After attempting to incorporate a few AK80-9 actuators from T-Motor into a robotic arm project, YouTuber Nikodem Bartnik was forced to pivot to a different kind of project: a universal robotic chassis/platform. By using these high-power and high-precision motors, his robot could be both fast and accurate while moving along the floor.
Once a flat plate had been cut from a piece of plywood with the help of a CNC router, Bartnik mounted the two motors and attached a wheel to each one. To control the motors, he went with a single Arduino Uno and fabricated a custom PCB that routes CAN bus signals between the Uno and the two motors. Power was provided to everything via a pair of LiPo battery packs for a total of around 24 volts.
Currently, the robot is essentially an RC car that responds to commands that it receives from somewhere else. In Bartnik’s project, he used an additional Uno connected to a laptop over USB and an nRF24 radio transceiver module to wirelessly send data to the robot’s nRF24 module. He also made a Python script, which can be used to set the speed of the robot’s movements and takes arrow key presses that are then converted to directional movements.
You can watch Bartnik’s video below for more information or you can check out the his repo here for the project code and design files.
Becky Stern’s machine brings the NYC hot dog experience to you
Arduino Team — December 24th, 2021
For her gift to Colin Furze as a participant in this year’s YouTube Makers Secret Santa event, Becky Stern opted to bring the street food of New York City in the form of a mostly automatic hot dog dressing machine. It was designed with the intention of letting a user set down a hot dog at the top of a small roller ramp and then have it slide along as it gets covered in various authentic toppings.
An Arduino Uno is responsible for controlling all three servo motors via a single PCA9685 driver module and the attached Adafruit Sound Board, which is loaded with sounds that Stern recorded around Manhattan. A separate Adafruit Pro Trinket sits at the base and sends commands to an RGB LED matrix in order to scroll text across the display.
There are two servos dedicated to the task of dispensing mustard from a squeeze bottle, as one applies pressure with a pull while the other shakes violently to produce a messy drizzle. At the end of the rollers is a much simpler configuration, which has a servo motor that turns 90 degrees to dump an onion sauce mixture over the hot dog.
After producing a few more decorations for her mini-NYC hot dog cart, Stern shipped her creation across the pond to Furze where he got to test it for himself, as seen at the 8:50 timestamp in his video. You can view the process of making this project in more detail here on Instructables or by watching Sterns video below!
It can be extremely annoying and frustrating to finally get comfortable somewhere only to realize that you forgot to turn off a light, thus requiring a short journey to and from the wall switch. Mechanical engineering student and Instructables user alanmerritt ran into the same problem in his dorm room, so he responded by creating a device that could remotely operate a light switch without any modifications to the switch itself.
The first step in designing this remote control device was measuring the fixture and modeling it in CAD, after which Alan made a small rack-and-pinion mechanism that uses a servo motor to rotate a gear and thus lift an attached slider up or down. He also 3D printed an enclosure that surrounds the otherwise ugly electronics, hiding them from the view of potential visitors.
Commands to toggle the switch are sent from a controller that consists of an Arduino Mega and an nRF24 wireless transceiver module, and a corresponding nRF24 transceiver receives the command and passes the information to an Arduino Uno over the SPI bus. Finally, this Uno board interprets the command and moves the servo motor to their the on or off position accordingly.
To read about this project in more detail, including the code and design files, you can check out Alan’s write-up here on Instructables.
As part of their city’s beach restoration project, Instructables users Kousheek Chalraborty and Satya Schiavvina, who go by the team name Technovation, needed to construct a small and cheap boat that could assist in mapping the depth of the sea floor at various locations. The design they were able to come up with achieved this goal and even went beyond it by incorporating an autonomous navigation system into their watercraft.
The hull of the boat was made from a leftover Tupperware container and discarded water bottles, therefore reducing the cost significantly and integrating recycled materials. After the pontoons were attached to the bottom, a pair of brushless DC motors were screwed into place at the top, along with an 11.1v LiPo battery and dual 30-amp ESC modules.
At the core of the robot is a single Arduino Uno that has a custom shield mounted to its top pin headers. This board consists of an nRF24L01 transceiver module for sending/receiving telemetry, a GPS module for tracking position, and a compass module that determines the boat’s orientation. With the firmware loaded onto the Uno, Kousheek and Satya created their own dashboard in Python that allows them to view information in real-time as well as send commands from across the water.
Oftentimes, even the simplest of machines can produce intricate results, and that is perhaps best demonstrated by Instructables user Dee et Ko and their pattern making device. Reminiscent of a Spirograph, it consists of just a few parts — two stepper motors, an Arduino Uno, a motor shield, and a marker — though it’s capable of some intriguing patterns.
