered for the job,” Matt chose it because it offers a quick and easy way for him to bring the project into being. “As always, with anything I’ve made with a Raspberry Pi, the hard bit for me was getting the code to run by itself at startup without any warnings or windows popping up over the top.” Matt also praises Pimoroni, who “have done the hard work of making the round screen so easy to use.” An alternative option would have been to use a microcontroller and a different round screen, but this would have taken far longer, as so many aspects would have needed to have been written or designed from scratch.
Another piece of good fortune was that someone else had already created a really good-looking case for the HyperPixel display that would look great sitting on a desk.
Matt wrote a Python script that checks the Blue Marble API for new EPIC photos, downloads them, and then loops showing each one in sequence on the screen using the Pygame library. The EPIC Daily Blue Marble API is provided by NASA and provides information about the images that the DSCVOR EPIC equipment collects here. Its Earth-Sun Lagrange positioning ensures that it is not just the acronym that is EPIC! It captures unique perspectives of astronomical events, such as lunar transits, using a 2048 × 2048 pixel CCD, coupled to a 30 cm aperture Cassegrain telescope.
Case work
The HyperPixel display was useful on its own, but needed something to hold it at a convenient viewing angle. Matt was about to design his own case, but did a quick check online to see whether anyone else in the community had designed a 3D-printable case for the round screen and Raspberry Pi combo. Happily, he found Cults3D user named ‘Printminion’ who had designed the perfect case.
Since Printminion’s case was specifically designed for the HyperPixel display, Matt was able to focus on how to make use of NASA’s Blue Marble API to get the incredible NASA photos on the screen. The API is named after the famous Blue Marble photo of Earth captured by the Apollo 17 space mission in 1972.
As well as daily images used to form Matt’s EPIC slide show, the API can serve up noteworthy images depicting our exploration of near space, and important images such as partial lunar eclipses and transits.
Matt has created a making-of video for the EPIC Satellite project on his YouTube channel. Look out for updates as he begins to make it even more epic, by adding options to view images of the moon and other planets.
In 2021, the average household had 25 connected devices, a massive increase on previous years, driven in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. And in 2023, the number of smart homes worldwide looks set to hit 195.8 million.
We’re living through a fascinating time for technology in general, with new breakthroughs hitting the headlines all the time, and the home automation industry is especially exciting.
In this article, we’ll dive into some of the main ways home automation is changing in 2023, some of the biggest current trends, and what’s on the horizon.
Emerging trends in home automation in 2023
2023 so far has been a big year for home automation, and there looks to be more to come. Let’s take a look at some of the most interesting emerging trends this year.
On top of that, the tech behind these gadgets is also developing fast, with new features emerging all the time. Today’s voice assistants are already a far cry from the first few generations of Amazon Alexa gadgets, and are capable of integrating with multiple devices and recognizing a range of different voices.
Edge computing and local processing
“Edge computing” refers to when data processing and analysis take place closer to the source of data generation (locally) rather than on centralized cloud servers somewhere else.
In the context of home automation, this means IoT devices can process the data they generate right there and then. This has a number of advantages, such as:
Low latency, because the data doesn’t have to travel all the way to a data center and back. This means tasks can be performed much quicker, and even in real-time.
Better bandwidth efficiency and reduced costs because only relevant information is shared over the network.
Better scalability, making it easier to add more devices to your smart home network.
Let’s check out a few examples of edge computing at work in smart homes.
Voice assistants like Amazon Echos with built-in processing capabilities are capable of handling voice commands locally, making them much more responsive and able to function smoothly even with the internet connection is unstable.
Security cameras can analyze video footage locally instead of sending that data to the cloud for analysis. This makes it easier to detect and report suspicious activity with much faster response times.
Managing things like lighting and temperature even when offline, keeping your working and living spaces in the most comfortable state at all times.
AI and machine learning
AI is a hot topic right now, and at times it can be hard to separate the truly exciting developments from the hype.
When it comes to home automation, though, AI holds a ton of promise.
Energy efficiency: AI can track the energy usage in your smart home appliances and make adjustments to ensure nothing is being wasted. It can also detect problems and unusual activity and take steps to correct any issues.
AI can add a touch of personalization to your smart home by learning your preferences and making automatic adjustments to things like temperature, lighting, and music.
Predictive maintenance: AI can monitor your smart home devices and predict when faults and issues are about to occur, helping you avoid outages and make repairs before they’re needed.
Sustainable and eco-friendly automation
We already briefly talked about how technologies like AI can help your smart home devices function more efficiently. In fact, smart heating and cooling systems, used correctly, can save users 50% of their energy consumption in some cases.
But that’s not the only way home automation can help you live more sustainably. For example, you can integrate your smart home with green energy sources like solar — something that’s becoming more common around the world.
What’s in store for the near future?
Now we’ve explored a few of the exciting things happening in home automation right now, let’s turn our gaze to the near future.
What can smart home owners look forward to over the next few years? This is where things get really interesting, as the rapid development of smart technologies mean things are changing fast.
Continued growth of 5G
5G technology looks set to grow in both popularity and sophistication throughout the next decade.
According to Ericsson’s 2022 Mobility Report, 5G subscriptions will reach 4.4 billion globally by the end of 2027, and account for around 48% of total mobile subscriptions.
For smart home owners, this means even faster connectivity, lower latency, and support for increasingly powerful and sophisticated IoT devices that aren’t possible just yet, as well as the opportunity to build more complex and connected smart home networks.
Augmented reality and virtual reality in smart homes
The AR and VR market is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 13.72% between 2023 and 2027, which has a ton of exciting implications for home automation.
One example here is smart home maintenance. Augmented reality apps can make it much easier to repair faulty devices by providing real-time, 3D instructions that are far clearer than any manual or YouTube tutorial. AR can also be used to improve home design by helping you visualize how new furniture, decorations, and layouts will look before committing to them.
Even better security and privacy features
Keeping our families, homes, and possessions safe is always going to be a primary concern, and smart technology here is developing in some really interesting ways.
One example is the use of biometric tech to improve home security. The global biometrics market is projected to hit $83 billion by 2027, with voice recognition alone expected to reach $27 billion.
