A few years ago, Austin Blake built an electric go-kart that looked like a Tesla Model S. It had the plastic shell from a kid’s Radio Flyer ride-on vehicle, but on top of a custom go-kart frame with a powerful electric motor. That looked like a Tesla, but it didn’t really act like one because it lacked self-driving capability. Now Blake has finally addressed that oversight and given his Tesla go-kart an Arduino-based autopilot.
Tesla’s autopilot and full self-driving features don’t allow for 100% autonomous driving, but they get pretty close. Blake’s autopilot is much more limited, but still impressive. It can steer the go-kart around a known track while Blake handles the throttle and brakes. However, it can only follow the course it was trained on and can’t deviate from that without issues. It also can’t account for unusual events, like a pedestrian in the “road.”
Blake’s autopilot works using a machine learning model running on a laptop, which controls the steering and receives steering angle information from a pair of Arduino Nano boards. The laptop looks at the road through a trio of Logitech webcams and those were also used to gather the training images. A large motor from a power chair rotates the steering column and a potentiometer monitors that rotation, so the two work together like a servo motor.
Many times every second, the machine learning model looks at a frame from the video. Based on its training data, it determines what steering angle best matches the current view. It then turns the steering motor until it reaches that steering angle. The disadvantage of this technique is that it will always attempt to follow the same route as it was trained on and is therefore unable to navigate a new route.
Today, Arduino officially announced its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), offering a new path for the future of edge hardware and cloud services. The new partnership will provide Arduino products and Arduino Cloud customers more options to integrate AWS into IoT projects.
One big cloud for all
It might be news to learn that Arduino Cloud has run on AWS infrastructure from the beginning three years ago. Since that launch, Arduino has increased its investment in the product, growing the team, adding new features, and creating versions for Business and Education. It turned out to be the right decision, as we hear from our customers about how much the progress has helped them achieve both personally and professionally.
Speaking of achievements, it is incredible to report that Arduino Cloud has crossed a milestone. Our cloud now process 4 billion device messages each month! This astonishing accomplishment marks us as one of the more significant IoT SaaS platforms deployed on AWS. Thank you to all of our customers and contributors!
Businesses <3 Arduino Cloud, too
Our Cloud for Business solution is one of the areas in which we are heavily investing and growing the fastest. We have received great feedback on how quick commercial customers can realize value from the core features and our integrations with Edge Impulse and Foundaries.io.
For example, one of our customers, ABM Vapor Monitoring, built a connected contamination monitoring product for commercial buildings using the Arduino Pro Opta PLC. After evaluating different cloud options, they picked Arduino Cloud, and the feedback was great.
“Choosing Arduino Cloud for our [regulated air quality] application slashed product development time by six months and saved us over $250,000 in engineering services. Arduino Cloud has been an instrumental partner in our journey to introduce new products to the market.”
What this partnership means
Considering our professional customers was the driving motivation behind this partnership announcement with AWS. We continue to hear from businesses how they appreciate our device management, particularly the automatic industrial-grade secure connection and over-the-air firmware updates.
As these customers’ business grows and their product offerings evolve, it is easy to understand how some of the excellent cloud services from AWS could benefit their applications. As a company, Arduino wants to support everyone with an open ecosystem, and from that perspective, this partnership with AWS began.
Officially, Arduino joined the AWS ISV program. It is a program designed for SaaS providers built on AWS, like Arduino Cloud, to work with AWS in supporting medium to large customers with architecting custom solutions. Joining this program also provides access to a vast network of over 100,000 AWS Partners worldwide. This means both existing AWS and Arduino customers will experience streamlined support for integrating each cloud with one another.
In addition, Arduino currently has 12 devices in the process of achieving AWS Device Qualification status. This means our devices will officially be recognized by AWS and provide customers architectural documentation to help simplify the complexity of developing an end-to-end solution.
Just the beginning
We hope this article helped convey that this collaboration between Arduino and AWS is not just another partnership; it is a strategic effort that aims to simplify and accelerate the deployment of commercial IoT and cloud-based solutions. It’s an important step forward in connecting the capabilities of edge hardware with the immense potential of cloud computing.