Dee et Ko began this project by laser cutting a pair of discs and arms, along with a base plate, out of a thin sheet of acrylic and then attached them together with machine screws. Next, each stepper motor was mounted underneath the base plate and connected to a dedicated A4988 motor driver on the CNC shield. Finally, a marker was placed at the intersection of the arms so that it hovered just above the paper.
At its core, the code relies on just a couple of parameters in order to generate the resulting pattern, namely the rate at which the left disc rotates and the rate for the right disc. Eventually, these might be read in from an external sensor or a potentiometer for on-the-fly control, but for now they’re constants.
As seen in Dee et Ko’s demonstration video, this DIY device can draw ornate designs across a canvas using only a marker and two steppers. More details can be found in its write-up on Instructables.
As familiar as we all are with the UNO, there’s probably a lot you don’t know about the iconic Arduino microcontroller board. Put on your rose-tinted spectacles, and let’s wax poetic about the origins of this beloved maker board.
Rise of the Techno-Hippies
By 2009, the team that would become Arduino was gathering steam. A team that Make: Magazine once referred to as “designers, teachers, artists, and techno-hippies.”
I don’t think anyone on that team would object to such a definition.
Forged in the crucible of a classroom, the idea of an accessible, affordable electronics development platform was under serious investigation. It would eventually give birth to the Arduino UNO, but despite its name meaning “one,” this is far from Arduino’s first board. Moreover, its name was chosen to mark a point in Arduino’s story where the business itself came out of beta and into version 1.0.
“The UNO is an arrival point of a large number of small experimentations and incremental improvements,” says co-founder Massimo Banzi.
These experiments weren’t just a learning experience for electronics design. They were useability tests, and even marketplace research. Each little quirk, unexpectedly popular feature and, of course, mistake helped to define what makers wanted and needed.
This was a time when the maker movement was still unrepresented by a defining brand or killer product. But not for long.
Massimo and David with Arduino CEO, Fabio Violante
Driving Towards the Future
The journey to the UNO wasn’t short, but it did have a distinct destination. The notion of an enhanced user experience was very prominent, although the people who would become the founders of Arduino hadn’t necessarily articulated it even to themselves. Looking back, it’s easy to see that this guiding principle was there from the beginning.
“On the original Arduino serial board, look at the components,” says co-founder David Cuartielles, talking about the earliest of Arduino’s self-assembly boards, which were used almost exclusively in the classroom. “They’re sorted by value. I made sure that components of a similar type and value were together, to minimize mistakes during assembly. For example, there were two diodes. In terms of operation, they’re working in opposite directions to each other. But to reduce errors when populating the board by hand, I set the diodes facing in the same direction, and the PCB’s tracks take care of orientation. So it’s optimized for education, not for electronic operation!”
“Back in the day we used to use FTDI chips,” Massimo recalls. “A Scottish company, now in Singapore. Great chips, but you had to install drivers to get your computer to recognize devices when you plugged them in.”
“Which is when we realized there was this thing called CDC (communications device class) protocol, which was embedded into operating systems. It’s the reason you don’t need a driver for a USB serial port. We found that you could develop a firmware for some simple Atmel processors that worked just the same as FTDI chips, but would liberate us from needing a driver.”
This opened the door to reprogramming the firmware and making the boards do other things. Some people created MIDI firmware to send notes to a computer. Others made HID firmware so they could emulate computer peripherals. It was the herald of dual processor experimentation, which piqued the interest of both Arduino users and its designers.
Press On with the UNO
These proto-UNOs also required you to press a reset button before uploading new code. It was a pretty standard requirement for any prototyping platform at the time. Most designers had simply never questioned this apparent necessity. But when the Arduino team found themselves placing more and more emphasis on user experience, this small requirement was identified as an obstacle to useability.
It was at a workshop in Germany when Massimo figured out an alternative.
“It turned out that if you put a capacitor between the reset pin of the microcontroller and one of the serial port pins,” he explains, “it would reset the board automatically whenever you opened the port.” This small tweak became a vital and very popular aspect of the UNO’s useability.
But there were a lot of other factors that went into making the UNO so recognizable that it’s become indistinguishable from the overall Arduino brand.
The Power of One
Early Arduino boards required a more active participation when it came to powering them up.
They already offered flexibility in choosing your power source. But if you wanted to power the board from the USB or the external power jack, you had to move a jumper. Not a lot to ask, but as many of the design experiments proved, these seemingly insignificant requirements had a disproportionate effect on usability.
People would forget to set the jumper in the first place. Or have it in the wrong position when trying to power on, and frustrations ensued. So a small circuit was implemented that detected where the power was coming from, and switched to it automatically. Simple, but essential.
Tweaks to the power options didn’t stop there. On other boards there had been some experimentation with microUSB ports, not realizing how fragile they can be. So when it came to the UNO, the USB connector was carefully chosen for its reliability. “It’s like a Russian tank,” Massimo laughs. “It’s indestructible.”