What does this mean for smart homes? Biometrics can be used to identify people with extremely accurate levels of precision, allowing you to enter your home with just your fingerprint, a scan of your iris, or even a voice command — while keeping everyone else out.
Other promising trends in smart home security include advances in data encryption and privacy controls to keep your IoT devices secure.
AI-powered home health monitoring
Keeping track of your vital signs and health metrics is more than just a hobby for fitness enthusiasts — for older people and those with health issues it can literally be life-saving.
Wearable devices like smart watches can track key health data, issue reminders to take medication, and alert emergency services when things go wrong. These devices can even be used to monitor individuals’ movement patterns and predict falls and other accidents.
We’re still some way off fully automated health care, but this is a step in the right direction.
Entire smart cities
Cities around the world are getting bigger, and that means they need to get smarter.
Home automation isn’t just for houses and apartments — it can be scaled up to the size of a city, a trend which is well underway. The global smart cities market is expected to grow at an annual compound rate of 13.13% until at least 2028.
Smart cities use technology like 5G, the Internet of Things, and AI to build more efficient, safe, and pleasant environments for millions of people to share. These technologies drive features such as:
Better connectivity for everyone, like accessible WiFi anywhere in the city including on transport.
More efficient and better-connected public transport systems, including more intelligent traffic management based on constant monitoring using sensors.
More efficient usage of energy, based on tracking usage and minimizing wastage.
Better waste management, using sensors to measure how full waste bins are and issuing alerts when it’s time to empty them.
Staying ahead of the smart home curve
With so much happening so fast, with no signs of slowing down, staying up-to-date with home automation tech can feel like an impossible task.
However, there’s a lot you can do to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and access these incredible benefits as they roll onto the market. Let’s check out a few ideas.
Keep your network current
Your home automation devices are only as good as the network they run on. That means a robust and up-to-date home network is one of the best investments you can make in your smart home.
Consider upgrading to a Wi-Fi 6 router, or the even more advanced 6E router. This will open up new possibilities when it comes to 5G and bring a new level of speed and slickness to your IoT network.
Another option is to set up a mesh network — a collection of connectivity sources around your home instead of a single router — to provide better coverage.
Keep your devices maintained
With the rate at which home automation technology is advancing, devices that were brand new just a few years ago are quickly becoming outdated.
This is especially true for firmware — it’s essential to keep your devices updated at all times to ensure they’re optimally secure and can take advantage of new features and capabilities.
Remember that your devices won’t last forever, and have some kind of plan in place to review and replace any older technology.
Stay informed
One of the best ways to keep pace with the rapidly changing world of home automation is to join online communities and attend events.
Of course, it’s not always feasible to travel huge distances to attend conferences and expos just to learn more about your smart home devices, but you can learn a lot from joining the right forums and online groups. These can help you get quick answers to questions, gain inspiration for future projects, and stay up to date with all the latest news and advice.
Here are some ideas:
r/HomeAutomation on Reddit, a subreddit dedicated to home automation with tips, questions, and shared projects.
Arduino’s community and forum: a place for Arduino users to gather and talk about their own projects, share guides, and discuss challenges they have encountered.
There’s also an extensive list of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and blogs to explore, and specific technologies and devices often have their own dedicated support groups and online spaces.
Get into DIY
What better way to access the next generation of home automation technology than to build it yourself?
Today it’s easier than ever for total amateurs to build their own IoT devices and home automation projects, with nothing more than some simple components and a bit of basic coding knowledge.
At Arduino, we help people get started with their own home automation journey. Our products are built to help everyone from complete beginners to advanced makers create their own smart home technology and share it with the world.
Contact us to learn more about this and how to get started.
Rodents, including mice, are problematic. They can cause significant damage to your home by chewing up wires, walls, and insulation, while leaving behind unsanitary droppings that present a health hazard. But those of us who love animals are reluctant to utilize traditional mousetraps. Not only are those fatal, but they can also cause a lot of suffering along the way. That’s why Trapsticles built this rodent-friendly catch-and-release mousetrap.
This mousetrap doesn’t kill rodents or harm them at all. It simply traps them in a large box, so the homeowner can relocate them. To keep a mouse from just coming back, it is necessary to release them far away. But that’s a lot better than killing them. It may also be possible to donate the captured mice to pet stores to use as feeders. That is still a little gruesome, but nature is like that.
The concept here is simple: it is a big box and the top is a trap door actuated by a servo motor. Bait (like peanut butter) lures mice onto the trap door, which then swings down to drop the critter inside. The door then closes so the mouse can’t escape — though one wily rodent was able to climb out of Trapsticles’s trap.
An Arduino Nano board controls the servo. It detects the presence of a mouse (or any small warmblooded creature) using a PIR sensor. Blinder-style shields prevent the PIR sensor from spotting anything that isn’t on the trap door, so a passing person doesn’t set it off.
As you can see in the video, this works well and is much more humane than the traps at your local hardware store.
Servers don’t usually need monitors, keyboards, or mice. Because the user only interacts with servers through separate devices under normal conditions, a server can just be a box with with a processor, RAM, storage, and network adapter. But that becomes an issue if something is wrong with the server that requires direct interaction. To help his dad in those situations, Abraham Limpo added an LCD interface to his father’s old file server.
Limpo’s father owns an HP ProLiant MicroServer that he uses as a file server. Its only real job is to provide storage that is accessible over a network and/or the internet. It was a simple black box, but Limpo upgraded it to make it more usable. He installed an interface that includes an LCD screen and a couple of buttons. The LCD shows the file server’s IP address, so it is readable without having to check the router for that info. And the buttons let Limpo’s father safely shut the system down without having to SSH in.
An Arduino Nano board monitors the buttons and controls the LCD screen. It receives information from the file server via a Node app. Limpo mounted those in the ProLiant MicroServer using a 3D-printed frame that sits in place of the unused drive bay. The LCD is just a standard 16×2 character model, but that is sufficient for displaying the IP address and a little bit of extra information.
Throughout this year, space agencies have been embarking on new missions to explore our solar system, and young people can get involved too through the European Astro Pi Challenge 2023/24, which we’re launching today.