The future for IoT and cloud computing looks promising, and we are eager to see what innovations this partnership will unlock for our customers.
Most people today rely on technology to navigate through the world. That is practical thanks to the reliability of modern GPS. But receiving directions can be difficult for people with certain disabilities. People who are blind, for instance, cannot look at a map on a smartphone. People with missing limbs may not even be able to hold a smartphone. To help those people, Rice University engineers have developed a lightweight wearable device that uses pressurized air to provide directions.
Instead of displaying a graphical map, this device indicates to the user when they should make a turn. It does so through pneumatic haptic feedback. The device’s electronic components attach to wearable textiles, so it is out of the way. Pneumatic hoses run from the device to nozzles pointed at the user’s skin. The locations of those nozzles can be tailored to suit the user’s preferences and physiology. When the device needs to alert the user, such as when a turn is coming up, it will open a valve to the appropriate hose so air blows on their skin.
The Rice engineers designed a prototype to test this concept, which uses an Arduino Nano board for control. The Arduino opens the solenoid valves through MOSFETs and it receives commands from an external device, like a computer, via a four-channel 433MHz receiver. Air comes from canisters of compressed CO2 through a pressure regulator.
The cyberdeck community has exploded in recent years, because makers like to use their creativity to create custom machines tailored to their tastes and requirements. But the community has overlooked one very significant target market: toddlers. Young kids love fiddling with buttons and switches, and there is a plethora of evidence that suggests that interactive toys are good for development. With that in mind, a hacker dad named Josh built his son this cyberdeck for little ones.
Unlike most cyberdecks, this doesn’t actually have to do any real computing. Josh’s son won’t be performing any pentesting with Kali Linux. Instead, it just needs to be fun and engaging for a two-year-old. That means lots of switches, buttons, dials, and LEDs. The top does have a single-board computer and screen from a promotional video player, but it is self-contained and just loops videos. All of the real magic happens in the bottom half.
Josh created this cyberdeck using a waterproof hard case. The bottom half has a panel covered in buttons and switches. Each of those also has a corresponding LED. An Arduino Mega 2560 board monitors the states of the inputs, then sets the LEDs accordingly. Right now, that is just a one-to-one direct relationship, so flipping a particular switch turns a specific LED on or off. But Josh envisions more complicated relationships, like logic puzzles, that he can incorporate as his son gets older. Implementing those would be as simple as uploading new sketches to the Arduino.
There is a thriving Arduino gaming community, with many homebrew video games developed to run on Arduino development boards. Arduboy, for example, produces custom handheld consoles with games that can also run on Arduino hardware. However, many boards have microcontrollers with limited processing power and memory, which means the graphics have to be simple. But Volos Projects took advantage of the new Nano ESP32 to build a portable gaming device with full-color graphics.
As the name suggests, the Nano ESP32 makes use of the popular Espressif ESP32. That has more processing power and memory than most other MCUs, as well as built-in Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® adapters. In this case, the ESP32’s impressive power was enough to generate colorful video game graphics at a respectable resolution.
As a demonstration, Volos Projects put together a simple handheld system on a breadboard. Other than the Arduino, this only required a 1.28″ round GC9A01-driven TFT LCD, some jumper wires, and a few buttons. Those are two-pin momentary push buttons, which are nice because they eliminate wiring confusion. Volos Projects then programmed a basic side-scrolling space shooter game to run on this hardware.
We see many Arduino projects that feature audio output, but they tend to require a substantial amount of additional hardware. Audio files take up a lot of storage space, so they require something like an SD card adapter. Audio signals are analog, so they require a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) to get good quality. And then, to make the audio signal powerful enough for a speaker, these usually need amplifiers. But Scott W Harden found a way to make an Arduino UNO Rev3 talk without any additional hardware beyond the speaker.