Feeling Blue
“Going from the original design we had on a rectangular green board, to the shaped blue board that everyone recognizes now, took two days,” David recalls, musing on how Arduino could move so fast because of its focus on simplicity. “And in between we went to a party. Because the designs are very simple.”
“The original board, before it became the Arduino UNO, was a typical green PCB,” Massimo explains, lavishing mediocrity on the state of pre-Arduino prototyping platforms. “Not so exciting. The PCB manufacturer we were talking to went on and on about how he was making blue PCBs because they were apparently easier on the eye for production line workers. We thought, ‘Hey! Blue is better, because everyone else is using green!’”
You can see a pattern in the way Arduino was beginning to question the norms of its industry. Those shades of blue and teal have become synonymous with Arduino devices, and that didn’t happen by accident. At the time, PCBs were green. Maybe beige, if they were still bare fibreglass.
But no longer, once the UNO arrived.
Arduino didn’t just have its eye fixed on usability. It was also searching for an identity that makers would associate with enhanced experience and quality. It just so happened that the UNO was destined to become the vessel that gave that identity a tangible shape.
The beautiful blue board, with the first appearance of the brand new Arduino logo
Taking Shape
“I was teaching and I had to draw PCBs on a white board all the time,” recalls David. “And all boards were square or rectangular. So how do you tell people which is left and which is right? In order to avoid errors in plugging things in and building the boards, which originally were self-assembly, I thought it needed to be a non-symmetrical shape. Then the students could see that this is left and this is right. It wasn’t a creative decision, so much as a functional one for education purposes.”
Around that same time, the school where he was teaching in Ivrea was issuing everyone with business cards. They arrived on Massimo’s desk in a small plastic box. “So that seemed like a good starting place for sizing,” Massimo remembers, “as it seemed like a great idea if we could fit the UNO in a plastic box like the one my business cards came in.”
It was taking shape as a very recognizable product. And you want to put your name on products you’re proud of. Typically any branding on a PCB was added using the standard font that came with the Eagle PCB design software. Essentially vector lines, not graphics. This change was enacted by a former student of the Ivrea classroom, Giorgio Olivero. He was entrusted with the new Arduino identity.
“The strength of our current image depends entirely on the outstanding work Giorgio’s done,” David notes. “Giorgio understands not only graphic design, but the importance of designing the whole user experience. He understood interaction design really well. He understood the nature of the Arduino project intimately, and the needs of the end user.”
An UNO in its original packaging, designed by Giorgio Olivero. Photo courtesy of Francesco Balducci.
The UNO was the moment when quality came home in every respect. The boards were given an appealing new color, precision engineering, high quality manufacturing, and an emblem that made sure you knew you were holding an Arduino.
“The response was fantastic,” David continues, reflecting on the reception that the new Arduino and its flagship device received. “Nowadays it’s really common to do these kinds of things, but back then on the maker scene it was really unusual to put so much into making things look good, and putting a focus on the user experience.”
One Small Mistake
“When I was designing the board I made a mistake that we still have to live with,” admits Massimo. “I moved the connectors in the top right of the board half a step to the left, so the gap between the connectors is non-standard. It’s 1.27mm out. Which is fine on the connectors at the bottom, but that’s why you struggle to use a veroboard to develop shields, because the connectors aren’t quite aligned as they were meant to be.”
It’s a mistake that had a silver lining, though. That slight misalignment also (inadvertently, perhaps) gave us a key for attaching shields the right way around. So, just between you and me, let’s pretend it was deliberate and say no more about it.
Even the first batch of UNOs that came off the production line weren’t quite where Arduino wanted them to be, quality wise. The process for milling the PCBs into the iconic UNO shape wasn’t as reliable as it is now.
A small number of the boards had rough edges where they were snapped out of the sheet after cutting. Nothing that affected the operation of the board, but not so good when your focus is on achieving a distinctive level of quality.
“A friend and I spent the weekend at the PCB manufacturers,” Massimo remembers, semi-fondly, “sandpapering the edges of the first batch of UNO boards. What else could we do?”
Ten Thousand and UNO
Makers responded very positively to the ethos behind the UNO. And that enthusiasm was directly reflected in the number of Arduino boards sold.
“I remember an article in a magazine celebrating that Arduino had sold 10,000 boards,” Massimo recalls. “Arduino was here to stay, they said, because back then if anyone sold 10,000 boards you were boss!”
Arduino itself celebrated this milestone back in 2007, with a predecessor to the UNO called the Arduino Diecimila, meaning “ten thousand”. Interestingly enough, this was also the board that introduced automatic software resets when uploading a sketch, so you no longer had to press a reset button. Without the Diecimila, the UNO couldn’t have been born.