Kids’ code in space with the Astro Pi Challenge
In the past few months India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission landed near the Moon’s south pole, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe flew by Venus on its way to the sun, and the SpaceX Crew-7 launched to the International Space Station (ISS), led by ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen. We’re especially excited about Andreas’ mission because he’s the astronaut who will help to run young people’s Astro Pi programs on board the ISS this year.
ESA astronaut Andreas Mogensen will help run kids’ Astro Pi code on board the ISS. Can you spot an Astro Pi computer in the photo?
As you may know, the European Astro Pi Challenge gives young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific experiments in space by writing computer programs for the Astro Pis, special Raspberry Pi computers on board the ISS.
Two Astro Pis on board the International Space Station.
The Astro Pi Challenge is free and offers two missions for young people: Mission Zero is an inspiring activity for introducing kids to text-based programming with Python. Mission Space Lab gives teams of young people the chance to take on a more challenging programming task and stretch their coding and science skills.
Participation in Astro Pi is open to young people up to age 19 in ESA Member States (see the Astro Pi website for eligibility details).
Astro Pi Mission Zero opens today
In Astro Pi Mission Zero, young people write a simple Python program to take a reading using a sensor on one of the ISS Astro Pi computers and display a personalised pixel art image for the astronauts on board the ISS. They can take part by themselves or as coding teams.
The theme for Mission Zero 2023/24 is ‘fauna and flora’: young people are invited to program pixel art images or animations of animals, plants, or fungi to display on the Astro Pi computers’ LED pixel screen and remind the astronauts aboard the ISS of Earth’s natural wonders.
A selection of Mission Zero pixel art images of animals.
By following the guide we provide, kids can complete the Mission Zero coding activity in around one hour, for example during a school lesson or coding club session. No coding experience is needed to take part. Kids can write their code in any web browser on any computer connected to the internet, without special equipment or software.
Mission Zero participants get a certificate showing the exact time and place where their code was run in space.
All young people that meet the eligibility criteria and follow the official Mission Zero guidelines will have their program run in space for up to 30 seconds. They will receive a unique and personalised certificate to show their coding achievement. The certificate will display the exact start and end time of their program’s run, and where the ISS was above Earth in this time period.
Mission Zero 2023/24 opens today and is open until Monday 25 March 2024. It’s very easy to support young people to get involved — find out more on the Astro Pi website:
Astro Pi Mission Space Lab will open soon
In this year’s Astro Pi Mission Space Lab, ESA astronauts are inviting teams of young people to solve a scientific task by writing a Python program.
The Mission Space Lab task is to gather data with the Astro Pi computers to calculate the speed at which the ISS is travelling. This new format of the mission will allow many more young people to run their programs in space and get a taste of space science.
The Strait of Gibraltar photographed by an Astro Pi on board the ISS during a previous Mission Space Lab.
Mission Space Lab will open on 6 November. We will share more information about how young people and mentors can participate very soon.
Sign up for Astro Pi news
The European Astro Pi Challenge is an ESA Education project run in collaboration with us here at the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
You can keep up with all Astro Pi news by following the Astro Pi X account (formerly Twitter) or signing up to the newsletter at astro-pi.org.
The Witty Pi 4 ($27.63) from UUGear is a great solution for all your Raspberry Pi timing, scheduling, and power management needs. No longer will you need to worry about the accuracy of your Raspberry Pi clock thanks to the on-board real-time clock and temperature sensor that allows for additional accuracy and temperature compensation. And anyone who has worked with the Raspberry Pi knows about power management and the relatively difficult nature of powering your Raspberry Pi on or off, and this is where the Witty Pi really shines.
Unlike a microcontroller that you simply power-off, you need to go through a powering-off sequence with your Raspberry Pi, similar to your desktop computer. And the Witty Pi can do that too! Now your Raspberry Pi can shut down and only wake up when needed, saving lots of power. If you have a remote monitoring project, or one that runs off battery power, the Witty Pi should be something to consider adding to the build.
Verdict
9/10 Great addition to a Raspberry Pi.
Adafruit Feather RP2040 with RFM95 LoRa Radio
The Adafruit Feather RP2040 RFM95 LoRa Radio board ($29.95), aka ‘RadioFruits’, is Adafruit’s take on a microcontroller with integrated long-range (LoRa) packet radio transceiver, along with a built-in USB and battery charging system. This is the perfect microcontroller board for creating wireless sensors that have a longer range and require less power than other wireless solutions like Bluetooth.
The board features an RP2040 chip running at 133MHz, the same as you can find on a Raspberry Pi Pico. You also get a generous 8MB of on-board QSPI flash and 264kB of RAM, plus on-board RGB LED, STEMMA QT connector, and lots of GPIO pins. Between the on-board battery management, LoRa radio, and RP2040, it would be hard to beat this little board for creating an outdoor sensor network.
Air quality concerns encompass several different pollutants and irritants. Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were, for example, a major concern in the 20th century due to the damage they cause to the ozone layer. But not all pollutants are easy to monitor. Hydrogen sulfide, which causes irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat at low levels and much more serious symptoms at high levels, can collect in pockets. To find them, researchers from Brazil have a developed a low-cost lab-on-a-drone.
The CDC reports that hydrogen sulfide exposure is a risk for those working in rayon textile manufacturing, petroleum and natural gas drilling and refining, wastewater treatment, and farms with manure storage pits. Because industry isn’t always keen on environmental protection, these researchers wanted a way to find pockets of high hydrogen sulfide concentration. To detect that gas efficiently at a variety of altitudes, they decided a drone-mounted approach was best.
They achieved that by designing a sensor system light enough to be carried by off-the-shelf consumer drones. That payload consists of an Arduino UNO R3 board, the hydrogen sulfide sensor, an air pump for that sensor, and a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor. It also has an HC-05 Bluetooth® module, so the researchers can monitor readings from anywhere within range.
The team found a significant increase in hydrogen sulfide levels as the drone got higher, indicating that existing sensors on the ground are insufficient for monitoring this kind of pollution. You can read more in their published paper here.