In this case, the Arduino can speak any number, from zero to nine, out loud through the speaker. This is possible because those are very short words (most only a single syllable) that are recognizable when the quality is very low. This audio quality wouldn’t be suitable for music or even general language, but it is enough for a sequence of numbers. By reducing the audio quality as much as possible and making the clips short, Harden was able to create audio files small enough to fit in the 32KB flash memory of the UNO‘s ATmega328 microcontroller with room to spare for the sketch.
Harden started with normal MP3 recordings of the spoken numbers. He then performed a 100Hz to 2.5kHz band-pass on the clips, resampled them to 5kHz, and then converted the waveforms to eight-bit unsigned values to store in program memory. The Arduino can then play those waveforms through PWM (pulse-width modulation). A low-pass filter, comprised of a capacitor and resistor, helps smooth the PWM output into something closer to a true analog waveform. An optional LM386 chip can amplify the output, but Harden found that he was able to drive a speaker directly without that.
In a world where energy bills are climbing and the environment is on our minds, keeping tabs on how we use energy at home has become a smart move. Every gadget we plug in impacts our wallets and the planet. That’s where home energy monitoring comes in – giving us real-time info on how we’re using energy, so we can save money and do our bit for the Earth.
This post delves into home energy monitoring, spotlighting how to track your energy consumption using the Arduino Cloud and a Tuya-compatible energy meter with Node-RED acting as a middleware.
What’s the deal with home energy monitoring?
Home energy monitoring is all about watching how much energy we’re using at home. It’s not just about paying the bills; it’s about knowing what’s eating up energy, so we can be smarter about it.
Why does it matter? Well, first off, it helps us be more aware. When we can see which devices are energy hogs (looking at you, always-on TV), we can take action. And with energy costs going up, finding ways to save money is a no-brainer. Plus, with everyone talking about being green these days, knowing where your energy goes is like a badge of honor for doing your part.
The ingredients
The key component in this setup is an energy meter designed to monitor both real-time and cumulative power consumption, along with metrics such as voltage and current. This meter is installed within your home’s electrical distribution board. Tuya-compatible devices have gained widespread popularity due to their affordability, user-friendliness, and seamless management through the SmartLife application. Moreover, these devices can also be seamlessly integrated into alternative platforms through the utilization of the Tuya API.
The Arduino Cloud stands out as a versatile and user-friendly IoT platform, supporting a wide range of hardware. It’s not only customizable and adaptable to suit different purposes and use cases, but it also streamlines the incorporation of multiple devices, facilitating smooth information exchange among them. It is a perfect tool to monitor your energy consumption, being informed when outstanding events happen and perform actions on other devices based on the energy information acquired.
While direct connection of Tuya-compatible devices to the Arduino Cloud isn’t possible, the process becomes really straightforward with the intervention of Node-RED. This intermediary acts as a bridge between the energy meter and the Arduino Cloud, ensuring seamless communication between the two. With Node-RED you can integrate almost anything with the Arduino Cloud.
The project
The following project shows how to integrate all those elements to easily build your own energy monitoring system.
Before getting started, you’ll require:
A Tuya/Smartlife-compatible energy meter
The SmartLife or Tuya app installed on your iOS/Android device
The Energy Meter added to the Tuya Smart app
An Arduino Cloud account (https://cloud.arduino.cc)
An instance of Node-RED running locally or on a cloud machine (installation guide found here)
The process is really straightforward:
Install the energy meter within your electric board.
Obtain your Tuya device API key.
Create the Device and Thing within the Arduino Cloud.
Develop the Node-RED flow to manage data traffic.
Fashion the Arduino Cloud Dashboard.
Build your own energy meter from the ground up
Monitoring energy consumption with Arduino Cloud doesn’t solely rely on Tuya-compatible energy meters. If you’re inclined to build your own solution from the ground up, consider exploring the Arduino IoT-based energy meter hosted on the Project Hub. There is additional detailed documentation available and a ready-to-use template to deploy your solution with one click.
By engaging with this project, you’ll not only gain insight into your energy consumption monitoring but also experience the simplicity of crafting practical projects that interface Arduino boards with external components such as the Modbus energy meter. All this will be seamlessly managed and monitored by the Arduino Cloud.
Ready to Get Started? Take Control of Your Energy!