The Arduino Diecimila
Now Arduino’s selling in the region of 10,000 boards a week. As you can imagine, magazines and blogs have stopped writing about every maker device that hits the 10,000 milestone now. The UNO itself, in fact, has recently crossed the 10 million mark.
The Day of the UNO
It wasn’t just the Arduino UNO that was unveiled at the Maker Faire New York in 2010. It was the new Arduino. Colors, branding, logos and a refined focus on usability and recognizable quality across everything Arduino did, from the UNO to the website and the packaging.
“I was the only one not present at that event in New York,” David laughs. “I was in a hotel in my home town of Malmö, because I had to launch the new website. At the time we were running the whole Arduino server in a $5-per-month VPS, because we had no money. Whenever we announced a new product, the website was going down. So to try and avoid this happening while Massimo was up on stage announcing the Arduino UNO, I was waiting to flip the website to Giorgio’s fantastic new design.”
The UNO’s launch signaled a transition from DIY success story to the primary platform for makers, engineers and creators around the world.
“We didn’t create a computer that allowed people to continue to do their job but at a cheaper price,” David continues. “We created a computer that empowered people who had no idea about electronics to start using technology, and this represented a huge life change for a lot of people. When I hear people say they started with an Arduino UNO, and now they’ve become the IT teacher at their school, it’s just amazing. And there are hundreds of stories like this.”
“There are some products in history that just work,” Massimo concludes. “That simply do what people need. So they endure. They last for a long time.”
The UNO wasn’t Arduino’s first board, and it won’t be its last. There have been many varieties of microcontroller and maker boards before and after the UNO, but none have been as iconic. As we cross the epic milestone of 10 million UNOs sold and the launch of the UNO Mini Limited Edition, we decided it was time to take a look back at some of our favorite UNO projects from the last 10 years.
And we want to hear about yours, too. Join us over on social media to share your favorite UNO projects, whether you built them yourself or marveled at someone else’s electronic creation.
The Toothbrush Machine
The queen of terrible tech Simone Giertz casually blew the internet’s mind back in 2015 with her robotic skateboard helmet with an automated toothbrush mounted on the front.
Arduino GRANDE
Spend more than five minutes Googling “Arduino UNO” and you’re bound to find yourself looking at the Arduino GRANDE. A fully operational UNO that’s six time bigger than it should be.
Coffee Printer
If you’ve ever left a coffee ring on your notepad or table top, you’ll appreciate how effective it is at leaving a mark. This UNO project put that annoying side effect of coffee to artistic use.
Autonomous “Follow Me” Cooler
Why carry your own beer and sandwiches around like a sucker, when you can “simply” connect a robotic cooler to your smartphone’s Bluetooth, hook it up with GPS and let if follow you around.
Skeleton Arduino Uno
This Arduino UNO is its own project, which is so meta it’s impossible not to love it! It’s a PCB without the PCB, and takes “open” source more literally than any other maker board has ever achieved.
Gaming Microwave
Microwave’s used to be considered the fastest way to cook things. But in today’s CPA-addled world, even one-minute noodles take too long. Problem solved; game while you’re waiting.
Floppotron
This UNO project takes the concept of “everything is a drum” to new levels by turning devices like hard drives, floppy drives, scanners and more into a techno-orchestra.
pedalSHIELD UNO
This programmable guitar pedal built from an UNO lets you create all your own effects and digital sounds, with an ever-growing repository of pre-built effects from the Arduino music community.
Automated Dust Collection
Master maker and craftsman I Like to Make Stuff has created some incredible carpentry projects, and underneath it all is an Arduino UNO keeping his awesome workshop clean.
Useless Box
Useless machines are a wonderful maker project rabbit hole to fall down. This is a great example, and even though they’re useless, you can learn so much from building one. Which means it’s not actually useless, right?
Drumcube
Drumcube is a drummer in a box, so as long as you’ve got an Arduino UNO and a small box, you’ll always have someone down in the boiler room when you play at a gig.
Petoi Bittle
This highly maneuverable little palm-sized robot runs, jumps and plays to become your very own robotic pet. Some stunning design work, and it can even carry up to half a kilogram as it skips around!
The iconic Arduino board is back, in the shape of the UNO Mini Limited Edition. Pre-orders have just gone live, so don’t dawdle if you want to get your hands on this stunning piece of Arduino history.
10 Million Makers Can’t Be Wrong
The UNO Mini Limited Edition is here to celebrate a pretty epic milestone in Arduino’s history. The iconic board, which first launched back in 2010, has become synonymous with Arduino itself. It’s like the company and the board are inextricably linked in the minds of makers around the world. For many, Arduino is the UNO.
There was a feature in Make: Magazine once, which declared Arduino was here to stay because it had just crossed the 10,000 sales threshold. Back then (and it’s not even that long ago), the idea that you could sell 10,000 maker boards was pretty epic.
The UNO has now sold over 10 million units.
