A physical lock, like what secures your front door, has a finite and calculable number of combinations, just like a digital keypad does. There are a set number of pins in the lock and each can be one of a set number of lengths. Each of those numbers varies based on manufacturer and model, but that information is easy to find. As a result, it is possible to brute force such a lock by trying all of the combinations. But that’s time-consuming, so this robot built by Sparks and Code works smarter instead of harder.
In this case, “smarter” meant deducing the pin lengths instead of trying all of the combinations in sequence. The technique used by the robot to perform that deduction is what makes this project so interesting.
Each pin in the lock has a spring that pushes it down against the key’s edge. Typically, the springs for all of the pins are identical. But because the pins are of different lengths, the force required to push a pin to a specific height (above an imaginary reference line) varies. By measuring that force and comparing it against reference measurements for known pin lengths, the robot can guess the length of the pin and therefore the correct “combination” (the key bittings).
The robot has an Arduino Nano board that measures the spring force by pushing a wire into the lock with a servo motor. That servo motor mounts onto a load cell, which outputs a signal proportional to the force on the servo motor and therefore the wire and therefore the spring. The robot has such an assembly for each of the five lock pins.
This idea, while very clever, proved to be difficult to implement in the real world. Sparks and Code struggled to get accurate measurements and had to rely on collecting several measurements to average. Even that didn’t work well on many of the pins.
But the concept is still intriguing and we hope to see Sparks and Code continue with the development.
The whole point of a robot is that it can operate without direct control input from an operator. Except there are many exceptions and it isn’t uncommon for roboticists and operators to require direct control. The Tinkering Techie needed to add that capability to his rover robot and built his own Wi-Fi controller that also accepts voice commands.
Conventional remote control (RC) vehicles communicate through analog radio. But it is becoming increasingly common to use Wi-Fi instead, because it allows for a lot of data transmission and Wi-Fi is now usually available in most indoor locations (ad hoc is common, too). Makers can also take advantage of development boards that have built-in Wi-Fi connectivity. In this case, The Tinkering Techie turned to the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and a generic ESP8266 dev board acting as a Wi-Fi adapter for an Arduino Nano.
The UNO R4 WiFi is in the controller and is the server. The ESP8266 board is on the robot and connects to that server through a router to retrieve commands. Once it finds a command, such as “turn right 90 degrees,” it passes that along to the Nano that controls the robot’s motors and monitors its sensors.
The controller has a pair of joysticks so The Tinkering Techie can pilot the robot like an RC car. But it also has a DFRobot Gravity Offline Language Learning Voice Recognition Sensor. That has 121 pre-programmed voice commands and also supports 17 custom commands. Using those, The Tinkering Techie was able to make the robot respond to verbal instructions, like “turn right 90 degrees.”
It is a story as old as time (or at least the 1960s): kid gets an RC car for Christmas and excitedly takes it for spin, but crashes it into a wall within five minutes and tears ensue. The automotive industry has cut down on accidents by implementing automatic emergency braking safety features, so why can’t RC cars have something similar? They can and Narrow Studios proved it by creating their own DIY emergency braking system to protect their toy vehicle.
Christmas morning jokes aside, this is practical. Today’s RC cars can accelerate very quickly and reach surprisingly high top speeds, which means they’re easy to crash. These vehicles can easily cost several hundred dollars, so such crashes are a hit to both the ego and the wallet. The system made by Narrow Studios prevents those crashes and is relatively affordable to integrate.
The hardware necessary to add emergency braking to an RC car consists of two major components: an Arduino Nano board and ultrasonic sensors. A simple version of this system could be built with just one ultrasonic sensor, but Narrow Studios used four: two on the front bumper and one on each side.
The Arduino constantly monitors the ultrasonic sensors. Under normal circumstances, they won’t report seeing anything — or at least not anything close by. But if something like a wall is nearby, the Arduino will immediately go into action and send a braking command (via a PWM signal) to the RC receiver. That’s a Flysky FS-i6X in this case, but the process should work with most others.