The path to smarter energy consumption begins with your curiosity and action. Now armed with the knowledge of the Arduino Cloud’s potential, it’s time to embark on your own energy monitoring journey. Don’t wait – seize the opportunity to optimize your energy usage, save on bills, and contribute to a more sustainable planet. With the Arduino Cloud as your ally, you can monitor, manage, and make a positive impact starting from your own home. Create your account, dive in, tinker for free, and start your energy-saving adventure today. Your future of empowered energy management is just a click away!
Your dog has nerve endings covering its entire body, giving it a sense of touch. It can feel the ground through its paws and use that information to gain better traction or detect harmful terrain. For robots to perform as well as their biological counterparts, they need a similar level of sensory input. In pursuit of that goal, the Autonomous Robots Lab designed TRACEPaw for legged robots.
TRACEPaw (Terrain Recognition And Contact force Estimation Paw) is a sensorized foot for robot dogs that includes all of the hardware necessary to calculate force and classify terrain. Most systems like this use direct sensor readings, such as those from force sensors. But TRACEPaw is unique in that it uses indirect data to infer this information. The actual foot is a deformable silicone hemisphere. A camera looks at that and calculates the force based on the deformation it sees. In a similar way, a microphone listens to the sound of contact and uses that to judge the type of terrain, like gravel or dirt.
To keep TRACEPaw self-contained, Autonomous Robots Lab chose to utilize an Arduino Nicla Vision board. That has an integrated camera, microphone, six-axis motion sensor, and enough processing power for onboard machine learning. Using OpenMV and TensorFlow Lite, TRACEPaw can estimate the force on the silicone pad based on how much it deforms during a step. It can also analyze the audio signal from the microphone to guess the terrain, as the silicone pad sounds different when touching asphalt than it does when touching loose soil.
More details on the project are available on GitHub.
Today’s consumer and professional drones are very stable. They’re easy to pilot and we’re past the era of rampant out-of-control drone crashes. But drones can still fail and benefit from a system that lets them return safely to the ground without damage. That is also true for hobby rockets, which still have very experimental controlled descent systems. To suit both types of craft, Niklas Bommersbach designed his own setup to detect critical flight behavior and then activate a two-stage parachute.
The idea is something familiar to everyone: if the aerial vehicle experiences uncontrolled descent, the parachute deploys and returns it gently to the ground for recovery. But achieving that is more difficult than you might think. Bommersbach had to engineer a robust deployment mechanism, as well as a system to trigger the deployment. He chose to load the primary parachute with a spring mechanism, plus a drogue chute as a backup. That drogue chute would also slow descent if the primary parachute fails to deploy altogether.
An Arduino Nano Every board monitors altitude using a barometric pressure sensor. It can either deploy the parachute at a set altitude when it senses rapid descent indicative of an uncontrolled fall, or it can respond to a manual command sent via radio. The chutes reside within 3D-printed containers opened servo motors. Power comes from a small lithium battery independent of the craft’s battery, so the system is self-contained. The Arduino first deploys the drogue chute, which slows descent and tries to pull out the main chute. If that fails, the Arduino can actively deploy the main chute.
People living in small towns and rural areas may not realize it, but pickpocketing is a genuine issue in big cities. Real-life pickpockets aren’t magic like those in movies, but they can pull an item like a wallet from your pocket without you noticing — it is surprisingly easy to do. The only reliable way to prevent that is to make sure nothing valuable is easily accessible. But Engineering Dads didn’t want to protect their belongings, they wanted to catch pickpockets red-handed.
If a pickpocket does their job well, you won’t notice your missing wallet until later when you go to pay for something. So this device needed to trigger the moment it leaves a pocket and to let everyone in the vicinity know about it. To achieve that, it needed a sensor to detect the theft (but not normal movement) and it needed a way to alert the owner — and, ideally, everyone else in the area.