It’s impossible to guess how many projects that equates to. Just like us, many of you will have owned a lot of UNOs over the last decade, and some of those will have been used in multiple projects. Can you still remember your first UNO, or your first UNO project? Share them with us!
So we wanted something super cool to celebrate this new maker board milestone. And that something is the UNO Mini Limited Edition.
Meet the UNO Mini Limited Edition
First and foremost, this is an UNO like any other. It’s (almost) the same specs, with the same processor, pinouts and performance that made the UNO so popular. But there are a couple of cool tweaks we think you’ll love.
Probably one of the first things you noticed was that the USB port has been updated to USB-C. An update we’re confident you’ll appreciate, and not just because it helps with the reduced form factor. Most of us have an abundance of spare USB-C cables kicking around these days, so it’s decidedly more convenient.
And then there’s the form factor. The UNO Rev 3 is, more or less, the same size as its predecessors, dating back to the original design. As you expect, the UNO Mini Limited Edition is half the size of the original footprint, measuring 34.2mm x 26.7mm x 8mm.
Limited Edition, for Serious Collectors
It’s not just the beautiful new black and gold design that makes the board so desirable. This is a limited edition, with each board individually numbered.
All the features you’ve come to know and love are still there, so this is a fully functional UNO in every respect. But hardcore Arduino lovers will also appreciate its desirability and collectability. Everything about the UNO Mini Limited Edition screams quality, from the device to the assembly, the packaging to the printing. Who knows what an unopened UNO Mini Limited Edition (R@RE! Mint, still in box!) will be worth in the years to come.
Make sure you join us on social media (#UNOmini) to share your thoughts and first impressions when you get it in your hands, and we’d love to see your videos of this beautiful new board being unboxed when it lands on your doorstep.
Inspired by a special two-axis mechanism that uses a pair of beveled gears to create panning and tilting motions, maker and YouTuber JBV Creative wanted to integrate it into a larger kinetic sculpture that could move electromechanically while also looking great at the same time. This led to the creation of RobBob, which is essentially a robot-shaped head that has been placed onto a pan/tilt system.
Initially, RobBob could only move with the help of a person turning a pair of opposing knobs — one for each axis. But after some minor additions, including mounts on each side for a single servo motor and adapters that allow servo horns to attach to the knobs, RobBob could now move on its own power. At first, JBV considered using a serial monitor to send rotation commands, although he eventually settled on an N64 joystick since it was a more natural choice for fluid motion.
After writing a small program, which takes in joystick data from the N64 controller and converts it into positional data for the servos, JBV loaded it onto an Arduino Uno. To see RobBob in action, check out JBV Creative’s demo/build video below or read more about the project on his website.
Being able to derive the absolute position of an object is vital in countless applications, primarily for anything that uses a motor. Instructables user holybaf had the idea to build their own rotary encoder, which has 60 degrees of resolution and utilizes a CD to act as a precise clock.
To accomplish this, they first laid down a single circular track featuring patterns of light and dark areas that each correspond to a single value. By reading these areas with a set of six infrared emitters/detectors and comparing their current reading to the previous one, an absolute position can be determined.
A custom PCB was also designed for this project, which contains the aforementioned IR detectors along with a PCF8574 I/O expander and a pair of headers for connecting an Arduino Uno and an OLED screen for viewing relevant information such as the current time. After attaching a motor and loading some code, the clock was finally complete.
You can see this device in action below or you can check out the build log in more detail here on Instructables.
Self-propelling robots come in a whole host of shapes, sizes, and capabilities, with some being able to fly while other can walk on just a couple or many legs. But YouTuber James Bruton wanted to innovate on this concept even further by designing and building a robot that mimics an earthworm through extending and contracting segments at certain times to slowly inch along the ground. This class of motion is called peristalsis, and it works by constricting a ring of muscles to propagate material, such as in the case of the digestive tract, or to move an entire body.
For Bruton’s first prototype, he went with four identical segments that each contain a single linear actuator which pushes or pulls within a scissor mechanism to move the segment. The actuators were then connected to an Arduino Uno that is responsible for sending pulses that dictate the extent of motion in a series. Although it worked at least somewhat, this initial design proved far too slow, thus leading to a redesign.
In this next iteration, each segment houses a powerful servo motor at the end of a scissor mechanism that rotates to extend or contract the segment. This way, the worm can raise up, fall further away, and pull the rest of the body along, akin to an inchworm.
For more details on the project, you can watch Bruton’s video or check out his GitHub repository here.
Capacitive touchscreens today use a digitizer to pinpoint the coordinates of a finger tap. That makes sense for smartphones and tablets, but isn’t ideal for large scale applications. If you want to recognize touches on the scale of an entire wall, a Kinect sensor could be more appropriate. But such a setup traditionally has a limited range — usually less than 1.5 meters. FarOut is a new system developed by Carnegie Mellon researchers that extends Kinect touch sensing range to 3 meters.
