Hard data is hard to find, but roughly 100 million books were published prior to the 21st century. Of those, a significant portion were never available in a digital format and haven’t yet been digitized, which means their content is effectively inaccessible to most people today. To bring that content into the digital world, Redditor bradmattson built this machine that automatically scans books from cover to cover.
There are, of course, already machines on the market for scanning books. But the inexpensive models require manual page-turning and the more feature-packed models are very expensive. Bradmattson’s book scanner is fully automatic and can scan a whole stack of books without the assistance of a human operator. And the machine is relatively affordable to build, which makes it easier to justify the digitization of books that might otherwise be overlooked.
Oh, and it is portable. The whole thing folds up into a briefcase, so the operator can take it from location to location, digitizing books along the way.
As you’d expect, this machine is fairly complex. But the basic gist is that a stack of books rests on one side and gravity drops each one down onto a feed mechanism, which carries the book to the scanning area. There, a suction gripper lifts the cover. Next, a plexiglass press holds down the pages while a camera snaps a photo. To flip to the next page, a PC fan creates negative pressure to gently grip the paper and then the whole process repeats. When the whole book has been scanned, it slides over to the output area and the next book enters the scanning area.
A computer running Python oversees the process and catalogs the images. It controls the various motors through an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board paired with a CNC shield, as well as additional relays and a servo driver board.
Managing shared spaces, especially meeting rooms, can be a headache in busy offices. At Arduino, we’ve experienced it firsthand in our flexible and dynamic offices around the world – where colleagues could often be seen wandering around with their laptops, trying to find a quiet place for videocalls or brainstorming sessions.
We started with a simple shared Google Calendar, but as we often do, we took it a step further by creating an innovative solution – using Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi and GIGA Display Shield.
Open the door to better room booking
Our engineers developed a physical device that can be conveniently installed next to every meeting room door, using the Arduino GIGA and GIGA Display Shield. The device connects seamlessly with Google Calendar APIs, allowing users to check room availability and book a space directly from the touchscreen. The APIs are managed by a custom Python® application that processes Google Calendar data and updates the corresponding IoT Thing in Arduino Cloud.
No more knocking on doors or interrupting meetings to check if the room is free! It’s all displayed in real-time, and booking is just a tap away. And, of course, everything is built with data privacy in mind.
To power the user-friendly interface we used LVGL, the “light and versatile visual library” perfect for building custom GUIs. We also leveraged Squareline Studio – because sometimes coding just feels like too much work – to easily design the display’s look and feel.
But why stop at meeting room booking? With this phygital system, you can integrate sensors to collect additional data like room temperature, humidity and lighting, automating systems to improve comfort and energy efficiency.
Get started today
Built on two of Arduino’s most advanced products, the Arduino GIGA and GIGA Display Shield, this solution opens endless possibilities for automation and customization in your office.
Inventor Charly Bosch and his daughter Leonie have crafted something truly remarkable: a fully electric, Arduino-powered car that’s as innovative as it is sustainable. Called the Batteryrunner, this vehicle is designed with a focus on environmental impact, simplicity, and custom craftsmanship. Get ready to be inspired by a car that embodies the spirit of creativity!
When the Arduino team saw the Batteryrunner up close at our offices in Turin, Italy, we were genuinely impressed – especially knowing that Charly and Leonie had driven over 1,000 kilometers in this unique car! Their journey began on a small island in Spain, took them across southern France, and brought them to Italy before continuing on to Austria.
Building a car with heart – and aluminum
In 2014, Charly took over LORYC – a Mallorca carmaker that became famous in the 1920s for its winning mountain racing team. His idea was to ??build a two-seater as a tribute to the LORYC sports legacy, but with a contemporary electric drive: that’s how the first LORYC Electric Speedster was born. “We’re possibly the smallest car factory in the world, but have a huge vision: to prove electric cars can be cool… and crazy,” Charly says.
With a passion for EVs rooted in deep environmental awareness, he decided to push the boundaries of car manufacturing with the Batteryrunner: a car where each component can be replaced and maintained, virtually forever.
Indeed, it’s impossible not to notice that the vehicle is made entirely from aluminum: specifically, 5083 aluminum alloy. This material is extremely durable and can be easily recycled, unlike plastics or carbon fiber which end up as waste at the end of their lifecycle.
