It used to be hot air soldering gear was exotic, but not anymore. There are plenty of relatively inexpensive choices. Many of these appear to be the same despite having different brand names and model numbers. One that is common and inexpensive is the 858D. These run about $50. [Gabse] has one and decided to upgrade it using some open source controller hardware and software. There wasn’t a complete guide, so he created one himself.

According to the original GitHub page, the controller will work with the Youyue-858D and any clones. However, there are others like the Atten 858D that use a different controller. In addition, there have been several variants. [Gabse’s] guide is for the latest version. Information on other versions and brands might be on this discussion board thread.

The new controller and firmware offer better temperature regulation, a safety feature that prevents the handpiece from heating up if power is applied when the handpiece is not docked, fan fault detection, a cold air mode, a sleep mode, and more. There are PCBs available from OSH Park if you want to attempt it yourself. There are also a few YouTube videos showing the custom firmware, one of which appears below.

In addition to the controller change, [Gabse] shows you some optional tweaks to make the handpiece more robust, change the power plug, and make the cradle sensor more reliable. Worthwhile changes and all well-suited for the processing power of the Arduino.

We have gotten used to having the handpiece fixed on the bench, that’s another easy hack. You can also try an unholy union of soldering iron and articulated lamp.

OK, we haven’t heard of a Ford Cylon either. However, there is now a Mustang Cobra out there that has been given a famous Cylon characteristic. [Monta Elkins] picked himself up an aftermarket third brake light assembly, hacked it, and installed it on said Mustang.

The brake light assembly contains 12 LEDs, which unfortunately, are not individually addressable. Additionally, by the looks of it, the brake light housing was not meant to be opened up. That didn’t get [Monta] down though. There’s more than one way to skin a cat, but he chose to use a hot knife to open the assembly, which worked quite well. A rotary cutter tool was used to cut the traces between the LEDs allowing them to be individually controlled with an Arduino. A Bluetooth module allows him to control the new brake light from his smartphone. There are different modes (including a special mode that he shows off at the end of the video) that can be selected via a Bluetooth Terminal app.

There is no schematic or code link in the video itself or the description, but [Monta] did hit the high points. Therefore, it shouldn’t be too hard to replicate.

This isn’t the first brake light hack we’ve featured. This one goes way beyond just animated lights.  This one requires no programming. Rather wear your brake light? We’ve got your back(pack).

We’ve all seen hamsters in a cage, furiously running nowhere. Perhaps you’ve thought about the pointlessness of this activity, before going to the gym to lift weights up and down or run on a treadmill. From an outside perspective, both activities seem pointless, but when you realize the benefits, maybe tracking what “feats of strength” you’re able to accomplish, things become much more clear.

As seen on Hackaday, in order to track the activity of his daughter’s hamster, John Mueller implemented an Arduino Uno-based system that records revolutions using a magnet and a reed switch. Every time the magnet on the wheel passes the fixed switch, it triggers an Arduino input, recording how many revolutions, and thus how many miles the little guy runs each night. Results are quite impressive considering its size, recording over 3.5 miles on one occasion!

This type of encoder concept could be used in many different situations, such as logging bicycle speeds, or tracking motor stats.

If you’re familiar with the Segway or other vehicles that balance in what is known as an “inverted pendulum” configuration, you may think that while interesting, creating something similar would be too complicated or out of your budget. Though perhaps still not simple, Joop Brokking takes you through his design for this type of bot in the video seen here, making it accessible if you’d like to build your own.

The robot, which will cost about $80 in parts, uses two stepper motors for greater movement precision than could be had with normal DC models, and employs an Arduino Pro Mini, along with an MPU-6050 accelerometer/gyroscope for control. It can be driven around by a Wii U-style nunchuck, which transmits to the robot via an Arduino Uno and wireless transceiver module.

You can find more info and product links for this project on Brokking.net.

Depending on your point-of-view, you may see claw machines as an interesting device that can normally be ignored, or perhaps magnet for quarters that you must satisfy until you capture the stuffed animal that’s “so easy to get.” Maybe these gantry-crane gadgets would be a bit more fun if you could play them at home to your heart’s content. If that sounds appealing, then Ryan Bates of Retro Built Games has the perfect solution with his “Super Claw” machine.

