As fun as claw games are, the jaws are always disappointingly weak, and you usually end up with bupkis. What if the jaws were completely within your  control? That’s the idea behind [Upside Down Labs]’ muscle-controlled servo claw game.

While electromyography (EMG) is great for identifying neuro-muscular abnormalities and allows for amazing prosthetic limbs to work, it can also be used for fun. As you’ll see in the video after the break, accurate block-stacking (and possible candy-grabbing) depends on teamwork and tensed muscles.

Though the user provides the muscle, the brains behind this operation is an Arduino Uno with a Muscle BioAmp shield stacked on top, which [Upside Down Labs] also created. This shield makes it ridiculously easy to connect EMG sensors and other I²C devices like screens and, well, servo claws. From there, it’s really just a matter of printing the claw, connecting it to a 9g servo, and using an accompanying kit to prepare the skin and connect the muscles to the Arduino. Be sure to check it out in tense block-stacking action after the break.

If you want to listen in on your muscles, look no further than the BioAmp EMG Pill.

[a-RN-au-D] was looking for something fun to do with his son and dreamed up a laser blaster game that ought to put him in the running for father of the year. It was originally just going to be made of cardboard, but you know how these things go. We’re happy the design went this far, because that blaster looks fantastic.

Both the blaster and the target run on Arduino Nanos. There’s a 5mW laser module in the blaster, and a speaker for playing the pew pew-related sounds of your choice. Fire away on the blaster button, and the laser hits a light-dependent resistor mounted in the middle of the target. When the target registers a hit, it swings backward on a 9g servo and then returns quickly to vertical for the next shot.

There are some less obvious features that really make this game a hit. The blaster can run in 10-shooter mode (or 6, or whatever you change it to in the code) with a built-in reload delay, or it can be set to fully automatic. If you’re short on space or just get sick of moving the target to different flat surfaces, it can be mounted on the wall instead — the target moves forward when hit and then resets back to flat. Check out the demo video we loaded up after the break.

No printer? No problem — here’s a Node-RED shooting gallery that uses simple wooden targets.

When [Taste the Code] saw that his YouTube channel was approaching 1,000 subscribers, it was time to do something special. But celebration is no reason to be wasteful. This flag-waving celebratory hat has endless possibilities for the future.

The build is simple, which is just right for these strange times of scarcity. An Arduino Uno hot-glued to the back of the hat is directly driving a pair of 9g servos on the front. [Taste the Code] made the flags by sticking two stickers back to back with a bamboo skewer in between. The code is flavored such that the flags will wave in one of three randomly-chosen patterns — swing around, swing in reverse, and wild gesticulations.

After the novelty of the whole 1k subs thing wears off, [Taste the Code] can change the flags over to Jolly Rogers to help with social distancing. And someday in the future when things are really looking up, they can be changed over to SARS-CoV-2 victory flags, or fly the colors of a local sports team. We think it would be way cool to program some kind of real semaphore message into the flags, though the mobility might be too limited for that. Check out the build video after the break, which happens picture-in-picture as [Taste the Code] dishes out a channel retrospective and lays out a course for the future.

Even though YouTube messed with subscriber counts, we think it’s still worth making a cool counter. Here’s one with a Tetris twist.