The car’s bodywork includes thousands of laser-cut aluminum pieces. “This isn’t just a prototype: it’s a real car – one that we’ve already been able to drive across Europe,” Charly says.
The magic of learning to do-it-yourself
“People sometimes ask me why I use Arduino, as if it was only for kids. Simple: Arduino never failed me,” is Charly’s quick reply. After over a decade of experience with a variety of maker projects, it was an easy choice for the core of Batteryrunner’s system.
In addition to reliability, Charly appreciates the built-in ease-of-use and peer support: “The Arduino community helps me with something new every week. If you are building a whole car on your own, you can’t be an expert in every single aspect of it. So, anytime I google something, I start by typing ‘Arduino’, and follow with what I need to know. That’s how I get content that I can understand.”
This has allowed Charly and Leonie to handle every part of the car’s design, coding, and assembly, creating a fully integrated system without needing to rely on external suppliers.
Using Arduino for unstoppable innovation
A true labor of love, after four years since its inception the Batteryrunner is a working (and talking!) car, brought to life by 10+ Arduino boards, each with specific functions.
For instance:
• An Arduino Nano is used to manage the speedometer (a.k.a. the “SpeedCube”), in combination with a CAN bus module, stepper motor module, and stepper motor.
• Different Arduino Mega 2560, connected via CAN bus modules, control the dashboard, steering wheel, lights and blinkers, allowing users to monitor and manage various functions.
• Arduino UNO R4 boards with CAN bus transceivers are used to handle different crucial tasks – from managing the 400-V battery system and Tesla drive unit to operating the linear windshield wiper and the robotic voice system.
Charly already plans on upgrading some of the current solutions with additional UNO R4 boards, and combining the GIGA R1 WiFi and GIGA Display Shield for a faster and Wi-Fi®-connected “InfoCube” dashboard.
All in all, the Batteryrunner is more than a car: it’s a rolling platform for continuous innovation, which Charly is eager to constantly improve and refine. His next steps? Integrating smartphone control via Android, adding sensors for self-parking, and experimenting with additional features that Arduino makes easy to implement. “This is a car that evolves,” Charly explains. “I can add or change features as I go, and Arduino makes it possible.”
Driving environmental awareness
Finally, we see Batteryrunner as more than a fun, showstopping car. Given Charly’s commitment to low-impact choices, it’s a way to shift people’s mindset about sustainable mobility. The environmental challenges we face today require manufacturers to go well beyond simply replacing traditional engines with electric ones: vehicles need to be completely redesigned, according to sustainability and simplicity principles. To achieve this, we need people who are passionate about the environment, technology, and creativity. That’s why we fully agree with Charly, when he says, “I love makers! We need them to change the world.”
Follow LORYC on Facebook or Instagram to see Charly and Leonie’s progress, upgrades, and experiments, and stay inspired by this incredible, Arduino-powered journey.
Every decade or two, humanity seems to develop a renewed interest in humanoid robots and their potential within our world. Because the practical applications are actually pretty limited (given the high cost), we inevitably begin to consider how those robots might function as entertainment. But Jon Hamilton did more than just wonder, he actually built a robotic performer called Syntaxx and it will definitely make you feel things.
It is hard to describe this robot without sounding like a Mad Libs game filled out by a cyberpunk-obsessed DJ. Hamilton designed it to give performances, primarily in the form of synthetic singing accompanied by electronic music. It looks like a crude Halloween mask given life by a misguided wizard sometime in the 1980s. It is pretty bonkers and you should probably watch the video of it in action to wrap your head around the concept.
Hamilton needed three different Arduino development boards to bring this robot to life. The first, an Arduino Giga R1 WiFi, oversees the robot’s operation and handles voice interaction, as well as audio playback. The second, an Arduino Mega 2560, moves the robot’s neck according to input from two microphones (one on the left, the other on the right). The third, an Arduino Uno R4 WiFi, controls the rest of the servo movement.
The result is a robot that is both impressive and also pretty disconcerting.
The EV (electric vehicle) versus ICE (internal combustion engine) debate is more complicated that it may seem, but one fact is quite simple: it is much easier to generate electricity at home than it is to refine fossil fuels. This means that it is possible power a vehicle for free after the initial investment. But doing so takes quite a lot of hardware, which is why Shawn Murphy developed this charging system controlled by an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi.