Like other Kinect-based touch sensing systems, this can detect the coordinates of a finger tap on an ordinary wall. Due to resolution and other factors, a typical Kinect sensor can’t reliably detect the position of a fingertip during a tap at a long distance. But the FarOut team doubled that distance using a series of techniques, including thermal mitigation, background subtraction, and de-noising. To reduce noise and increase the Kinect’s effective resolution, they turned to Arduino.
The Kinect v2 sensor is stationary, which limits the resolution of the depth map that it creates. By moving the camera a tiny amount, the team increased the sensor’s effective depth resolution by a substantial degree. It’s similar how you move your head to better judge the distance to a faraway object. They introduced that movement using a custom pan-tilt mount for the Kinect sensor. That mount has two stepper motors that an Arduino Uno controls via a CNC shield. With sophisticated post-processing, FarOut can detect a touch 3 meters away with a precision of less than 10 millimeters.
The classic MP3 player was a truly innovative device for its time, however with the advent of modern smartphones and other do-it-all gadgets, they have largely fallen by the wayside. In order to add a new twist, Norbert Zare decided to implement an MP3 player that not only responds to user inputs by moving the volume knob and tilting some notes to signal the next track, but can also be controlled simply by waving a finger in front of it.
Gesture control was achieved using the PAJ7620U2 sensor, which can quickly detect movements within a 3D space and output its findings over the I2C bus to a host microcontroller. Zare set up his Arduino Uno’s program to continually check for a new gesture, and based on the one being read, perform a certain action. For example, making a clockwise circle with a single finger will increase the volume, turn the servo attached to the volume knob, and change the text on the attached LCD to match. Other functions include skipping tracks and resuming/pausing.
When a motion has been picked up by the Uno, it also sends a signal to an attached and partially disassembled MP3 player’s button pad that controls the actual music being played as well as its volume. You can read more about this project here on Hackaday.io and check out Zare’s video below.
3D printers are very popular in the maker community and CNC machines complement them well. While 3D printers fabricate parts by adding material over time, CNC mills and routers fabricate parts by subtracting material. That is preferable when working with large parts or when you require a lot of precision. If you want an affordable option, this guide will show how to build Ivan Miranda’s 3D-printed CNC machine design.
Miranda posted his first video about this 3D-printed CNC machine back in March, 2020. He eventually published the design files on his website, but didn’t provide many details on parts sourcing or assembly. The GitHub page linked above, created by Max Fischer, provides thorough guidance for people looking to build their own machines based on Miranda’s design. It gives you a detailed bill of materials and walks you through the entire build process with step-by-step photo instructions.
While this machine does require a lot of square tube aluminum extrusion and hardware like linear rails and bearings, all of the custom mechanical parts are 3D-printable. For strength and mechanical stability, you’ll want to print those using a material like PETG. The controller board is an Arduino Uno combined with a CNC shield, which controls the stepper motors via drivers. Like a 3D printer, the X and Y axes utilize drive belts and the Z axis has a leadscrew. The spindle motor, which spins the cutting end mill, is a handheld electric router.
This year for Halloween, Quint BUILDs wanted to make something special for his daughter’s costume. Quint’s idea was to design and fabricate a pair of mechatronic dragon wings that can mount to a user’s back and move in three different modes by utilizing a set of pneumatic air cylinders.
The prototype began as a single air cylinder connected to a relay that was, in turn, controlled by a single Arduino Micro and button. This way, Quint could finely tune the timings and pressures required for the device. After 3D printing a simple controller, machining a few aluminum plates, and welding it all together into a second prototype, it was time to experiment with programming more complex movements.
Three pneumatic cylinders were used to create a couple axes of motion. First, the larger base cylinder moves a central piston vertically, thus extending and retracting them outwards. Each wing can flap independently through the use of two smaller pistons and linkages. Finally, pressurized air is provided by a compressed CO2 canister. These actuators are each controlled by a dedicated relay module that’s connected to an Arduino Uno.
Whenever one of the three buttons on the controller are pressed, a subroutine for the specified movement is executed. This could include fluttering the wings a couple of times, extending them outwards, and even performing a more complicated flapping motion.
Driven by a desire to print massive pieces of art on his new studio’s blank wall, Shane Wighton of the YouTube channel Stuff Made Here set out to create a large painting robot, which he calls “Janksy” after the famous artist and the jankiness of the construction.
In principle, the device works by using a large gantry that spans the entire length of the wall to move horizontally while a series of cables and pulleys move it vertically. To avoid vibrations caused by moving such a large amount of weight so quickly, a second and far smaller/faster gantry houses a spray nozzle that deposits paint dots. All of this hardware is controlled by an Arduino Uno that translates positional commands into movements for the onboard stepper motors and servo.