Images credit:Leal et al. Analytical Chemistry, 2023, DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c02719
You can play chess just as easily on a $2 set from a thrift store as you can on a $2,000 ornate set from a bespoke retailer. But that doesn’t stop people from building or buying those fancy chess sets. If you’re the DIY type, you may even be interested in an electronic chessboard like this one from the NVE Corporation team, which was made possible by practical magnetic switches.
This is an electronic chessboard that registers moves and speaks them out loud. That can make it useful for people who don’t have good eyesight. It also allows for the possibility of recording entire matches on a connected computer. Chessboards like this aren’t uncommon, but this project was simplified by the use NVE’s GMR magnetic switch sensors. Those detect the presence of magnets in the bases of the chess pieces, with enough tolerance to account for variation in placement and board thickness.
An Arduino UNO R3 board monitors all 64 of those switches through a matrix similar to keyboard. When a player picks up a piece, the Arduino notes the square that changed states. Then, when the player puts down the piece, the Arduino records that square, too. It can then output PWM (pulse-width modulation) audio to an amplifier board that says, for example, “B7 to B6” using the Talkie library.
By updating a running log of every piece’s position, it would also be possible for it to instead say “pawn to B6.” But the current implementation doesn’t do so.
The rapid rise of edge AI capabilities on embedded targets has proven that relatively low-resource microcontrollers are capable of some incredible things. And following the recent release of the Arduino UNO R4 with its Renesas RA4M1 processor, the ceiling has gotten even higher as YouTuber Nikodem Bartnik has demonstrated with his lidar-equipped mobile robot.
Bartnik’s project started with a simple question of whether it’s possible to teach a basic robot how to make its way around obstacles using only lidar instead of the more resource-intensive computer vision techniques employed by most other platforms. The chassis and hardware, including two DC motors, an UNO R4 Minima, a Bluetooth® module, and SD card, were constructed according to Open Robotic Platform (ORP) rules so that others can easily replicate and extend its functionality. After driving through a series of courses in order to collect a point cloud from the spinning lidar sensor, Bartnik imported the data and performed a few transformations to greatly minify the classification model.
Once trained, the model was exported with help from the micromlgen Python package and loaded onto the UNO R4. The setup enables the incoming lidar data to be classified as the direction in which the robot should travel, and according to Bartnik’s experiments, this approach worked surprisingly well. Initially, there were a few issues when navigating corners and traveling through a figure eight track, but additional training data solved it and allowed the vehicle to overcome a completely novel course at maximum speed.
In the 2023 Coolest Projects online showcase, 5801 young people from all over the world shared the wonderful, fun, and creative things they had made with technology. But that’s not all we’ve seen of Coolest Projects this year. As well as our worldwide annual online showcase, a number of in-person Coolest Projects events are taking place in countries across the globe in 2023.
The exhibition hall at Coolest Projects Ireland 2023.
Run by us or partner organisations, these exciting events create a space for young people to meet other young tech creators, connect to their community, and celebrate each others’ creations. In-person Coolest Projects events around the world had to pause over the coronavirus pandemic, and we’re delighted to see them return to engage and inspire young people once again.
Coolest Projects Ireland in Dublin
On 1 July, we were super excited to host Coolest Projects Ireland, our first in-person Coolest Projects event since 2020. 63 young tech creators from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland came together in Dublin for an exciting one-day event where they shared 43 incredible creations, with engineer and STEM communicator Dr Niamh Shaw leading everyone through the day’s celebrations.
The creators with projects in the Scratch category on stage with Dr Niamh Shaw.
One young maker showcasing her project was Charlotte from Kinsale CoderDojo in the Republic of Ireland. Her creative storytelling project ‘Goldicat and the Three Angry Property Owners’ was chosen as a judges’ favourite in the Scratch category.
Charlotte’s story includes different games and three secret endings for the user to discover. She told us: “I know someone who made an animation based off the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel in Scratch. This inspired me to make a game based off a different fairy tale, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”
Charlotte’s project ‘Goldicat and the Three Angry Property Owners’.
Harshit entered the Hardware category with his amazing mini vending machine. Describing his project, he explained, “This is a recreation of a vending machine, but I have added my own twists to it to make it simple to build. You still get the full experience of an actual vending machine, but what makes it special is that it is made fully out of recycled materials.”
Harshit with his mini vending machine project.
Young people at Coolest Projects Ireland were joined and supported by family, friends, and mentors from Code Clubs and CoderDojos. Mentors told us their favourite things about attending a Coolest Projects event in person were “the joy and excitement the participants got from taking part and discussing their project with the judges”, and “the way it was very inclusive to all children and all [were] included on stage for some swag!”
Coolest Projects events by partners around the world
In 2023 we’re partnering with six organisations that are bringing Coolest Projects events for their communities. We’re still looking forward to the exciting Coolest Projects events planned in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Iraq, and South Africa during the rest of the year.
Back in June, more than 30 young creators participated in Coolest Projects Hungary, which was organised in Budapest by the team at EPAM. And April saw our partner CoderDojo Belgium organise Coolest Projects Belgium for 40 young people, who shared 25 projects across different categories from Scratch to Hardware and Advanced Programming.
A young tech creator at Coolest Projects Belgium.A young tech creator at Coolest Projects Belgium.
The CoderDojo Belgium team shared how important the Coolest Projects event is to their community:
“Just like every year, we’ve unlocked the doors to welcome the next generation of tech enthusiasts. And this year, once again, we were absolutely amazed by the projects they brought to the spotlight. From an app predicting stock market evolution, to creatively designed games with unexpected twists, not to mention the incredible robots, and more, their ingenuity knows no bounds.”
CoderDojo Belgium
How you can get involved in Coolest Projects
We’re excited that the Coolest Projects online showcase — open to any young creator anywhere in the world — will return in 2024. And if there isn’t a Coolest Projects in-person event in your country yet, don’t worry. We’re working with more and more partners every year to bring Coolest Projects events to more young people.
And you can celebrate young tech creators with us year round wherever you are by following Coolest Projects on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, where we share inspiring projects from the Coolest Projects online gallery and photos from the in-person events.
We’d like to thank Meta, GoTo, and Pimoroni for supporting the Coolest Projects Ireland event. If you’re interested in partnering with us for Coolest Projects, please reach out to us via email.