Murphy owns a Ford Lightning electric pickup truck, which is inefficient by EV standards thanks to its weight. But even at just two miles per kWh of electricity, he estimates that he can break even on the cost of his solar charging system within four to five years. After that, the electricity to power the Ford will, essentially, be free. Any excess energy can power his home or feed back into the grid.
Just powering the truck alone will require a lot of electricity, so Murphy acquired 10 used 360-watt solar panels. Those feed to a battery backup array, which supplies power to the Ford charging station.
To maximize efficiency, Murphy wants the solar panels to pivot on one axis to follow the sun. He estimates that will increase their output by 20-25% throughout the day, which is a significant amount of energy with a solar panel array this large. An Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board controls the tilt of the panels via linear actuators. Murphy originally used “dumb” actuators, but is switching to “smart” models from Progressive Automations that include positional feedback through Hall effect sensors.
A GIGA Display Shield gives Murphy access to an interface, which he can also access through the Arduino Cloud. In addition to controlling the linear actuators, the Arduino monitors power generation and consumption.
This is still a work in progress as Murphy continues to make improvements, but he’s well on his way to “free” energy for his truck.
While many of the things we interact with every day have become more usable by people with disabilities, the kitchen remains as one important area of our lives that still lacks many accessibility features. One of these commonplace appliances is the coffee maker and its array of small buttons or even a touchscreen that can be hard to see/touch. Orlie on Instructables has developed a set of wireless buttons and an accompanying receiver that translate simple actions into an easy, end-to-end brewing experience.
Each button started as a custom 3D-printed shell with compartments for a AA battery holder, large arcade button, and the perfboard that also contained the ESP8266 microcontroller. In this system, the ESP8266 communicates with the Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board via Wi-Fi and an MQTT message broker running on a host PC. This enables each button to be assigned a unique message that dictates the desired task to be performed.
At the coffee maker, the GIGA R1 WiFi was wired into a pair of ULN2003 stepper motor driver modules that move a gantry across a set of linear rails and eventually push the corresponding buttons once the correct position has been reached. Ultimately, this allows for those with less mobility and/or dexterity to select what they want from anywhere in the house — all over Wi-Fi.
Watching back a slideshow of some of your favorite times of the past years is a great way to reflect on what’s happened and get excited for the future. The Electronic Cats crew wanted to incorporate this concept into a more simplified, interactive form which resulted in the Garrita project.
Garrita is a homemade platform that lets an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi with GIGA Display Shield transform into a highly mobile slideshow thanks to its larger onboard memory capacity and convenient layout. This year, the Electronic Cats were able to take their image shifter concept even further with Michi: an existing project that turns any conductive object into a capacitive touch-sensing controller. Whenever one of Michi’s inputs are toggled, the board sends a signal to the GIGA R1 WiFi that causes the current slide to advance to the next one.
In order to go from a locally stored image to something on the Display Shield, users first transform their images into a more suitable format via the LVGL conversion tool. Once downloaded, the resulting files can be easily bundled into a Sketch before they become accessible in the application code. To see more about how the Electronic Cats built Garrita, you can read their write-up here on Hackster.io.
You’ve seen movies and TV shows with Geigers counters: handheld devices that click when they detect radiation — the faster the clicks, the stronger the radiation. Those clicks are actually the result of inert gas briefly made conductive by bursts of energy released by ionizing radiation particles entering the sealed Geiger–Müller tube. YouTuber The Edison Union had the clever idea to use those clicks as triggers for generative music and turned to Arduino to make it happen.
This is part of a larger project called The Cherenkov Effect, which seeks to explore Cold War-era anxieties related to nuclear power and nuclear weapons. The Cherenkov Effect does that through a combination of performance art and generative music. And what better way to generate that music than with radiation?
In this case, that radiation comes from Strontium-90 and Polonium-210. While those are less dangerous to handle than many other radioactive materials, they still aren’t safe and you shouldn’t replicate this project if you don’t know the proper procedures.
The Edison Union uses Ableton Live to produce the music for The Cherenkov Effect, but needed “seeds” for the generative processes that turn into audible notes. Those seeds come from five Geiger counter modules that connect to an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board through a Seeed Studio Grove Shield. The Arduino sketch counts radioactive pulses, then passes that data on to a Processing sketch that performs the generative music functions. The latter is where The Edison Union is able to get creative regarding the sound produced. Finally, Processing sends notes to Ableton Live to synthesize.