Generating the dot array is done by first taking the initial digital image and converting it into four layers that each correspond to cyan, yellow, magenta, and black, just like a traditional inkjet printer. From there, every dot is scaled based on the intensity of the color, with larger dots appearing brighter and smaller ones showing up as dimmer.
After painting the wall over the course of several days, Wighton’s mural of his wife’s signature glare was complete. And even though it doesn’t look like much up close, taking a few steps back makes the entire thing come alive — imperfections and all.
As time has progressed, personal radios have shrunk from the size of a large filing cabinet down to a tiny circuit that can be integrated into other ICs. Instructables user exposedwire wanted to bring back the experience of a vintage 1920s radio set, so they built one out of wood that carries the same antique feeling with some more modern features.
For the electronics, exposedwire went with an Arduino Uno for the main control board, along with a TEA5767 FM receiver IC that communicates with the Uno over I2C. The currently tuned frequency is displayed on a seven-segment LED module, which is driven by the ubiquitous TM1637 chip. The station can be changed by rotating the accompanying rotary encoder. Finally, the resulting audio signal is sent from the TEA1637 to an NS8002 amplifier and outputted from a small speaker.
The outer shell of the enclosure was fabricated by first 3D printing an arch-like structure and gluing it to the back wooden cover. After the speaker was set into its mount, the wooden faceplate was attached along with its speaker grill and front panel assembly. The FM radio antenna simply sticks out the back next to the power input jack.
When we think of circuits, we tend to picture wires or PCB traces. But a circuit is anything that conducts electricity between components. Today we have more options than ever before thanks to material like conductive ink and thread. Utilizing conductive ink on a large scale, Duco is an open source wall-climbing robot that brings interactivity to vertical everyday surfaces.
Duco’s inspiration came from Sandy Noble’s fantastic Polargraph, which was a hanging pen plotter robot that could draw large images. But those images didn’t serve any purpose beyond visual appeal. Duco takes the Polargraph idea into a whole new direction. By swapping between special pens, Duco can draw conductive, dielectric, cleaning, or decorative lines on walls. Those combine to create multilayer functional circuits.
An Arduino Uno board controls Duco through a motor shield. It has two stepper motors, a servo motor, a linear actuator, and a UV light. It is capable of switching between two different pens — normally the conductive and dielectric ink. The UV light cures the ink after Duco applies it to a wall. Most of Duco’s frame parts were 3D-printed.
In one demonstration, Duco drew a working piano circuit onto a wall. Once the components, including control boards and speakers, were added to the circuit, people could play the piano by touching the conductive pads. In another demonstration, Duco turned a wall into a large capacitive touch sensor grid similar to a massive track pad. Duco’s creators even experimented with a laser module add-on, which let the robot cut the circuit “substrate” material.
When we think of circuits, we tend to picture wires or PCB traces. But a circuit is anything that conducts electricity between components. Today we have more options than ever before thanks to material like conductive ink and thread. Utilizing conductive ink on a large scale, Duco is an open source wall-climbing robot that brings interactivity to vertical everyday surfaces.
Duco’s inspiration came from Sandy Noble’s fantastic Polargraph, which was a hanging pen plotter robot that could draw large images. But those images didn’t serve any purpose beyond visual appeal. Duco takes the Polargraph idea into a whole new direction. By swapping between special pens, Duco can draw conductive, dielectric, cleaning, or decorative lines on walls. Those combine to create multilayer functional circuits.
An Arduino Uno board controls Duco through a motor shield. It has two stepper motors, a servo motor, a linear actuator, and a UV light. It is capable of switching between two different pens — normally the conductive and dielectric ink. The UV light cures the ink after Duco applies it to a wall. Most of Duco’s frame parts were 3D-printed.
In one demonstration, Duco drew a working piano circuit onto a wall. Once the components, including control boards and speakers, were added to the circuit, people could play the piano by touching the conductive pads. In another demonstration, Duco turned a wall into a large capacitive touch sensor grid similar to a massive track pad. Duco’s creators even experimented with a laser module add-on, which let the robot cut the circuit “substrate” material.
Jackson Pollock was famous for his unique style of splattering large blobs of paint across a canvas, and it was this technique that JBV Creative was trying to imitate. But rather than working by hand to painstakingly dip a brush into paint and then flinging it many times over, he wanted to build a robot that could do this task for him while still creating art.
The main part of the Flingbot, the name JBV gave to his system, is comprised of a catapult arm that is capable of both rotating and adjusting how far it can throw paint. A servo motor at the back pulls an elastic band a certain amount based on the desired distance, and a second one releases a pin to perform the launching action. As another parameter for generating abstract art, the silicone scoop itself can bend to change its shape. Every servo motor is connected to a single SSC-32U servo controller board that receives commands from an Arduino Uno.