It isn’t perfect and it isn’t very “smart,” but this system could genuinely prevent expensive crashes and that makes it worth considering if you have a nice RC car.
If you ask someone to think of a battery, they’re probably going to picture a chemical battery, like a AA alkaline or a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. But there are other kinds of batteries that store energy without any fancy chemistry at all. If you find a way to save energy for later, you have a useful battery. Erik, of the Concept Crafted Creations YouTube channel, achieved that by storing kinetic energy in a spinning flywheel weighted with water.
This isn’t a crazy idea, because flywheels exist specifically to store kinetic energy in a spinning mass. In this case, most of that mass comes from tubes full of water. Water is cheaper than something like cast iron and it is easy to adjust the levels to maintain perfect balance.
But this wet flywheel has another trick up its sleeve: adjustable moment of inertia. Watch an ice skater as they tuck into spin and you’ll understand this. By pulling their arms and legs close their axis of rotation, the skater can reduce their overall moment of inertia and increase their speed. Erik’s flywheel can do the same thing by actuating the cylinders of water to bring them in closer to the rotational axis.
To control that process, Erik used an Arduino Nano board housed in a simple laser-cut box with a potentiometer for adjusting speed, and buttons to control power and the arm actuation. A beefy brushless DC motor spins up the flywheel under power. Then, when it is time to collect that power (such as to power the lightbulb Erik used for demonstration), that motor acts as a dynamo, like in a generator.
As a battery for long-term power storage, this isn’t very practical. In a vacuum with perfect frictionless bearings, it would be. But in the real-world the flywheel will slow down on its own in short order. Even so, it is still a great illustration of the concept.
How can we ever really know anything? If you listen to the anti-science types, you might believe that we can’t. But if you get past Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, you can start identifying basic truths, through logic and experiments, on which to build upon. One important foundational building block is absolute zero. Most of us take scientists at their word about where that is relative to temperatures we can comprehend, but Marb built this machine to find it for himself through experimentation.
In the real world, nobody can physically bring anything down to absolute zero. It is a bit like Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox — you can’t reach zero, because there isn’t anything cooler than the thing you’re cooling, so you just keep getting closer. But it is possible to get really close and that’s why Marb did here.
The experiment works by expanding gas as much as is feasible, reducing the average energy in any given volume and resulting in cooling…on average. If you’ve ever used canned air to clean a dirty keyboard, you’ve experienced that effect yourself.
But Marb didn’t have a way to expand gas enough to get anywhere close to absolute zero. Instead, he needed a way to develop a mathematical function to estimate the value.
To achieve that, he used a glass syringe (meant for gasses), a hot air gun, a thermocouple with amplifier, and a time-of-flight sensor from Adafruit. An Arduino Nano board took measurements from those. It measured the temperature and the plunger position in pairs while Marb heated the syringe. Using those values, Marb was able to calculate the gas volume for each given temperature.
From there, estimating absolute zero was a matter of finding a function that fits the measured values and extrapolating it out to zero.
Woodwinds and brass are so 19th century. We’re living in the future and now it is synthesizers all the way down. There are many to choose from and the Bleep Labs Nebulophone is a neat example that was sold from 2012 to 2016, with the design files now available on GitHub for DIYers. Marcus Dunn liked how the Nebulophone sounds, but wanted it to be more practical. That’s why he developed this “Solar” upgrade that dramatically enhances the playability of the Nebulophone.
The primary interface of the Nebulophone is a stylus keyboard integrated directly into the PCB. That was a design choice that saved a lot of money and has a lot of character, similar to the iconic Stylophone, but a stylus is a bit unwieldy during performances that include several pieces of equipment.
Dunn’s Solar upgrade adds a tactile keyboard and repackages the entire thing so that it can fit in a Eurorack along with other modules. There is also a sync-in for using Solar with other synths.