Now when The Edison Union moves Strontium-90 or Polonium-210 around the array of Geiger counters, the device will generate and play music based on the radiation it receives.
One of the main difficulties that people encounter when trying to build their edge ML models is gathering a large, yet simultaneously diverse, dataset. Audio models normally require setting up a microphone, capturing long sequences of sounds, and then manually removing bad data from the resulting files. Shakhizat Nurgaliyev’s project, however, eliminates the need for the arduous process by taking advantage of generative models to produce the dataset artificially.
In order to go from three audio classes: speech, music, and background noise to a complete dataset, Nurgaliyev wrote a simple prompt for ChatGPT that gave directions for creating a total of 300 detailed audio descriptions. After this, he grabbed an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit and loaded Meta’s generative AudioCraft model which allowed him to pass in the previously made audio prompts and receive sound snippets in return.
The final steps involved creating an Edge Impulse audio classification project, uploading the generated samples, and designing an Impulse that leveraged the MFE audio block and a Keras classifier model. Once an Arduino library had been built, Nurgaliyev loaded it, along with a simple sketch, onto an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi board that continually listened for new audio data, performed classification, and displayed the label on the GIGA R1’s Display Shield screen.
ChatGPT is certainly the best-known large language model (LLM) available today and it has a lot to offer. But you can’t run it locally and instead you must use OpenAI’s online service to access its functionality. That doesn’t, however, mean that you’re out of luck if you want to use ChatGPT on your own DIY devices. As Shakhizat Nurgaliyev shows, you can build your own ChatGPT client powered by Arduino.
Because ChatGPT isn’t available offline, the ArduinoGPT project takes advantage of OpenAI’s API. That lets you access ChatGPT through your sketches if your development board has a network adapter. In this case, Nurgaliyev used an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi. That can reach the OpenAI API through a wireless network in order to send prompts to ChatGPT and receive responses.
The Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi is also ideal because it possesses a very unique feature: a USB-A port and the ability to act as a USB host. That lets the user connect a standard USB keyboard and type prompts without any other hardware.
Nurgaliyev paired that board with a new Arduino GIGA Display Shield, which provides 3.97″ of LCD touchscreen at a resolution of 480×800. That includes additional hardware, like a microphone and inertial measurement unit (IMU), but they aren’t necessary for this project.
The ArduinoGPT sketch connects to the user’s Wi-Fi network, then lets the user type in a prompt. It sends that prompt to ChatGPT through the OpenAI API and waits for a response. The user can choose to receive the entire response as a single block of text, or as a stream of several blocks sent as ChatGPT generates them.
In a previous video about controlling household appliances and lighting fixtures from the Arduino Cloud, Sachin Soni of the techiesms YouTube channel designed a custom PCB that allows an Arduino Nano ESP32 to toggle a series of relays. But since then, he realized that his project needed a faster and more permanent method of getting to the controls, which led him to build a complete home automation dashboard using solely Arduino hardware.
Soni opted for the new Arduino GIGA Display Shield since it contains a 3.97” RGB touchscreen with support for up to five simultaneous touch points and an array of sensors if the functionality were to ever be expanded. On the back, an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi was attached to act as the display’s controller and leverage its Wi-Fi capabilities to communicate with the system’s Arduino Cloud variables.
The final step in this project involved creating a software-defined graphical user interface (GUI) complete with toggleable buttons for the lights, dials to indicate temperature/humidity levels, and a way to select the fan’s speed from an array of values. Soni was able to finish most of the groundwork by utilizing the LVGL library and its highly customizable GUI components.
After laying out the buttons and dials, synchronizing Cloud variables, and connecting their event handlers to value updates, Soni had a functional tablet that could wirelessly manage his appliances from anywhere.
Now, we are happy to announce you can step up your game even further, with the introduction of theArduino GIGA Display Shield — an innovative touchscreen solution enabling all makers to effortlessly deploy fast and highly responsive graphic interfaces to their GIGA R1 WiFi projects.
Featuring a 3.97” 480×800 RGB touchscreen, an MP34DT06JTR digital microphone, a Bosch BMI270 six-axis IMU, an Arducam® 20-pin camera connector, and an RGB LED, the GIGA Display Shield is perfect for easily creating handheld devices or dashboards you can control with a touch.
