While electric wheelchairs are a vital tool for those with restricted mobility, they typically cost around $2,500, an amount that’s not the most affordable. To address this problem, a group of students from Aviv High School in Israel have come up with a low-cost, 3D-printed motor conversion kit that connects to a standard push-chair without any permanent modification or damage.

The system uses a pair of motors to steer like a tank, and features a joystick and Arduino Uno for control. Another interesting feature is shown later in the video below, when it’s folded up for storage with the motor kit still attached.

You can check out the team’s website for more details this incredible project, as well as All3DP’s recent article here.

If, for whatever reason, you need your computer to stay awake without changing its settings, that’s easy—just remember to shake your mouse back and forth intermittently! If remembering to do that over and over seems like too much work, then here’s a simple solution: a device setup to optically wiggle your mouse using an Arduino Nano and a micro RC servo.

The 3D-printed unit sits underneath a mouse and rotates a printed grid left and right in order to trick it into thinking that you’re moving the mouse, and thus keeping the computer awake.

Place your mouse on top of the Mouse Wiggler and make sure the optical sensor on top of the wheel. Power the device up use a USB power adapter and you’re good to go.

There’s no software to install, which makes it easy to enable and disable as needed! You can find more details on the build on its Instructables page.

Nikodem Bartnik had a small problem. When soldering, he had to move his light around in order to properly see what he was working on. In order to avoid this constant interruption, he built a 3D-printed lamp capable of manuevering like a small robot arm under voice command.

An Arduino Uno controls the light’s movement directly via three servos, and a relay flips the switch on and off. Instead of adding voice recognition hardware to his robotic light, he cleverly linked it with an Android app over Bluetooth, using his phone to translate spoken words into serial commands.

Although great for soldering, this device can certainly come in handy when reading books or even finding your way to bed at night. Want to create your own? You can find more details on Bartnik’s Instructables page here.

With the lack of people capable of turning written or spoken words into sign language in Belgium, University of Antwerp masters students Guy Fierens, Stijn Huys, and Jasper Slaets have decided to do something about it. They built a robot known as Aslan, or Antwerp’s Sign Language Actuating Node, that can translate text into finger-spelled letters and numbers.

Project Aslan–now in the form of a single robotic arm and hand–is made from 25 3D-printed parts and uses an Arduino Due, 16 servos, and three motor controllers. Because of its 3D-printed nature and the availability of other components used, the low-cost design will be able to be produced locally.

The robot works by receiving information from a local network, and checking for updated sign languages from all over the world. Users connected to the network can send messages, which then activate the hand, elbow, and finger joints to process the messages.

Although it is one arm now, work will continue with future masters students, focusing on expanding to a two-arm design, implementing a face, and even integrating a webcam into the system. For more info, you can visit the project’s website here as well as its write-up on 3D Hubs.

As multitools have lots of different functions in one case, so [Shadwan’s] clock design incorporates a multitude of features. He started the design as a binary clock using a Fibonacci spiral for the shape. However, the finished clock has four modes. The original binary clock, an analog clock, a flashlight (all lights on), and a disco mode that strobes multiple lights.

[Shadwan] used Rhino to model the case and then produced it using a laser cutter. The brains are — small wonder — an Arduino. A 3D-printed bracket holds everything together. You can see the result in the video below.

The clock was a school project and used a Neopixel ring. The students had a 16 position ring, which is not enough to do a 24-hour clock so they settled on a 12-hour design. The LED color, however, changes between AM and PM.

The paper included with the design said that research didn’t turn up any other binary clocks using Neopixels. We found that hard to believe, but it might be true. We certainly didn’t find any in our archives, although there are plenty of non-binary clocks out there.

Adafruit’s Fona microcontroller, with a GSM phone module, can be used to make your very own dieselpunk cellphone that can make calls and store contacts.

Read more on MAKE

The post Build a 1930’s Style Dieselpunk Cellphone appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

With October still six months away, you may not be thinking about Halloween decorations just yet. However, this Arduino-based ocular assembly could make for a spooky yet simple prop!

There are few things more unnerving than an eyeball or three looking at you from some concealed position—such as under clothing as in the project’s video. If you’d like to scare friends, family, or random visitors, Maker Will Cogley has the perfect solution with his 3D-printed animatronic eye and eyelid mechanism.

A joystick moves the eyeball around, while a small push-to-make switch blinks the eye and another potentiometer adjusts how wide open the eyelids are by default. The device itself, which can be controlled with any Arduino board capable of supporting four servos, took him a day to design and build, and should take much less time using his instructions, code, and STL files.

Want to create your own? You can find more details over on Cogley’s Instructables page here.

You may have seen robots that wobble around, such as BOB, OTTO and ZOWI. Though their locomotion style of shifting the unit’s weight on huge feet is clever, they all share a rather similar look. French computer scientist Paul-Louis Ageneau decided to do something about this and created his own biped in the form of a dancing teapot a la Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

To accomplish this, he attached four servos to the robot’s hips and ankles, which were connected to an Arduino Pro Mini and powered by a 9V alkaline battery. All the electronics are housed inside the 3D-printed teapot. It’s a neat build in itself, and in a separate post he goes over how to play music on an Arduino, which should make this little guy even more entertaining!

You can find Ageneau’s original blog here, as well as the Disney-like bot’s code on GitHub.

As with many products, if you want the best, you’ll pay top dollar for it. After seeing that the supposed best soldering station on the market sells for $500, YouTuber GreatScott! decided to instead purchase the iron and tip for a total of around $100, then reverse-engineer how the station should work.

From there, he used an Arduino Pro Mini along with a little OLED screen to display the temperature, and a toroidal transformer as well as several other components to power and complete his build. Finally, he 3D-printed a nice red enclosure and attached everything together, making his own custom soldering station.

You can see more on this station’s Instructables write-up, and check out GreatScott!’s channel for other interesting projects!

Using an Arduino along with some 3D-printed and salvaged parts, hacker “notionSunday” made an excellent photo turntable for under $10.

In a masterful display of converting one man’s junk into another man’s treasure, notionSunday used a VCR head as a very smooth-looking bearing surface for a small turntable. A DVD-ROM drive motor, a potentiometer from an old TV, and screws and wires from other electronics rounded out the internals of this build, as well as an Arduino Pro Mini with an H-bridge driver for control. All of this was placed inside of 3D-printed housing, then a disk was added to the top for other contraptions to rest on.

You can see it in action around the 8:00 mark in the video below. What really sticks out are the 3D-printed circumference markers, apparently there to indicate the speed of rotation or to hypnotize viewers. Check out notionSunday’s YouTube channel for more interesting projects, or his website for more pictures and code.