The audio circuitry is based on the original Nebulophone, but Dunn completely redesigned the PCB to accommodate the new features. In fact, Solar has two PCBs: one for the circuitry and one that mostly acts as a cover plate. It looks great with the Cherry MX key switches and key caps.
The brain of the operation is an Arduino Nano board and it runs the Nebulophone sketch, available on Dunn’s GitHub page. As Dunn demonstrates in his video, Solar sounds really cool and would be a great addition to your Eurorack.
Today’s digital slot machines are anything but “fair,” in the way that most of us understand that word. There is tight regulation in most places, but the machines can still adjust their odds of payout in order to maintain a specific profit margin. If the machine thinks it has paid out too many wins recently, it will effectively prevent you from winning. That’s pretty infuriating when you think about it, so Hugo White built his own slot machine so he could control the odds.
This is a very basic slot machine with three wheels. Each has 12 symbols and there aren’t any complicated second screens, payline variations, or any of the other nonsense you’ll find in a modern casino. It is, however, a digital experience and the machine operates under the control of an Arduino Nano board. That means that White can set the odds programmatically. But for now, he plans to keep the odds natural (so each wheel has a 1:12 chance of landing on any particular symbol).
Three NEMA 17 stepper motors turn those wheels, under the control of the Arduino through a CNC shield with stepper driver modules. There is a small speaker and strips of WS2812B individually addressable RGB LEDs for added flair. The enclosure and all of the mechanical parts, aside from basic hardware and fasteners, were 3D-printed.
The highlight of this project is the coin-handling. It has custom mechanisms for accepting and dispensing coins. It will only take 50-cent coins (detected by a photo sensor) and, during a payout, it will push those coins out using a servo-actuated rack-and-pinion mechanism.
Unfortunately, White reports that there are still bugs in the code that he’s struggling to sort out. He’d like some assistance with that, so get in touch with him if you’re willing to lend a hand.
We call them “deck builders” for a reason: because players end up with huge piles of trading cards. They can get difficult to manage, which is why the ManaBox app exists for Magic: The Gathering. It lets collectors scan and log their decks, which is handy for everything from finding market values to optimizing deck builds. To speed up the scanning process, Fraens designed this 3D-printable rig.
The ManaBox app has a nice feature that lets users scan cards with their phone’s camera. The app recognizes the scanned card and then adds it to the library. But doing that manually, one card at a time, can be a labor-intensive process for large collections. This rig automates that by feeding cards from a deck to a scanning area. After the app logs a card, the machine moves on to the next card.
That happens under the control of an Arduino Nano board. It turns the feed motor through a basic L298N H-bridge driver. A light dependent resistor triggers when a card is in position, so the Arduino knows when to stop the motor.
But it is the motor starting process that is particularly clever. Fraens needed a way for the machine to determine when a scan finishes, so it can push the next card into place. The ManaBox app plays a sound after a successful scan and the Arduino listens for that through a microphone. When it hears the sound (or any sound — the room must be quiet), it knows to proceed.
However, Fraens ran into an issue with scanning certain reflective cards. Too much glare would ruin a scan, so Fraens added a diffused LED ring light with adjustable brightness and hue. After putting a new card in place, the machine waits to hear the notification sound of a successful scan. If too much time passes without that sound, the Arduino will begin adjusting the lighting parameters until the scan succeeds.
This is, of course, an awful lot of work if you only have a few dozen cards. But if you have hundreds or thousands in your collection, it could be worthwhile.
Sous vide (which means “under vacuum” in French) is a cooking technique in which food is sealed in a plastic bag (or another container) and immersed in warm water for a long period of time. It is great for meat, like steak, because it ensures the food is an even temperature throughout. For a steak, you would then quickly sear the outside for beefy perfection. If that intrigues you, Rob Cai has a guide that will walk you through the construction of a sous vide cooker.
You can, of course, purchase a sous vide cooker and they’re quite affordable these days. But building your own is a fun project and it gives you complete control over the cooker’s functionality.
Closed-loop feedback is critical for sous vide cooking. The cooker needs to keep the water at a precise temperature, which means it needs to monitor the temperature while heating.