In this case, the sensor is a photoresistor. An Arduino Nano monitors that photoresistor and expects to see darkness most of the time, because the gadget should be in a pocket. If it registers significant light, that indicates that the unit is no longer in a pocket and has therefore been stolen. When that occurs, it starts blaring the famous “Attenzione Pickpocket!” viral video audio through a speaker module. Engineering Dads doesn’t say what kind of module that is, but there are a number of suitable options. The hardware fits inside a 3D-printed enclosure that is close enough to the size of a wallet to fool some thieves.
Most people leave their phones on their chargers overnight, but sometimes you end up at 5% halfway through the day and need to top off your battery. Fast charging is very convenient in such circumstances, but it may be damaging your smartphone’s battery and reducing its capacity over time. To find out if that does happen, GreatScott! used Arduino to test fast charging on several smartphone batteries.
Lithium batteries aren’t susceptible to the same degradation issues that were common for NiCad batteries, but that doesn’t mean they are impervious to damage. GreatScott! suspected that fast charging stresses Li-Ion batteries and diminishes their capacity. To test that idea, he needed to put batteries through many charge and discharge cycles. For this experiment, he had a control group charging with the typical 1A of current and another group fast charging at 5A. Both groups discharged at a constant 1A and went through 100 cycles.
Charging and discharging six batteries 100 times each is a time-consuming task, so GreatScott! designed custom devices for the job. Each is a custom PCB populated with an Arduino Nano board, an OLED screen, lithium charging circuitry, and the discharge circuit. That discharge circuit utilizes an op-amp to convert a constant 1A into waste heat. The OLED shows the battery voltage at any given time and the number of charge cycles.
These test devices let GreatScott! gather valuable data. The batteries charged at 1A didn’t suffer any substantial capacity loss, but the batteries charged at 5A lost an average of 1.6% of their capacity. That was after only 100 cycles, so the loss would get much worse over the course of years. GreatScott! concluded that it is best to avoid fast charging and to only use it when necessary.
The central gimmick of the new Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom game is the construction system, which is a lot of fun. You can fuse simple objects to build structures, but you can also add Zonai Devices to increase their functionality. One of those devices is the Stabilizer, which forces any attached vehicle or structure to stand upright. It seems like magic, but James Bruton set out to create a Stabilizer in real life.
There are many robots and vehicles available today that are capable of balancing themselves, with the Segway being the most famous example. These all rely on mass and inertia to stay upright, but most do that through either moving the base (like a Segway) or with a reaction wheel. Bruton went a slightly different direction for this project and chose to use gyros. When spinning, a gyro resists any motion that pushes it off its axis. By using two gyros, Bruton figured that he could keep the stabilizer upright.
Bruton built those gyros with automotive disc brakes for the mass wheels. Those rotate in frames constructed using aluminum extrusion and 3D-printed parts. An Arduino Mega 2560 controls the motors, including the brushless DC motors that spin the gyros and the geared DC motors that rotate the gyros to counteract tipping.
This doesn’t work quite as well as it does in the game — there are limits to what anyone can achieve with physics. But it is still cool to see in action!
While many users get them confused, microcontroller development boards and single-board computers are very different things. Single-board computers can run full operating systems, like your desktop PC or laptop does. Microcontroller development boards, like those from Arduino, are usually limited to simpler firmware. But as microcontrollers become more powerful, the line gets blurrier. To prove that, Naveen Kumar built an ultra-low-powered portable Linux computer based on the new Arduino Nano ESP32 development board.
By modern PC standards, the ESP32-S3 microcontroller in the Nano ESP32 board lacks both processing power and memory. But just a couple of decades ago, the 240MHz clock speed and 512kB of SRAM would have been considered respectable for a lightweight operating system. Clearly, that is still enough to run an operating system today. But there are other challenges that Kumar had to overcome to make that work.
On the hardware side, Kumar used a Nano ESP32 along with an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi, a CardKB mini keyboard, and a 2.8″ Adafruit TFT touchscreen. The Nano ESP32 acts as a headless computer, while the UNO R4 WiFi, keyboard, and touchscreen act as a terminal to access that computer’s command line. Most Linux distros wouldn’t run on an ESP32 microcontroller, because they expect a different architecture and instruction set. But Max Filippov already ported Linux to work with the Xtensa instruction set used by the ESP32.