The great thing about art is that it doesn’t have to serve a purpose. When utility is irrelevant, the artist is free to express their creativity in whatever way they like. A painting doesn’t have to inspire introspection or revolution — it can just be something pretty to look at. In the same vein, Eirik Brandal’s Intermittent Luminal Phase kinetic sculpture is both gorgeous and useless.
Brandal started this project as an excuse to experiment with his new CNC router. Cutting gears seemed like a good way to do so, but he didn’t have a need for any mechanism that utilized them. That led him to the concept of a kinetic sculpture and Intermittent Luminal Phase is the result. It spins endlessly, making noise and blinking lights. But it is almost hypnotizing to see in action.
An Arduino Nano Every board controls two motors that spin a central input shaft, which turns all of the other gears. The gears aren’t perfect and produce a fair amount of vibration, but Brandal converted that bug into a feature. He added a piezo element that picks up the vibrations. Those are then amplified and pumped out through a speaker on the sculpture. The gears also have LEDs that make contact through DIY slip rings, so they light up at certain points in the rotation.
Cyborgs have long been a staple of sci-fi, but we see few real-world examples of this concept outside of a handful of biomedical devices and prostheses. But bionics — engineered systems that integrate biological structures — is an adjacent field with interesting possibilities. A bionic device would include some biological material (often tissue) with artificial components (often electronics). In the burgeoning field of bionics, Saarland University Human-Computer Interaction Lab’s Biohybrid Interactive Devices look promising.
The goal of this research was to a develop viable and practical HCI devices. The approach taken by the researchers was to embed traditional electronics in bacterial cellulose. Comparable to animal tissue, bacterial cellulose is a growable biomaterial. It is flexible and retains structural integrity, which makes it suitable for many applications. To embed electronics in the bacterial cellulose, the team had to create growth and stabilization techniques that enable the biomaterial to remain stable for a useful amount of time.
A couple of different prototype devices demonstrate this. One is a shoulder-worn accessory that conveys the user’s emotions visually. An embedded galvanic skin response (GSR) sensor lets an Arduino Leonardo detect user anxiety or stress. When it does, it passes current through shape memory alloy that causes bacterial cellulose flaps to rise noticeably. Another is a gamepad with an embedded multi-touch matrix and capacitive touch buttons, which connect to a computer through an Arduino Nano.
Both of these prototypes were successful, but the bacterial cellulose did still experience degradation caused by the presence of the electronic components and the heat they generate. Further research may allow for more stability. You can read more about Biohybrid Interactive Devices in the team’s paper here.
It’s time to catch up on all things LoRaWAN® and low-power IoT! Our team is looking forward to returning to The Things Conference this year, joining all LoRa® key players in Amsterdam on September 21st-22nd. Our experts will be showcasing new products and applications relevant to the technology that is putting the “smart” in smart cities, smart agriculture, smart logistics, and more.
Indeed, with IoT’s huge growth potential in both B2B and B2C applications, LoRaWAN® is stepping up as one of the technologies of the future. Already established as the low-power connectivity choice, according to The Things Network it is reaping the benefits of innovations that increase efficiency even further – and is poised to support ESG (environmental, social and governance) goals with reduced energy consumption and secure data transmission.
LoRaWAN® novice, or expert? We’ve got you covered
Whether you are just realizing the potential of LoRaWAN® or have been a fan of it since day one (like us!), we’ll have something for you to discover at our booth at The Things Conference:
Looking for an entry-level option? The Arduino MKR WAN 1310 offers you the renowned versatility of the practical and cost-effective MKR family and adds LoRa® connectivity to projects requiring low power.
Ready to take it up a notch? The solution for advanced applications requiring sturdy computational power is to boost Arduino Pro’s Portenta H7 module (in any of its three variants) with the capability to run embedded computer vision applications, connect wirelessly via LoRa® to the Arduino Cloud (or third-party infrastructure), and activate systems upon the detection of sound events. How? With thePortenta Vision Shield LoRa®, of course!
Feel the need for high performance? Pair the Portenta Max Carrier with aPortenta X8module to add LoRa® connectivity to your project, transforming your robust SOM into a single-board computer or reference design enabling edge AI for industrial, building automation and robotics applications.
Need deep indoor coverage or want to add reliable connectivity to your outdoor system? TheWisGate Edge Lite 2 andWisGate Edge Pro are your ready-to-use, industrial-grade gateways for LoRaWAN® connectivity powered by RAKwireless.
The Arduino ecosystem has something for everyone, and might just have everything you need for your next LoRaWAN® idea. Contact us or come by the booth to find out more.
Don’t miss the demos!
The Things Conference will also be a great opportunity to see some of our products in action. You’ll have the chance to explore our solution to control pests in vineyards with the most effectiveness and the least use of chemicals or labor, for example. Computer vision and LoRa® connectivity combine in a smart trap based on a MKR WAN 1310, which attracts bugs and records their number and type in real-time, allowing for remote monitoring and therefore more cost-effective interventions.
Our experts at The Things Conference will also be happy to show you how Portenta X8 and Portenta Max Carrier can join forces to deploy a secure, industrial-grade Linux computer capable of interacting with equipment/machinery or integrating within an existing smart kiosk: a system ready to collect data from onsite controllers, process them thanks to supported industrial protocols, and finally send useful information to your Cloud or ERP system, acting as a multi-protocol gateway via Wi-Fi, NB/IoT, LTE Cat.M1 or – you guessed it – LoRa®.
People make The Things Conference special
We are proud to have two special events included in the program this year.
On Friday, September 22nd, our Application Engineering Lead, Sebastian Romero, will return to Amsterdam with a keynote showing how IoT-capable hardware can be retrofitted to integrate smart remote management, using Arduino components and LoRaWAN®. Interested in present opportunities, but also curious about the future of IoT from Arduino’s perspective? Then make sure to attend the fireside chat with our CEO Fabio Violante on Thursday, September 21st at 10:30am CEST, to find out how the company’s philosophy will continue to leverage the latest technological evolutions to best serve innovators like you.
Let’s get social!