This project, though on version four, is not currently for sale as a kit, but he is now selling his stepper driver board for the device, which links up to an Arduino Mega via an IDC cable. This takes advantage of the brick of I/O opposite the USB and power connector on the Mega to clean up wiring significantly.

You can buy the board here and check out his build page for lots more info on the (still ongoing) development process!

[Alberto Piganti], aka [pighixxx] has been making circuit diagram art for a few years now, and has just come out with a book that’s available on Kickstarter. He sent us a copy to review, and we spent an hour or so with a refreshing beverage and a binder full of beautiful circuit diagrams. It doesn’t get better than that!

[pighixxx] started out making very pretty and functional pinout diagrams for a number of microcontrollers, and then branched out to modules and development boards like the Arduino and ESP8266. They’re great, and we’ll admit to having a printout of his SMD ATMega328 and the ESP-12 on our wall. His graphical style has been widely copied, which truly is the sincerest form of flattery.

But after pinouts, what’s next? Fully elaborated circuit diagrams, done in the same style, of course. “ABC: Basic Connections” started out life as a compendium of frequently used sub-circuits in Arduino projects. But you can take “Arduino” with a grain of salt — these are all useful for generic microcontroller-based projects. So whether you want to drive a 12 V solenoid from a low-voltage microcontroller, drive many LEDs with shift registers, or decode a rotary encoder, there is a circuit snippet here for you.

One of the things that we like most about the graphics in “ABC” is that they’re not dumbed down — they’re fundamentally just well-done circuit diagrams, but with graphic touches and extra detail where it actually helps to clarify things. This is a middle ground between the kind of schematic you use in a PCB layout program and the kind of diagram you get from Fritzing. In the former, every part has a symbol but multifunction parts like microcontrollers are just represented as squares bristling with pin numbers. In the latter, wiring up an IC is easy because the parts and pins are represented graphically, but you quickly run out of colors for the different wires, and the “breadboard” turns into a rat’s nest with a circuit of any complexity.

“ABC” takes the middle road, using standard circuit diagram style overall, but also the nice graphic representations of the ICs and modules that [pighixxx] is good at. Is a 2N2222 pinned EBC or BCE? You don’t have to look that up, because it’s sketched out for you here. We’d guess that this attractive, but information-rich, style is a great fit for the target audience — people with some electronics experience who do not yet have their favorite transistor symbol tattooed on their forearm. [pighixxx]’s diagrams are simple, easy to understand, easy to use, and pretty to boot.

There is a planned online counterpart to the book, with further elaborations of all of the circuit setups. They’re not finished yet, but they have a lot more of the flavor of the Fritzing-style, this-wire-goes-to-that-hole diagrams. This style does work better in an online format than in a physical book, because you can build up the rat’s nest in bite-sized steps, none of which are too overwhelming. But honestly, for an advanced beginner or intermediate electronics hacker, the book can be treated as stand-alone. The web content may help the rank newbie when they get stuck.

The breadth of circuits in “ABC” is fairly wide, covering most of the microcontroller-interfacing problems that we’ve ever encountered. None of the circuits are revolutionary — they’re the tried-and-true, correct solutions to the various problems, rather than anything too hacky or clever. We weren’t surprised by any of the circuits, but we didn’t find anything that we wouldn’t use ourselves either. These are basic connections after all, and a darn solid collection of them.

To sum up, “ABC” is an attractive book in a handy binder format that would make a great collection of solutions for anyone who’s just getting started in the whole “Arduino” scene but who gets hung up on interfacing the chips with the real world. It’s a handy reference for the pinouts of a number of frequently used parts, combined with the resistors, flyback diodes, level-shifting circuits, and whatever else that you’d need to make them work. It’s what we wish our simple circuit diagrams looked like. We like it.

Phone screens keep getting bigger. Computer screens keep getting bigger. Why not a large trackpad to use as a mouse? [MaddyMaxey] had that thought and with a few components and some sewing skills created a trackpad in a tablecloth.

The electronics in this project are right off the shelf. A Flora board for the brains and 4 capacitive touch boards. If you haven’t seen the Flora, it is a circular-shaped Arduino made for sewing into things. The real interesting part is the construction. If you haven’t worked with conductive fabric and thread, this will be a real eye-opener. [Maddy’s] blog has a lot of information about her explorations into merging fabric and electronics and also covers things like selecting conductive thread.