Kumar explains how to compile the kernel for that port and flash it to the Nano ESP32, as well as the UNO R4 WiFi sketch. Hardware setup is quick and easy. You won’t be able to use this to run the latest triple-A games, but you will be able to work with a real Linux OS through the terminal.
Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors are popular pieces of ghost hunting equipment. The idea is that paranormal apparitions emit a noticeable EMF that proves their existence. But in reality, those EMFs come from electric and electronic devices. And an EMF from you microwave may, for example, interfere with your Wi-Fi network and cause performance problems. So you may want an EMF detector to diagnose such issues and Mirko Pavleski designed a DIY unit you can build.
This DIY EMF detector is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation and will indicate the strength of any detected fields. A display shows the relative strength of the detected radiation and a buzzer sounds at different frequencies that correspond to the strength, kind of like a Geiger counter. There is almost always some ambient EM radiation around us at all times, so this device adjusts itself at startup to set that as the baseline. Only EM radiation stronger than that baseline will trigger the device.
To keep the build as simple as possible, Pavleski chose an Arduino Nano board. The antenna, which is just a small piece of copper pipe, connects directly to an analog input pin. Other than that, the only components are a buzzer, an OLED screen, and a 9V battery wired through a power switch. Any EM radiation will induce a tiny current in the antenna, which the Arduino’s analog pin can detect. The stronger the EMF, the greater the voltage on that pin.
Most EM radiation is very weak and this isn’t the most sensitive device, but it should still be enough to, for instance, detect a live wire in a wall.
The traditional method for changing a diaper starts when someone smells or feels the that the diaper has been soiled, and while it isn’t the greatest process, removing the soiled diaper as soon as possible is important for avoiding rashes and infections. Justin Lutz has created an intelligent solution to this situation by designing a small device that alerts people over Bluetooth® when the diaper is ready to be changed.
Because a dirty diaper gives off volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and small particulates, Lutz realized he could use the Arduino Nicla Sense ME’s built-in BME688 sensor which can measure VOCs, temperature/humidity, and air quality. After gathering 29 minutes of gas and air quality measurements in the Edge impulse Studio for both clean and soiled diapers, he trained a classification model for 300 epochs, resulting in a model with 95% accuracy.
Based on his prior experience with the Nicla Sense ME’s BLE capabilities and MIT App Inventor, Lutz used the two to devise a small gadget that wirelessly connects to a phone app so it can send notifications when it’s time for a new diaper.
Modern integrated circuit (IC) chips can have transistors as small as two nanometers, which is only about 10 silicon atoms laid end-to-end. At that scale, fabrication looks more like chemistry than any kind of physical manipulation — a machinist isn’t carving tiny transistors into silicon wafers. For many types semiconductors, the fabrication process requires a very powerful furnace. If you’re interested in creating your own ICs, then YouTuber ProjectsInFlight has a video explaining how to build your own furnace.
This is a design for a tube furnace that can reach 1200°C, similar to the kind that labs buy for many thousands of dollars. Producing that much heat in a controllable manner is not a trivial task and this is much more complicated than constructing a furnace for something like aluminum casting. The heating element is a coil of nichrome wire, which wraps around a quartz glass tube that can withstand the heat. A ridiculous amount of insulation surrounds the tube and wire to contain the heat.
Nichrome wire heats up through resistance when a current passes through, so you could just connect it to a power source. But that wouldn’t be controllable, so ProjectsInFlight created a control board based on an Arduino UNO Rev3 board. Like a 3D printer controller handling hot end temperature through proportional–integral–derivative (PID), this uses a closed-feedback PID loop to modulate power to the nichrome wire in response to readings from a thermocouple. The control interface has a dial for setting the target temperature and a 16×2 character LCD to show the current temperature detected by the thermocouple. The Arduino uses a solid-state relay (SSR) to modulate the power going through the nichrome wire.
A simple sheet metal enclosure houses the tube and, in a separate area, the control electronics. The furnace seems to be capable of safely reaching the desired temperature, so ProjectsInFlight can now use it for semiconductor experiments.