In this case, an Arduino Nano oversees that process. An LCD screen and pair of potentiometers let the user set the temperature and cook time. All of those components go in a basic enclosure for protection. The Arduino then toggles AC power to an immersion heater via a relay and monitors the water with a DS18B20 temperature sensor.
This doesn’t require any kind of tricky PID control that would need tuning, because water is relatively slow to change temperature. Therefore, the provided Arduino sketch is easy to understand and modify to get the exact performance you want.
Cirrhosis of the liver is an extremely serious condition that requires extensive medical monitoring and often intervention. Progression of the condition can be fatal, so even if caught early it must be monitored closely. But, like most things in medicine, that gets expensive. That’s why Marb built his own DIY “micro lab” to analyze ammonia levels in blood and urine.
Disclaimer: Don’t rely on YouTube videos for your medical needs!
The severity of Marb’s condition correlates with increased ammonia production, which is common for cirrhosis of the liver. More ammonia in the blood and urine indicates progression of the disease and a need for immediate medical intervention. Marb’s micro lab lets him monitor his own ammonia levels at home.
The central detection mechanism of this micro lab relies on Berthelot’s reagent, which becomes a blue-green color in the presence of ammonia. To make use of that, the micro lab needs to properly expose the sample to Berthelot’s reagent and look at the resulting color change.
An Arduino Nano board controls the whole process through a custom PCB. That starts with heating the sample in a vial to release the ammonia vapor. The vapor travels via a tube through a gas diffuser into another vial containing Berthelot’s reagent. A magnetic stirrer beneath mixes the gas into the reagent. A 660nm (deep red) laser shines through that vial into a photo diode on the other side, and the Arduino monitors that through a pre-amp.
If a lot of the red light passes through, then the Berthelot’s reagent didn’t turn very blue and there is little to no ammonia present. If hardly any red light passes through, then reagent is very blue and that indicates a high level of ammonia.
The amount of light detected, between those two extremes, provides a reasonably accurate measure of Marb’s ammonia levels, so he can keep track of his condition’s progression.
If your car was made in the last decade, its dash probably has several displays, gauges, and indicator lights. But how many of those do you actually look at on a regular basis? Likely only one or two, like the speedometer and gas gauge. Knowing that, John Sutley embraced minimalism to use a Game Boy as the dash for his car.
Unlike most modern video game consoles, which load assets into memory before using them, the original Nintendo Game Boy used a more direct tie between the console and the game cartridge. They shared memory, with the Game Boy accessing the cartridge’s ROM chip at the times necessary to load just enough of the game to continue. That access was relatively fast, which helped to compensate for the small amount of available system RAM.
Sutley’s hack works by updating the data in a custom “cartridge’s” equivalent of ROM (which is rewritable in this case, and therefore not actually read-only). When the Game Boy updates the running “game,” it will display the data it sees on the “ROM.” Sutley just needed a way to update that data with information from the car, such as speed.
The car in question is a second-generation Hyundai Sante Fe. Like all vehicles available in the US after 1998, it has an OBDII port and Sutley was able to tap into that to access the CAN bus that the car uses to send data between different systems. That data includes pertinent information, such as speed.
Sutley used an Arduino paired with a CAN shield to sniff and parse that data. The Arduino then writes to the “ROM” with whatever Sutley wants to display on the Game Boy’s screen, such as speed.
This is, of course, a remarkably poor dash. The original Game Boy didn’t even have a backlight for the screen, so this would be downright unsafe at night. But we can all agree that it is very cool.
Known by their characteristic mounting solution, Dobsonian telescopes are the standard in amateur astronomy due to their lower cost and ease-of-use. But after seeing how some of the larger, motorized telescopes at observatories can simply pivot to a target of interest, one member from the FabLab at Orange Digital Center Morocco wanted to add this functionality to his own hobbyist telescope.