We’ll be happy to see you at the booth: come say hi, ask questions and get to know Arduino better. While approaching the venue, keep an eye on the ground and look for our street graffiti – be sure to take photos and tag us on social media: we’ll repost to share highlights with the millions in our community!
“But can it run Doom?” is more than just a joke in the tech world. It is also a decent litmus test for the computing power of hardware. That test isn’t very relevant for modern computers, but it is still worth asking when discussing microcontrollers. Microcontrollers vary in dramatically in processing power and memory, with models to suit every application. But if you have an Arduino Nano ESP32 board, you can run Doomas Naveen Kumar has proven.
The Nano ESP32 is a small development board for the ESP32-S3 microcontroller. Espressif developed the ESP32 for IoT applications, so it has onboard Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® adapters. It also has a relatively high clock speed and quite a lot of memory: 240MHz and 512kB SRAM, respectively. That still isn’t enough to meet the requirements of the original Doom release, which needed a lot more RAM. But Kumar demonstrates the use of a microcontroller-friendly port that runs well on this more limited hardware.
To try this yourself, you’ll need the Nano ESP32, an Adafruit 2.8″ TFT LCD shield, an M5Stack joystick, a Seeed Studio Grove dual button module, a breadboard, and some jumper wires. You’ll then need to compile and flash the Retro-Go firmware, which was designed specifically for running games like Doom on ESP32-based devices. You can then load the specialized WAD (Where’s All the Data) files.
Kumar reports an average frame rate at a 320×240 resolution, which is very playable.
It’s back to school! Whether you are a student or not, Arduino’s Project Hub is a great place to never stop learning, thanks to the wealth of knowledge, experiments, and plain cool ideas our community so generously shares. The three highlights we’ve selected among the projects uploaded in June indeed all have something to teach us… with one valuable lesson in common: the past has a lot to offer, if we take the time to recharge, rediscover or revamp it just a little!
This tutorial is so clear it can make anyone feel capable of building their own charger – with additional functionalities such as determining battery wear. Batteries always have to be handled with care, but if you have the skills to customize code and solder a circuit according to the schematic provided, more power to you! All you need are an Arduino Nano and a few other common components.
This is not just a project, but a wonderful deep-dive on wireless communication where you’ll learn about the ISM band, ASK modulation, and synchronous and asynchronous demodulation. More importantly, you might rediscover the “simpler and older radio frequency devices and schemes” that are perfect to save resources on smaller projects. In this case, they will be all you need to implement wireless communication interfacing a Nano with a 433 MHz RF module.
Time and date, timer and alarm, but also detailed temperature data and even the weather forecast: you can have it all in one clock! With this project, Project Hub user dzh121 improved upon a previous version of theirs by adding a touchscreen and displaying more information. An impressive device that makes great use of Arduino IoT Cloud-based dashboards.
For your chance to be selected for a $100, $300 or even $500 gift card to spend on the Arduino Store, submit your best project on the Project Hub! We will be awarding three new entries every month, as detailed in the complete terms and conditions. Good luck!
When playing a short game of basketball, few people enjoy having to consciously track their number of successful throws. Yet when it comes to automation, nearly all systems rely on infrared or visual proximity detection as a way to determine when a shot has gone through the basket versus missed. This is what inspired one team from the University of Ljubljan to create a small edge ML-powered device that can be suspended from the net with a pair of zip ties for real-time scorekeeping.
After collecting a total of 137 accelerometer samples via an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and labeling them as either a miss, a score, or nothing within the Edge Impulse Studio, the team trained a classification model and reached an accuracy of 84.6% on real-world test data. Getting the classification results from the device to somewhere readable is handled by the Nano’s onboard BLE server. It provides two services, with the first for reporting the current battery level and the second for sending score data.
Once the firmware had been deployed, the last step involved building a mobile application to view the relevant information. The app allows users to connect to the basketball scoring device, check if any new data has been received, and then parse/display the new values onscreen.
A well-maintained garden is a beautiful thing. The envy of your friends and neighbors, and a lifelong project you can truly take pride in, especially in the summer months.
Gardening itself, though, can be a chore. The really fun parts often feel like a small fraction of the overall work, with a ton of time spent on tedious, boring, and even physically uncomfortable tasks.
The good news is that automation can help. In fact, garden automation is its own entire topic — one that’s growing in popularity all the time.
By tapping into this rapidly growing pool of garden automation tools and technologies, you can take your garden to the next level. Save time on the dull work so you can focus more on the rewarding stuff, and use tech to enhance your garden and make it better than ever before.
In this article, we’ll look at some of the key ways tech and automation help with gardening, and how you can start harnessing it at home.
How can tech benefit gardeners?
Let’s dive into a few of the ways tech can help gardeners:
Save time by making tasks more efficient and automated.
Take care of boring tasks, leaving you free to focus on the more interesting and enjoyable elements of gardening (which may be simply chilling out in your garden).
Assist with planning and design, helping you build the most attractive and convenient garden possible.
Make things more fun with creative and collaborative projects
Garden automation trends to pay attention
We’re currently living through an incredibly exciting time when it comes to technology. New, fascinating trends are emerging all the time, and existing technologies are growing at breakneck speed.
When it comes to garden automation, let’s check out some of the most interesting tech trends and solutions you can tap into this summer.
Soil monitoring and management
Soil is the lifeblood of your garden.
Without healthy soil, imbued with just the right balance of nutrients, minerals, pH levels, and moisture, your dreams of a thriving and beautiful garden are over before they’ve even begun.
However, it’s hard to find out this information ourselves. There are techniques and tricks you can use, but they rely on guesswork more than actual measurement.
This is where technology comes in. Smart garden tech makes it possible to accurately monitor all kinds of different aspects of your soil health. Thanks to the Internet of Things, even amateur gardeners can now access a ton of powerful sensors that keep track of various key metrics and alert you when something needs to change.
You can even install automatic tools to fix any issues your sensors detect. Let’s find out more about that.
Automated irrigation systems
Watering your plants by hand isn’t just tedious, it can also be wasteful.
The downsides to underwatering your plants are obvious, but overwatering can be bad for the plants and soil, as well as wasting precious water, especially in the hotter months.