While a solar panel installed on the top of a roof, lamp post, or the side of a building will produce power, it is nowhere near optimal for achieving the maximum efficiency possible. To get better results, panels are often mounted to pivots and linear actuators/servo motors that continually move to always face the sun. But as Fulvio points out, these motors can be heavy and require extra batteries to function, which is what inspired him to create the mysoltrk to address this shortcoming. Fulvio built his “reinvented” tracker to be small, solid, and sturdy enough to survive outdoors on a balcony or any other space-constrained area like a garden.
Mysoltrk relies on a pair of very simple yet robust actuators that are each based around a 6V 30RPM geared DC motor, which spins a threaded rod to move an M3 nut closer or further away. When placed in the same plane and connected via a ball joint at the top, this triangle of is able to maneuver the panel in three axes.
Both motors were then wired to an L298N motor driver which is controlled by an Arduino Nano. Having to incorporate Wi-Fi or a GPS receiver would have introduced far too much complexity, so these components were replaced by a matrix of four photoresistors and a tracking algorithm that, in essence, attempts to balance the readings across all of them in order to point directly at the sun. Perhaps the most incredible part of this project is how no batteries are required thanks to the low-power motors.
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.
Born and based in Barcelona, Spain, Monica Rikic is an award-winning artist who has chosen coding and creative electronics as her expressive media. Currently a PhD student at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya’s Network and Information Technologies program, she first encountered Arduino at school and quickly realized the platform would open up infinite opportunities for interactive works capable able of perceiving inputs from the physical context and generating different actions in response.
“Being a maker means not simply consuming technology, but taking on an active role in the dynamic where, every day, we are in contact with devices and applications that have become our gateways to relate to the world around us, to other people, and to ourselves as well,” she says.
Over the years, her philosophical and artistic approach have translated into projects such as Hipertèlia, of which she has recently set up a 2023 iteration at the Sala Apolo club in Barcelona thanks to a brand new Arduino UNO R4 WiFi: 20 “balloons” with LEDs inside, interacting with visitors thanks to a camera that tracks their position and communicates it to the system via Wi-Fi. The installation will be on-site until early November — if you are in Barcelona, check it out!
Rikic has also already developed a new project leveraging the UNO R4 Minima variant: “It’s a weird machine that generates infinite classical music, in collaboration with Rodo. Visitors at the Palau de la Musica can modify the output as they get closer to the installation, speak or even sing to it.”
What’s next? She is working on Hipèrbole, a new conceptual project for her EMAP European Residency with Hexagram at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, exploring the intersection between art and AI from an original standpoint — not to test machines’ creative possibilities, but to experiment with the characteristics that artificial cognitive systems must have to be considered sentient organisms.
We asked Rikic, “What’s your favorite part of UNO R4?”
The 24V tolerance: “Being able to connect to a single power source, even when controlling multiple motors, makes my work a lot simpler.”
The built-in mechanism that detects and prevents runtime errors: avoiding short circuits that could potentially harm the board and ruin a whole project is great, especially to keep students motivated.
The Qwiic I2C connector: because it allows you to connect different sensors and actuators without soldering.
The LED matrix: having a form of direct output helps you immediately see what you can create with electronics.
To find out more about Rikic’s artistic research and keep an eye out for the new installations she is setting up around the world, bookmark her website or follow her on Instagram.
With its bright color scheme and generally upbeat tone, the recently released Barbie movie evokes many of the same feelings as the toy brand. In keeping with this idea, Jaimie and Jay of the Wicked Makers YouTube channel decided to take it in the opposite direction by transforming a Barbie dollhouse into a haunted mansion for Halloween — complete with all of the requisite eerie effects and lighting.
The duo started by disassembling the interior and repainting the structural components, outside walls, and several other movable objects such as the door and various props. Once this had been completed, the next step involved finding LED filament, many small, discrete LEDs, and a miniature fog machine for creating an additional spookiness factor. The individual LEDs were placed into SLA printed skull lighting fixtures, custom-made clay candles, and inside of the previously pink chandelier where they could then be controlled by an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi.