The base of the telescope guidance system was made by cutting a large disk from a sheet of plexiglass on a laser cutter and then wrapping it in a timing belt for setting the azimuth (yaw). Once mounted, a 3D-printed set of gears, along with some bearings, were attached to one side in order to provide the altitude adjustments. Each axis is moved by a single stepper motor and accompanying A4988 stepper driver, and both plug into an Arduino Nano.
Over on the controls side of the project, an interface was added that gives the user two buttons, an analog joystick, and an LCD screen at the top. With it, they can select between three different modes. In offline mode, locations that have been preloaded into the other Nano can be chosen as the target, while any arbitrary location can be sent via serial from a host PC in online mode. Finally, the joystick can be used in manual mode to move anywhere.
Autonomous vehicles, and self-driving cars in particular, are probably one of the most enticing technologies of the 21st century. But despite a great deal of R&D and even more speculation, we have yet to see a self-driving car that can actually operate on real public roads without any human oversight at all. If, however, we remove that “real public roads” constraint, the challenge becomes a lot more approachable. All you need is a few Arduino boards and a webcam, as proven by Austin Blake’s self-driving go-kart.
Blake previously attempted a miniature self-driving Tesla project, which was supposed to drive around a park walking path. That was only a partial success, because the vehicle struggled to put its “behavioral cloning” machine learning algorithms into practice. Blake took those lessons and applied them here, with much better results.
Behavioral cloning, in this context, means that the machine learning algorithm watches what Blake does as he drives around the track, then attempts to replicate that while driving on its own. During training, it looks ahead of the kart through a webcam while monitoring the steering angle. Then, while driving on its own, it looks through the webcam at the track and tries to match the steering angle to what it saw during training.
The machine learning model runs on a laptop, but Blake needed a way for it to control the kart’s steering and throttle. He used three Arduino Nano boards to pull that off. The first just listens to the machine learning model’s serial output for a PWM signal representing the steering angle. It then sends that to the second, which uses that information and the real-time steering angle to control a Cytron motor driver for the steering. The third controls the throttle using an RC car-style circuit.
This proved to work quite well and the go-kart can navigate around a small track in Blake’s workshop. In theory, it could also handle new tracks — so long as they have similar clearly marked edges.
Each component you add to your Arduino project increases its complexity and the opportunity for mistakes. But most projects require some “auxiliary” hardware — components that you use to interact with the Arduino or to help it do the job you’re asking of it. Buttons and displays are great examples. But as Doctor Volt demonstrates in his most recent video, you can replace both of those with the high-quality touchscreen on your old Android smartphone using the RemoteXY app.
You likely learned early in your Arduino journey that the serial connection between the Arduino development board and a PC is very handy. It lets the Arduino output information and also lets you input commands. But an entire computer (even a laptop) is pretty bulky and requires a lot of power. The RemoteXY app, available for Android devices, lets you use your smartphone to do the same job.
Even better, you can use the RemoteXY app with an Arduino library to get an interface much more sophisticated than a normal serial terminal. The app still communicates with the Arduino via serial behind the scenes, but it uses that data to enable nice touchscreen-friendly GUI controls, graphs, and more.
For that to work, you need a way for your Android smartphone to establish a serial connection with your Arduino board. That is easy to do using an OTG cable with a USB-to-Serial adapter. Together, those let your smartphone talk to your Arduino just like your PC does. Doctor Volt’s video walks you through setting up and using the RemoteXY Arduino library and how to configure the app.
Until the 21st century, cathode-ray tube (CRT) TVs were pretty much the only option. As such, media was made to suit them. Retro video game consoles in particular look best on CRT TVs. But those old TVs are getting hard to find and desirable models are now quite expensive. So, bitluni built his own “fake CRT TV” that works using lasers and UV magic.
Conventional CRT TVs work by shining an electron beam onto a phosphorescent screen, which glows for a moment after being excited by the electrons. Electromagnetic coils deflect that beam so it can scan across the X and Y axes of the screen. Add some clever modulation and you’ve got moving pictures.