It basically adds intuitive interfaces, high-level user experiences, and cutting-edge technology to your strengths in this game we call making.
With the GIGA Display Shield, you can quickly add a cool UI to your hardware projects without extra wiring, have graphics adjust automatically according to device orientation or audio commands, or leverage computer vision as your solution’s input. If that’s not enough, GIGA R1 WiFi’s new set of top-facing connectors leave the top header available for expansion, attaching other shields to boost your possibilities even more.
Ready, player one? Find out more about how the GIGA Display Shield can give you a boost. We think you’ll have a lot of fun with this…
For those aged 65 and over, falls can be one of the most serious health concerns they face either due to lower mobility or decreasing overall coordination. Recognizing this issue, Naveen Kumar set out to produce a wearable fall-detecting device that aims to increase the speed at which this occurs by utilizing a Transformer-based model rather than a more traditional recurrent neural network (RNN) model.
Because this project needed to be both fast and consume only small amounts of current, Kumar went with the new Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi due to its STM32H74XI dual-core Arm CPU, onboard WiFi/Bluetooth®, and ability to interface with a wide variety of sensors. After connecting an ADXL345 three-axis accelerometer, he realized that collecting many hours of samples by hand would be far too time consuming, so instead, he downloaded the SisFall dataset, ran a Python script to parse the sample data into an Edge Impulse-compatible format, and then uploaded the resulting JSON files into a new project. Once completed, he used the API to split each sample into four-second segments and then used the Keras block edit feature to build a reduced-sized Transformer model.
The result after training was a 202KB large model that could accurately determine if a fall occurred 96% of the time. Deployment was then as simple as using the Arduino library feature within a sketch to run an inference and display the result via an LED, though future iterations could leverage the GIGA R1 WiFi’s connectivity to send out alert notifications if an accident is detected. More information can be found here in Kumar’s write-up.
A new board joins the Arduino family, and it’s the most powerful ever designed for makers, engineers and creators: today we’re announcing the GIGA R1 WiFi. Bridging you from great fun to amazing performance, it opens the door to infinite possibilities in robotics, IoT, music, computer vision, digital fabrication, and any kind of projects involving machines, interfaces, and real-time processing.
Excited yet? Because we sure are. Springboarding off the R&D efforts that power the Arduino Pro products like Portenta H7, we have developed a new product for ambitious makers, offering all the power of the STM32H7 microcontroller in the same form factor as the popular Mega and Due boards – and at an accessible price point. It’s the perfect tool for artists, gamers, sound designers, researchers and more, to step up their game, level the playing field, and add power to their play.
With GIGA R1 WiFi you can think bigger and be more creative than ever. It’s “two brains in one” thanks to the dual-core microcontroller (Cortex®-M7 core at 480 MHz and Cortex®-M4 at 240 MHz) which allows you to run two Arduino programs simultaneously – or, why not, an Arduino program and a MicroPython one. With this architecture, you can separate higher-level logic such as displays, interfaces, and networking from time-critical tasks such as motor control.
The board can be powered at 24V and takes the pins count to the stellar and rather unique number of 76 (of which 12 analog, 13 PWM, 4 serial ports, 3 I2C, 2 SPI, 1 FDCAN, 1 SAI). But get this: it all fits in the same footprint as the Mega, because the layout is optimized with extra pins in the middle, so you can boost existing projects or bring to life new ideas with more bang and no bulk.
And that’s not all. As the name suggests, your GIGA R1 WiFi provides Wi-Fi® and Bluetooth® Low Energy connectivity via a high-quality Murata 1DX module supporting external antenna. The board features an USB-C® connector for power, programming and HID device capability (i.e. simulate a mouse or keyboard when connected to a PC), but in addition it also carries a USB-A connector that provides USB host functionality which means you can plug a USB stick or another mass storage unit, as well as an external mouse or keyboard. An input-output 3.5-mm audio jack will enable lots of audio and music projects, while the camera and display pins will do the rest whenever you want to create interfaces, control panels or other creative interactions. This single-handedly makes building your own synth or visual installation not only possible, but easier. Which we love because we believe technology should enable everyone to think, make and innovate.
Last but not least, with the Arduino Cloud you can easily connect the board, create comprehensive dashboards and control your project from your smartphone using the native app.
Ready to find out more? Check out all the tech specs on its Arduino Store page!
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