Beyond these effects, a strand of LED filament was laid into the upper floor to produce a glowing ring for summoning spirits. While a pair of iPads and a phone were placed behind acrylic windows on the second floor and on the ceiling in order to play high quality videos of ghosts and a portal opening up above the summoning ring.
To see more about how Jaimie and Jay’s Barbie dreamhouse conversion using an UNO R4, watch their video below!
Most makers start their initial electronics prototypes on a breadboard, which is great for quickly setting up temporary circuits. But forming the connections requires jumper wires and even a basic project quickly becomes a rats’ nest of wiring that is difficult to manage. Tracking down issues within that tangle of wires is a massive headache, which is why Architeuthis Flux designed this jumperless breadboard to make prototyping a breeze.
In some ways, the aptly named Jumperless is similar to an FPGA. That’s because it allows for real hardware connections that the user can reconfigure with the push of a button. But Jumperless trades the power and flexibility of an FPGA for ease of use. Instead of the thousands of logic blocks you get in an FPGA, Jumperless gives you just enough to mimic a traditional breadboard. The benefit is in the user-friendly setup. Using a simple netlist file, users can specify which rows on the breadboard should connect to each other and which should connect to the pins of an Arduino Nano board.
This works using a whole bunch of analog crosspoint switches set by an RP2040 microcontroller based on the netlist file. The PCB contains a plethora of RGB LEDs to indicate which connections are active, as well as information about those connections. To use Jumperless, you simply plug in your components and then enter the connecting rows or Arduino pins via a Wokwi CLI (Command Line Interface) that creates the netlist file for you.
Great news for Arduino enthusiasts! The new Nano ESP32, just released on July 17th, is now officially supported by the Arduino Cloud. This powerful combo brings MicroPython and IoT capabilities right to your fingertips, simplifying all your smart devices projects.
The Nano ESP32‘s native MicroPython support empowers you to code in Python effortlessly. It opens up a world of possibilities for all skill levels, from simple scripts to complex IoT applications.
Nano ESP32 and Arduino Cloud, the power couple of IoT
Pairing the Nano ESP32 with the Arduino Cloud enhances your projects even further! The Arduino Cloud expands its existing ESP32-based hardware compatibility by including the Nano ESP32, allowing you to publish data from your Nano ESP32, monitor and control your devices from anywhere with ease, and update their firmware wirelessly.
About Arduino Cloud
The Arduino Cloud is the next exciting journey for IoT enthusiasts to bring their projects to life quickly. It is an all-in-one intuitive IoT platform, supporting a wide range of hardware and backed by the vibrant Arduino community. The Arduino Cloud removes complexity to enable users from all levels of expertise to create from anywhere, then control and share their projects with stunning dashboards.
Sign up for the Arduino Cloud now and unleash the full potential of your Nano ESP32 board.
At Arduino, we embrace security as an integral part of the development lifecycle in order to provide secure hardware, software, and digital services to our customers. That’s why we are happy to announce that Arduino Cloud services are now certified for ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (ISO 27001).
ISO 27001 is an internationally recognized standard that provides a framework for establishing, implementing, maintaining, and continually improving an Information Security Management System (ISMS). The standard sets out the requirements for managing information security risks and protecting sensitive information within an organization. ISO 27001 takes a systematic and risk-based approach to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information assets.
In the words of our CIO Stefano Visconti: “This certification and the review from an external auditor are helping us to ensure that our internal security processes are robust and complete, fully aligned with the ISO27001 standard, so that we can offer secure and reliable services in Arduino Cloud.”
“We are all experiencing the crucial importance of information security, and we can only be pleased to give the ISO 27001 certification to Arduino Cloud,” says Massimo Alvaro, Italy Managing Director for Business Assurance at DNV. “Our audits confirmed that Arduino Cloud is proactively managing and protecting their information assets and to managing and mitigating security events.”
Our compliance with ISO 27001 demonstrates that Arduino is committed to the best possible security posture for Arduino Cloud services, thus ensuring the best possible protection from cybersecurity risks for Arduino Cloud users.
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