The fake CRT made by bitluni works in a similar manner, except it has a 405nm laser pointer instead of an electron beam, stepper motors instead of deflection coils, and a screen printed in special UV-reactive filament instead of a phosphorescent screen. The two stepper motors move mirrors to direct the laser and an Arduino Nano board controls those through a CNC shield.
However, that system is far slower than that of a real CRT, so bitluni had to operate it a bit differently. CRT TVs normally make raster images by scanning across the entire screen, row by row, until the beam reaches the bottom and the process repeats. The fake CRT TV works displays vector graphics instead. That means that it moves the laser to trace the lines of the shapes to display, which is the same way that old tube oscilloscopes worked.
But that is still pretty slow, so bitluni can’t display anything particularly complex or fast-moving. Still, it looks great in the 3D-printed retro-style enclosure. It isn’t suited to playing Super Mario Bros., but it is a nice decorative piece.
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.
The Halo franchise is full of iconic designs, from vehicles like the Warthog to weapons like the Needler. But the armor, such as the Spartan armor worn by Master Chief, is arguably the most recognizable. The helmets are especially cool, and LeMaster Tech put his own unique spin on an ODST-style helmet by adding an adjustable-transparency RGB-backlit visor.
The ODST helmet that LeMaster Tech used for this project was made by Anthony Andress, AKA “enforce_props,” and it is a solid resin casting. LeMaster Tech’s goal was to make the coolest visor imaginable for that helmet.
He achieved that using a PDLC (Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal) “smart film” that changes from opaque to transparent when it receives current. That film can be cut to shape without causing any harm. He further enhanced the effect with some RGB LED backlighting, which illuminates the interior of the helmet and helps to make the wearer’s face more visible when the visor is transparent.
LeMaster Tech used an Arduino Nano board to the control the PDLC film and the NeoPixel individually addressable RGB LEDs. Momentary buttons in a 3D-printed enclosure control the LED lighting color, the lighting effect modes, and the visor transparency. The PDLC needs 20V to become transparent, so LeMaster Tech used a large battery to power that and a step-down converter to power the Arduino and LEDs.
The result looks fantastic and this helmet is going back to enforce_props, who will finish turning it into a cosplay masterpiece.
Everyone loves the look of Nixie tubes, with their glowing orange characters made of curvy filament. But we usually only see makers using Nixie tubes for one purpose: clocks. That’s unfortunate, because they have a lot more potential, as illustrated by Bob Cascisa’s Nixie tube slot machine game.
This is a really delightful device that puts the slot machine experience into a handheld form factor, with a beautiful Nixie tube display. It has a single button to spin the “wheels,” and seven Nixie tubes to show the action. The top three Nixie tubes represent the wheels and they cycle through distinct symbols. The bottom four Nixie tubes show the player’s balance to keep track of payouts.
The bottom Nixie tubes are IN-12 models, which are Soviet NOS (New Old Stock) models capable of displaying numeric digits. The top Nixie tubes are rarer IN-7 models that can display a handful of symbols that would be useful for lab instruments, such as ?. Cascisa chose those IN-7 tubes because their symbols have a more iconographic appearance than standard alphanumeric characters, which English-speakers would try to read.
An Arduino Nano board controls the gameplay. It plugs into a custom PCB that Cascisa designed to house all of the components necessary to drive the Nixie tubes — a difficult job compared to modern LED and LCD displays. It requires a power supply that can provide high voltage to the Nixie tubes. Power comes from an 18650 battery pack inside the simple enclosure, with a charging port on the side.
By Vegas slot machine standards, the gameplay is pretty simple. But this unit’s Nixie tube display certainly looks much nicer than the retina-scarring graphics on those machines.
Cats may be adorable, but they evolved to be predators. Unfortunately, responsible owners keep their cats indoors to avoid decimating the local wildlife population and that means Mr. Whiskers and Ms. Socks don’t get much opportunity to express their hunting urges. That’s why Sascha at Small Batch Factory designed Gatoino, which is an automatic laser turret toy that lets cats hunt for red dots indefinitely.