On top of that, relying on manual watering can mean forgetting key times, and of course the stress of leaving home for a few days and worrying about your garden becoming dry and wilted.
Once again, though, tech can help out. Smart irrigation systems combine sensors with up-to-date weather data, planning and executing watering schedules that work perfectly for your garden with minimal wastage.
Better gardening through AI
Whatever you think about it, there’s no denying that artificial intelligence is the flavor of the month right now, and with good reason.
We’re currently experiencing a renaissance of AI, with new tools exploding onto the scene every day and regular massive leaps forward in sophistication and power.
Gardening might not be the first use case that springs to mind for AI, but there is actually lots of potential here for tech-savvy gardeners. Here are a few examples:
Robots: Just like the Roomba revolutionized the way we clean our carpets, automated lawnmowers and other tools are transforming the way we care for our gardens.
Designing your garden: AI can now suggest ideas for how to design your garden, like providing plans for different layouts and structures, suggestions for plants and colors that work well together, and recommendations based on your previous designs, preferences, and your location.
Reminders and updates: The right apps can help you stay on top of various aspects of running your garden by using AI to notify you when you need to do tasks like watering your plants, trimming the lawn, planting seeds, and more.
Smart pest control
Hungry pests are the bane of any gardener’s existence, and depending on where you’re located they can be an enormous problem.
Gardeners have battled against pests for millennia, trying just about every strategy under the sun to finally defeat them, with varying degrees of success.
Now, technology may provide yet another powerful weapon in this fight. In fact, it can offer several.
Here are just a few quick examples:
Automated traps that quickly and efficiently remove pests from the danger zone.
Pheromone-based systems attract pests by simulating the chemicals that lure them in, drawing them away from your precious plant life.
AI-driven pest detection tools can be used to accurately monitor your plants for the presence of unwanted visitors, and then guide your pest control systems to efficiently deal with them.
On top of helping you reduce pest damage, these technologies also remove the need for harmful pest control methods like toxic pesticides and help you move towards a safer, cleaner, and more environmentally-friendly approach to gardening.
Vertical and space-efficient gardens
If you live in an urban environment, the chances are that one of the biggest challenges for you when it comes to gardening is a lack of space.
It can be tough to grow a varied, beautiful garden when you have serious constraints on space, but the good news is that smart gardening methods can help you stretch every square meter further and build a much more space-efficient garden — even if you live in an apartment.
One example here is stackable planters — essentially multiple plant containers stacked on top of each other that allow you to grow several different types of plants in the same space. These can range from simple, basic designs to much more complex constructions.
Another way technology can help make the most of small spaces is by giving you the insights and tools to optimize things like light exposure, water distribution, and plant health. This lets you make the most of limited resources to grow the best garden possible in the conditions available to you.
Integration with smart home systems
A well-equipped smart home is a hive of powerful features and tools.
Voice assistants and mobile apps bring everything together, enabling you to control your lighting, sound systems, heating, A/C, and much more at the touch of a button or a single spoken command.
The same process can be extended to your smart garden.
By integrating your smart garden tools like automated sprinklers, sensors, traps, and gardening robots with your existing smart home ecosystem, you can even more easily control your garden and stay on top of key data insights.
This can save a ton of time and bring your home and garden into the same, easily controlled system.
Data-driven plant selection
Not all plants are suitable for all gardens.
Various factors like your soil type, climate, water levels, humidity, and a ton of others will determine which plant species thrive in your garden, and which ones wilt away.
Finding out which plants fall into each category can be an incredibly time-consuming task, one that takes many gardeners years to work out through trial and error. Fortunately, with the right smart garden tools, you can shave a ton of time off that process.
Apps like Iris allow you to share information about the conditions in your garden — like climate and soil data — and it will recommend the best plants for you.
Data is an incredibly powerful, yet underused, tool for gardeners. It can help you grow a garden the smart way, by making informed and intelligent decisions to save huge amounts of time and disappointment.
Make it a family activity
One of the great things about gardening is that it’s an activity that really can be fun for the whole family.
With the right tech gadgets and tools, you can make gardening much more engaging and rewarding for kids, sparking what could be a lifelong interest in the hobby.
There are many resources to help with this. For example, this project from EDUcentrum uses Arduino tools combined with other components to help children build their very own automated gardening kit.
The project is designed to help kids get some hands-on experience with automation while learning about plants, gardening, and the environment — all while cooperating with other young learners from different countries.
The power of a smarter garden
Smart garden automation can completely transform the way you care for your garden and approach your future gardening plans.
By helping you make data-driven decisions, monitor the right vital signs more easily, keep pests at bay, and automate tedious tasks, technology can bring joy back into gardening while at the same time giving you a healthier, better-looking, and more durable outdoor space.
Everyone’s garden is different, of course, so ultimately this is all about experimentation and finding out the right tools and technologies that work best for you.
At Arduino, we have many different solutions to help you build and refine your own smart garden, along with just about every other aspect of your home. Check out a few examples from our users:
A smart soil moisture sensor
Check out this project by Arduino user Fouad_Roboticist. It’s a soil moisture sensor, made using just a handful of fairly simple components.
The sensor works by sending the data from the sensor to an Arduino microcontroller, giving you the ability to stay on top of your soil moisture more easily and efficiently.
Automated plant watering
Arduino user Saikan45 decided to build their very own automated plant watering system. The goal was to automate plant watering while ensuring there was enough moisture for healthy growth.
The project was also designed to cool the soil and soften the tillage pan, reducing the need for human work and creating a more suitable environment for plants to thrive. Built using just a few simple components, Saikan45’s project has the potential to save gardeners a ton of time and stress.
Crop monitoring and controlling
Arduino user beena_2000 created a robot that saves a huge amount of human time by giving real-time readings of temperature, humidity, and soil moisture, combined with live camera recordings from the robot.
Everything is controlled through a mobile application, and the robot can move through the environment and deploy pest spray and fertilizer to specific plants, avoiding wastage.
With an Arduino, some basic components, and a curious mind, there’s no limit to what’s possible. Get in touch with us to find out more and get started!
