Cycling is a great way to spend time outdoors while simultaneously getting exercise and even as a mode of efficient transportation. And in the last few years due to the recent proliferation of e-bikes on the market and the pandemic, there has been an explosion in the number of people wanting to use bikes on a regular basis. A few people have gone a step further and have taken it upon themselves to create devices that make this experience safer, more convenient, or more fun. For this year’s World Bicycle Day, let’s celebrate these makers and how they were able to creatively embed Arduino produc ..read more

Early astronomers used observations on the moon’s phases to deduce the spherical nature of celestial objects and eventually to develop the heliocentric model that we all know and love today. Astrologers saw deep meaning in the phases of the moon and used that to create an entire mythos. The moon and its phases are important to human history and society, so why not celebrate them with this lovely lamp that showcases them? At first glance, this looks like the kind of moon lamp that has been very popular in recent years. Such lamps are common 3D printing projects, because it is possible to use r ..read more

The recorder is a type of flute that is very popular in elementary schools because the instrument is so simple and inexpensive. If you were born in the last four decades and grew up in a western country, then there is a very good chance that you were required to learn how to play some basic melodies on a recorder. But like all instruments, the recorder is difficult to play well. So Luis Marx built a robotic recorder that could do the tricky parts. Marx still has to blow into the mouthpiece to play this robotic recorder, but it takes care of the rest. A standard recorder has eight holes: seven ..read more

The “Arduino Project of the Month” competition continues to bring out the best in our community! We are happy to highlight inventive projects and creative solutions, as well as the generous users who share everything they’ve learned along the way. So let’s hear it for the three entries selected for the month of March!  3. Add an LCD display to your Digitech Brian May pedal Adding an LCD display and controller to your Brian May pedal makes it easy to select and always know what tone you are on: no more guessing, and no more DIY labels! This project leverages the Arduino Uno Rev3, Arduino ..read more

The childhood classic tabletop game of Connect Four entails dropping either a red or yellow disc into one of several columns in a grid with the hope of lining up four in a row. And even though the game has existed digitally for a while now, it is mostly played on LCD screens with fancier graphics and AIs against which the player competes. Wanting to push this paradigm further, Mirko Pavleski built a mini tabletop arcade cabinet that uses an Arduino Nano and an LED matrix instead to run the game. In order to display the current grid to the player(s), Pavleski purchased an 8 ..read more

Health tracking is a vital component to recovering after an injury or simply trying to improve one’s own fitness, and although accelerometer-based devices are decent at tracking general activity, they fail to accurately monitor specific areas of the body such as joint movement. This is why a team of researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) along with members of SingHealth Polyclinics designed a knitted wearable sensor for use on the knee. Based on conductive fabric technology, the device utilizes a stitched pattern of conductive threads that change their ..read more

If you’re anything like every other human being on the planet, you have several cordless power tools and their batteries are all dead. You never remember to put the batteries on their chargers until you need the tool for a job on realize that it won’t turn on. Discipline is difficult, so instead Lance of the Sparks and Code YouTube channel built a robot to charge his power tool batteries. This robot does still require some attention: Lance has to place a stack of batteries into the robot’s hopper to get the process started. But after that, the robot will set each battery in the char ..read more

You’ve probably heard that there isn’t any sound in space. That’s because sound is vibration traveling through a medium, like air or wood, and space is a mostly empty vacuum. The frequency of the vibration in a medium is the pitch of the sound and the amplitude is the volume. If you want a way to visualize the frequencies of the sounds around you, Vaclav Krejci (upir on YouTube) designed an Arduino-based audio analyzer that you can build. Like the visualizer of the equalizer on an old stereo receiver, this displays the levels of several frequency bands within the audio it monitors. In this ca ..read more

Counting one’s coins by hand can take a very long time, and for those wanting to avoid physically going to the bank or paying a fee at a commercial machine, what options remain? The YouTuber known as Fraens has created a full 3D-printed coin sorter and counter that combines technology with a clever design to accomplish this task automatically. The bulk of the device is comprised of the drum which has many round slots placed around its inner circumference that coins can travel within. It is set at an angle that matches the stationary underside, and this is necessary because ..read more

There are many ways to control a robot arm, with the simplest being a sequential list of rotation commands for the motors. But that method is very inefficient when the robot needs to do anything complex in the real world. A more streamlined technique lets the user move the arm as necessary, which sets a “recording” of the movements that the robot can then repeat. We tend to see that in high-end robots, but Mr Innovative built a robot arm with recording capability using very affordable materials. This uses an input controller that is roughly the same size and shape as the robot arm, so Mr Inno ..read more