Gatoino automates laser cat toy playtime, putting less strain on owners’ wrists and keeping the fun going for as long as the furry felines want to keep up the chase. It moves the laser dot in two axes and does so in an unpredictable (pseudo-random) way, so it will keep the cats on their toe beans. And an onboard control interface lets the human adjust the playing field size and the movement speed, along with session schedules.
An Arduino Nano board controls all of that through a custom PCB to keep the wiring tidy. It moves the laser using two small SG90 hobby servo motors in an arrangement similar to a mirror galvanometer. Those parts all fit into a simple 3D-printed enclosure that can be placed on a shelf or mounted onto a wall out of the way.
Robotics is already an intimidating field, thanks to the complexity involved. And the cost of parts, such as actuators, only increases that feeling of inaccessibility. But as FABRI Creator shows in their most recent video, you can build a useful robotic arm with just a handful of inexpensive components.
This is pint-sized robotic arm that has some of the same features as big and expensive industrial robots, just on a smaller scale. Users can operate the four joints manually, but can also record a series of positions and let the robot automatically move from one to the next. That is a popular programming technique in many industries, making this robot useful for learning real methodology and for performing practical tasks.
The best part is that this robot is very affordable. All of the parts, with the exception of fasteners and electronic components, are 3D-printable. The electronic components include an Arduino Nano board and four SG90 hobby servo motors that can be found for just a couple of dollars each. FABRI Creator designed a custom PCB to host the Arduino, to provide power input, and to simplify the wiring. That PCB isn’t strictly necessary, but it results in a much tidier robot.
The assembled robot is small, but has enough reach to be useful and enough strength to lift light objects. It is a perfect starting point for people who want to learn robotics basics on a budget.
Starfield, a game set in the vast expanse of our galaxy, is receiving a new expansion called “Shattered Space” in which players can don novel weapons and gear to take on the latest challenge. As part of its release, the expansion’s publisher Bethesda reached out to cosplayer Jonas Zibartas and tasked him with creating a pair of render-accurate helmets that could be worn all day at conventions.
Within the first couple weeks of nonstop designing and test fits, Zibartas had a helmet model that consisted of 130 individual parts and where airflow was a major priority. Similar to a motorcycle helmet, the inner layer is comprised of soft fabric overlayed on top of a rigid, yet porous, helmet shell. Two fans near the front bring in fresh air from the outside and help prevent the transparent visor layer from becoming too foggy due to the wearer’s breathing. Raised just above this shell is a secondary set of 3D-printed accent pieces that give the helmet its finer details/form.
In Shattered Space, these helmets have lighting accents both inside the visor and at various points outside the helmet which act as indicators or headlamps. Zibartas was able to embed all of these features thanks to a dense strip of LEDs and an Arduino Nano.
The meticulous process of constructing these incredibly detailed helmets can be found here in Zibartas’s YouTube video below!
With roots in Africa, the kalimba is a type of hand piano featuring an array of keys that are each tuned for a specific note, and upon plucking or striking one, a pleasant, xylophone-like sound can be heard. Taking inspiration from his mini kalimba, Axel from the YouTube channel AxelMadeIt sought to automate how its keys are struck and produce classical melodies with precision.
The design process started out with Axel determining the best mechanism for interacting with the small keys, and after hitting/plucking them using a range of objects, he settled on plucking individual keys with a small plastic actuator. Two servo motors were utilized to perform the action, with one motor sliding a gantry left-and-right, and the other moving a small plastic pick across the keys. Axel’s design underwent several iterations to get the sound correct since material thickness, the lack of a resonant backing, and a loud servo motor all contributed to reduced quality initially.
After perfecting the physical layout, Axel assembled the electronic components into a custom 3D-printed case, which includes spaces for the Arduino Nano, battery, charging circuit, and pushbuttons. The first two buttons cause the kalimba to play preprogrammed melodies, while the last one plays random notes with a random amount of delay in between.
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