Paint gets dispensed from one of the 12 total reservoirs that each has a gravity-feeder out its base with a servo motor that controls how much paint is deposited into the scoop. Once all of the paint has been collected for a launch, the Uno adjusts the angle and tension of the arm and finally releases the paint.
To see how JBV Creative constructed this robot and a glimpse of the wildly unpredictable artwork it produced, check out his video below as well as his project write-up here.
Public art installations are a great way to express your creativity while simultaneously sharing it with others. Niklas Roy, a maker who builds interactive art installations in Berlin, Germany had the idea to create a machine that lets people draw pictures and then share them digitally too, which he calls the VEKTORKOLLEKTOR. Designed in collaboration with Kati Hyyppä, the project consists of two parts: a joystick for operating the device and a large pen plotter to draw on a piece of paper.
The joystick assembly was made with a classic arcade joystick and a pair of arcade pushbutton switches, all placed within a small enclosure. These components are connected to a central Arduino Uno that also has an SD card for saving drawings and a small TFT display that shows a virtual drawing of what’s on the page. The Uno communicates with a secondary Arduino Nano board in order to control the rotations of the two X/Y DC gear motors and thus the position of the drawing utensil. Positional data is gathered from a single optical encoder situated on each axis. Last but not least, a third Arduino and an Adafruit Music Maker Shield were added to round out the experience with chiptune-style music.
One great aspect to saving what people draw as a series of vectors is that they can be shared digitally and recreated in a variety of formats. Roy was able to get someone to create an Inkscape extension for converting drawings into SVG files, and some were even used to paint murals with an even larger spray can plotter.
YouTuber Robert Dunn (known as Under Dunn) had just received a large box of loose cylindrical battery cells and therefore wanted to join them together to create a large battery pack. Ordinarily, this is accomplished by utilizing a specialized type of tool called a battery spot welder that is used to tack nickel strips onto the terminals. But Dunn didn’t want to spend the money on a new one, so he built his own DIY version using only an old microwave, an offcut of copper, some wire, and an Arduino Uno with a solid-state relay attached to control the current discharge timings.
Dunn began by extracting the transformer from the microwave and cutting it open to expose the coils within. As a quick refresher, transformers step voltage up or down by using a pair of opposing coils inside of a magnetic field, which also causes the current to increase or decrease in an inversely proportional manner. Because Dunn wanted to maximize the current, he replaced the smaller coil with an even smaller one made from 6-guage wire that could handle the extremely high current.
An Arduino was used in conjunction with a solid-state relay module to pulse the current going into the transformer. Its circuit also contained a seven-segment LED module that showed the number of milliseconds the transformer would be on, as well as a red button for activating it. Timing could be adjusted with a rotary potentiometer.
Once everything was wired up and placed into a wooden enclosure, Dunn tested out his DIY battery spot welder by pressing the button, and it worked as expected.
Um dir ein optimales Erlebnis zu bieten, verwenden wir Technologien wie Cookies, um Geräteinformationen zu speichern und/oder darauf zuzugreifen. Wenn du diesen Technologien zustimmst, können wir Daten wie das Surfverhalten oder eindeutige IDs auf dieser Website verarbeiten. Wenn du deine Einwillligung nicht erteilst oder zurückziehst, können bestimmte Merkmale und Funktionen beeinträchtigt werden.
Funktional
Immer aktiv
Die technische Speicherung oder der Zugang ist unbedingt erforderlich für den rechtmäßigen Zweck, die Nutzung eines bestimmten Dienstes zu ermöglichen, der vom Teilnehmer oder Nutzer ausdrücklich gewünscht wird, oder für den alleinigen Zweck, die Übertragung einer Nachricht über ein elektronisches Kommunikationsnetz durchzuführen.
Vorlieben
Die technische Speicherung oder der Zugriff ist für den rechtmäßigen Zweck der Speicherung von Präferenzen erforderlich, die nicht vom Abonnenten oder Benutzer angefordert wurden.
Statistiken
Die technische Speicherung oder der Zugriff, der ausschließlich zu statistischen Zwecken erfolgt.Die technische Speicherung oder der Zugriff, der ausschließlich zu anonymen statistischen Zwecken verwendet wird. Ohne eine Vorladung, die freiwillige Zustimmung deines Internetdienstanbieters oder zusätzliche Aufzeichnungen von Dritten können die zu diesem Zweck gespeicherten oder abgerufenen Informationen allein in der Regel nicht dazu verwendet werden, dich zu identifizieren.
Marketing
Die technische Speicherung oder der Zugriff ist erforderlich, um Nutzerprofile zu erstellen, um Werbung zu versenden oder um den Nutzer auf einer Website oder über mehrere Websites hinweg zu ähnlichen Marketingzwecken zu verfolgen.