New artificial intelligence (AI) tools have had a profound impact on many areas of our lives in the past twelve months, including on education. Teachers and schools have been exploring how AI tools can transform their work, and how they can teach their learners about this rapidly developing technology. As enabling all schools and teachers to help their learners understand computing and digital technologies is part of our mission, we’ve been working hard to support educators with high-quality, free teaching resources about AI through Experience AI, our learning programme in partnership with Google DeepMind.
In this article, we take you through the updates we’ve made to the Experience AI Lessons based on teachers’ feedback, reveal two new lessons on large language models (LLMs) and biology, and give you the chance to shape the future of the Experience AI programme.
Updated lessons based on your feedback
In April we launched the first Experience AI Lessons as a unit of six lessons for secondary school students (ages 11 to 14, Key Stage 3) that gives you everything you need to teach AI, including lesson plans, slide decks, worksheets, and videos. Since the launch, we’ve worked closely with teachers and learners to make improvements to the lesson materials.
The first big update you’ll see now is an additional project for students to do across Lesson 5 and Lesson 6. Before, students could choose between two projects to create their own machine learning model, either to classify data from the world’s oceans or to identify fake news. The new project we’ve added gives students the chance to use images to train a machine learning model to identify whether or not an item is biodegradable and therefore suitable to be put in a food waste bin.
Our second big update is a new set of teacher-focused videos that summarise each lesson and highlight possible talking points. We hope these videos will help you feel confident and ready to deliver the Experience AI Lessons to your learners.
A new lesson on large language models
As well as updating the six existing lessons, we’ve just released a new seventh lesson consisting of a set of activities to help students learn about the capabilities, opportunities, and downsides of LLMs, the models that AI chatbots are based on.
With the LLM lesson’s activities you can help your learners to:
Explore the purpose and functionality of LLMs and examine the critical aspect of trustworthiness of these models’ outputs
Examine the reasons why the output of LLMs may not always be reliable and understand that LLMs are machines that make predictions
Compare LLMs to other technologies to assess their suitability for different purposes
Evaluate the appropriateness of using LLMs in a variety of authentic scenarios
An example activity in our new LLM unit.
All Experience AI Lessons are designed to be cross-curricular, and for England-based teachers, the LLM lesson is particularly useful for teaching PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic education).
The LLM lesson is designed as a set of five 10-minute activities, so you have the flexibility to teach the material as a single lesson or over a number of sessions. While we recommend that you teach the activities in the order they come, you can easily adapt them for your learners’ interests and needs. Feel free to take longer than our recommended time and have fun with them.
A new lesson on biology: AI for the Serengeti
We have also been working on an exciting new lesson to introduce AI to secondary school students (ages 11 to 14, Key Stage 3) in the biology classroom. This stand-alone lesson focuses on how AI can help conservationists with monitoring an ecosystem in the Serengeti.
We worked alongside members of the Biology Education Research Group (BERG) at the UK’s Royal Society of Biology to make sure the lesson is relevant and accessible for Key Stage 3 teachers and their learners.
Register your interest if you would like to be one of the first teachers to try out this thought-provoking lesson.
Webinars to support your teaching
If you want to use the Experience AI materials but would like more support, our new webinar series will help you. You will get your questions answered by the people who created the lessons. Our first webinar covered the six-lesson unit and you can watch the recording now:
September’s webinar: How to use Machine Learning for Kids
Join us to learn how to use Machine Learning for Kids (ML4K), a child-friendly tool for training AI models that is used for project work throughout the Experience AI Lessons. The September webinar will be with Dale Lane, who has spent his career developing AI technology and is the creator of ML4K.
Help shape the future of AI education
We need your feedback like a machine learning model needs data. Here are two ways you can share your thoughts:
Become part of our teacher feedback panel. We meet every half term, and our first session will be held mid-October. Email us to register your interest and we’ll be in touch.
To find out more about how you can use Experience AI to teach AI and machine learning to your learners this school year, visit the Experience AI website.
The launch of the Arduino UNO R4 marks a huge leap forward for our community. For us, it’s also the chance to celebrate the people who bring our ecosystem to life with their bright ideas, radiant enthusiasm, and shining insight.
That is how the UNO R4 Stars blog post series began: to highlight makers who have not only created amazing projects with Arduino, but who are giving back to the community by sharing as they go and helping others make anything they wish.
We invite you to discover each profile, hoping you might find a North Star to navigate around an expanding galaxy or venture into completely new universes.
After competing as a national figure skater in her native Canada and attracting over 1 million views as a Minecraft YouTuber – all by the age of 12! – the good-vibes powerhouse that is Tigris Li now invites us all to explore our most human inner workings. Her goals? To help everyone develop heightened emotional intelligence, and to educate and empower a new generation of innovators. She does so through her eclectic practice as an artist and creative technologist – leveraging 3D design and every tool making has to offer, to create experiences that spark conversations about our relationships with technology, each other, and ourselves.
Indeed, she says the project that best represents her is a “playfully absurd” installation she built in 2021, focusing on the very concept of love: the Incu-dater touches on the speculative future by welcoming couples in a futuristic pod, where they can assess the emotional status of their relationship and, based on the results, are prescribed a recommended dose of oxytocin to compensate any imbalances.
More in general, Li was always excited about turning imagination into reality by building physical objects: “Being a maker today is a very radical thing. It’s very radical to be independent against consumer and commercial objects, to be able to create something on your own that stems from you and your individuality.”
And today, she is able to inspire millions of followers to do the same, by sharing her projects online. Check out her latest one: a custom DJ controller based on the UNO R4 Minima and loads of fun retro style.
We asked Li, “What’s your favorite part of the UNO R4?”
The 12×8 LED matrix in the UNO R4 Wifi, because it allows her to build “hardware as an intimate art experience which you can hold in the palm of your hand.”
The ESP32 module (also featured in the WiFi variant), great for wireless connectivity.
How the entire Arduino ecosystem is able to transcend borders and accessibility limitations, to offer new opportunities for exploration and connection to everyone.
Li is currently based in London but of course you can catch up – and keep up – with her many projects anywhere in the world: just check out her portfolio on her website, or join the thousands already following her on Instagram and X!
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