As an optional feature, [MaddyMaxey] added vibration motors that provide haptic feedback to her touchpad. We were hoping for a video, but there doesn’t seem to be one. The code is just the example program for the capacitive sensor boards, although you can see in a screenshot the additions for the haptic motors.

We’ve covered the Flora before, by the way. You could also make a ridiculously large touch surface using tomography, although the resolution isn’t quite good enough for mouse purposes.

Are you a Bitcoin miner or trader, but find yourself lacking the compulsive need to check exchange rates like the drug-fuelled daytraders of Wall Street? Fear not – you too can adorn your home or office with a Bitcoin Price Ticker! The post is in Italian but you can read a translated version here.

It’s a straightforward enough build – an Arduino compatible board with an onboard ESP8266 is hooked up with an HD44780-compatible LCD. It’s then a simple matter of scraping the Bitcoin price from the web and displaying it on the LCD. It’s a combination of all the maker staples, tied together with some off-the-shelf libraries – it’s quick, and it works.

What makes the build extra nice is the use of custom characters on the LCD. The HD44780 is a character based display, and this project appears to use a screen with two lines of sixteen characters each. However, a custom character set has been implemented in the display which uses several “characters” on the screen to create a single number. It’s a great way to make the display more legible from a distance, as the numbers are much larger, and the Bitcoin logo has been faithfully recreated as well. It’s small touches like this that can really set a project apart. We’d love to see this expanded to display other financial market information and finished off in a nice case.

If you’re wondering what you can actually do with Bitcoin, check out the exploits of this robotic darknet shopper. Oh, and Microsoft will take them, too.

This weekend at the Bay Area Maker Faire, Arduino in conjunction with SiFive, a fabless provider of the Open Source RISC-V micros, introduced the Arduino Cinque. This is a board running one of the fastest microcontrollers available, and as an added bonus, this board includes Espressif’s ESP32, another wonderchip that features WiFi and Bluetooth alongside a very, very powerful SoC.

Details on the Arduino Cinque are slim at the moment, but from what we’ve seen so far, the Cinque is an impressively powerful board featuring the RISC-V FE310 SoC from SiFive, an ESP32, and an STM32F103. The STM32 appears to be dedicated to providing the board with USB to UART translation, something the first RISC-V compatible Arduino solved with an FTDI chip. Using an FTDI chip is, of course, a questionable design decision when building a capital ‘O’ Open microcontroller platform, and we’re glad SiFive and Arduino found a better solution. It’s unknown if this STM32 can be used alongside the FE310 and ESP32 at this point.

We’ve taken a look at SiFive’s FE310 SoC, and it is an extremely capable chip. It was released first at the HiFive1, and our hands-on testing revealed this is a chip that outperforms the current performance champ of the Arduino world, the Teensy 3.6. Of course, with any new architecture, there will be a few problems porting the vast number of libraries over to the FE310, but SiFive has included an Arduino compatible SDK. It’s promising, and we can’t wait to see SiFive’s work in more boards.

The Arduino has inspired many a creative projects that can be beneficial to humanity. The Arduino Hamster Wheel Pedometer by [John Mueller] on the other hand is a creation that is meant for the cute furry rodent pets. When [John Mueller]’s daughter wanted to keep track of her hamster’s night-time strolls, her maker-dad saw it as an opportunity to get her involved in technology. The project consists of a hamster-wheel with a magnet that triggers a reed switch on completing a revolution. The entire assembly is custom-made and [John Mueller] does an excellent job documenting the build with a lot of clear images.

The wheel is affixed to a shaft with a ball bearing at one end and the entire thing is mounted on the side of the cage so that it can be removed with ease for maintenance. The reed switch is embedded in the wooden mounting block such that the connecting cables pass from inside the assembly. This prevents the hamster from coming in contact with the cabling or damaging it in any way. An LCD and the Arduino Uno are placed outside the cage and are used to display the revolutions of the wheel as well as the equivalent miles travelled.

The code for the Arduino is also supplied for anyone who wants to replicate the project and the video below shows the working of the project. The project could also be extended to count calories burned as well as running speed. This project is a prime example of how technology can be used to assist and is similar to the IoT Hamster Wheels that tweets every movement of the Hamster Life.