There are two kinds of people in the world (and, no, this isn’t a binary joke). People who love the Arduino, and people who hate it. If you’ve ever tried to use a standard prototype board to mount on an Arduino, you’ll know what kind of person you are. When you notice the pins aren’t on 0.1 inch centers, you might think, “What the heck were those idiots thinking!” Or, you might say, “How clever! This way the connectors are keyed to prevent mistakes.” From your choice of statement, we can deduce your feelings on the subject.

[Rssalnero] clearly said something different. We weren’t there, but we suspect it was: “Gee. I should 3D print a jig to bend headers to fit.” Actually, he apparently tried to do it by hand (we’ve tried it, too). The results are not usually very good.

He created two simple 3D printed jigs that let you bend an 8-pin header. The first jig bends the correct offset and the second helps you straighten out the ends again. You can see the result in the picture above.

[Rssalnero] notes that the second jig needed reinforcement, so it is made to take 8 pins to use as fulcrums. Probably doesn’t hurt to print the jigs fairly solid and using harder plastic like ABS or PETG, too. Even if you don’t have a 3D printer, this is about a 15 or 30 minute print on any sort of reasonable printer, so make a friend. Worst case, you could have one of the 3D printing vendors make it for you, or buy local.

We love little tool hacks like this. If you are too lazy to snap 8 pins off a 40 pin strip, maybe you’d like some help. If you’d rather go with a custom PC board, you might start here.

The WS2812 is an amazing piece of technology. 30 years ago, high brightness LEDs didn’t even exist yet. Now, you can score RGB LEDs that even take all the hard work out of controlling and addressing them! But as ever, we can do better.

Riffing on the ever popular Adafruit NeoPixel library, [Harm] created the WS2812FX library. The library has a whole laundry list of effects to run on your blinkenlights – from the exciting Hyper Sparkle to the calming Breathe inspired by Apple devices. The fantastic thing about this library is that it can greatly shorten development time of your garden-variety blinkables – hook up your WS2812s, pick your effect, and you’re done.

[Harm]’s gone and done the hard yards, porting this to a bevy of platforms – testing it on the Arduino Nano, Uno, Micro and ESP8266. As a proof of concept, they’ve also put together a great demonstration of the software – building some cute and stylish Christmas decorations from wood, aluminium, and hacked up Christmas light housings. Combining it with an ESP8266 & an app, the effects can be controlled from a smartphone over WiFi. The assembly video on YouTube shows the build process, using screws and nails to create an attractive frame using aluminium sheet.

This project is a great example of how libraries and modern hardware allow us to stand on the shoulders of giants. It’s quicker than ever to build amazingly capable projects with more LEDs than ever. Over the years we’ve seen plenty great WS2812 projects, like this sunrise alarm clock or this portable rave staff.
As always, blink hard, or go home. Video after the break.

In the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 — the neurotic computer — had a birthday in 1992 (for some reason, in the book it is 1997). In the late 1960s, that date sounded impossibly far away, but now it seems like a distant memory. The only thing is, we are only now starting to get computers with voice I/O that are practical and even they are a far cry from HAL.

[GeraldF6] built an Arduino-based clock. That’s nothing new but thanks to a MOVI board (ok, shield), this clock has voice input and output as you can see in the video below. Unlike most modern speech-enabled devices, the MOVI board (and, thus, the clock, does not use an external server in the cloud or any remote processing at all. On the other hand, the speech quality isn’t what you might expect from any of the modern smartphone assistants that talk. We estimate it might be about 1/9 the power of the HAL 9000.

You might wonder what you have to say to a clock. You’ll see in the video you can do things like set and query timers. Unlike HAL, the device works like a Star Trek computer. You address it as Arduino. Then it beeps and you can speak a command. There’s also a real-time clock module.

Setting up the MOVI is simple:

 recognizer.init(); // Initialize MOVI (waits for it to boot)
 recognizer.callSign("Arduino"); // Train callsign Arduino (may take 20 seconds)
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What time is it ?")); // Add sentence 1
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What is the time ?")); // Add sentence 2
 recognizer.addSentence(F("What is the date ?")); // Add sentence 3
...

Then a call to recognizer.poll will return a numeric code for anything it hears. Here is a snippet:

// Get result from MOVI, 0 denotes nothing happened, negative values denote events (see docs)

 signed int res = recognizer.poll(); 

// Tell current time
 if (res==1 | res==2) { // Sentence 1 & 2
 if ( now.hour() > 12) 
 recognizer.say("It's " + String(now.hour()-12) + " " + ( now.minute() < 10 ? "O" : "" ) +
     String(now.minute()) + "P M" ); // Speak the time
...

Fairly easy.

HAL being a NASA project (USSC, not NASA, and HAL was a product of a lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign – ed.) probably cost millions, but the MOVI board is $70-$90. It also isn’t likely to go crazy and try to kill you, so that’s another bonus. Maybe we’ll build one in a different casing. We recently talked about neural networks improving speech recognition and synthesis. This is a long way from that.

We hate to break it to [Rob Cai], but he’s built a VGA drawing toy, not an Etch-a-Sketch. How do we know? Simple, Etch-a-Sketch is a registered trademark. Regardless, his project shows how an Arduino can drive a VGA monitor using the VGAx library. Sure, you can only do four colors with a 120×60 resolution, but on the other hand, it requires almost no hardware other than the Arduino (you do need four resistors).

The hardware includes two pots and with the right firmware, it can also play pong, if you don’t want to give bent your artistic side. You can see videos of both the art toy and the pong game, below.

Because the device started as a pong game, [Rob’s] version has two boxes, each with a pot and a button. Of course, if you were really building it just for the drawing toy, you’d probably put it all in a box. Maybe even a red box. If we were building it, we’d be tempted to put a tilt sensor or an accelerometer in the box so you could shake it to erase the picture. Just saying.

If you want 640×480 resolution from an Arduino, it can be done, but it takes more hardware. If you were trying to get a kid interested in Arduino, you could do worse than start with two projects with video that are fun, use a handful of easy-to-source parts, and shares hardware. Then again, if you are in the “go big or go home” camp, we’d redirect to this pong game, instead.

[LDX] first noticed the odd sounds coming out of his ceiling fan, regularly, on the hour and half-hour. Then he noticed that the lights were flickering as well. Figuring something was up, he built a logging power-line monitor to see if he could decode the shadowy signals and figure out what cryptic messages were being transmitted over the power lines. Naturally, he suspected the Illuminati were behind it.

Even if you’re not prone to flights of fancy, you might want to keep track of your power line because it can serve as an accurate long-run timebase for projects, or because it can tell you something about the overall health of the grid.

[LDX]’s circuit is as simple as can be. A 10 V AC transformer reduces the mains power down to something reasonable. A resistive divider chops this down further to the range that an Arduino can handle, and then another voltage divider biases the signal to the Arduino’s ADC midpoint. The plus-minus 10 V signal thus swings between 0 and 5 V, just.

SPOILERS! After confirming that there was a higher-frequency wiggle superimposed on top of the power-line frequency, he contacted the folks at his power company in Denver. The system is called Decabit and it’s used to control street lights, hot water boilers, and other public infrastructure that might want to be coordinated to run when power is cheap or when it gets dark. The PDF that he links to explains it all, so you can take your tinfoil hat right back off.
But we still think it’s a fun project to look into the power lines. Who knows what other people will find? CON-spiracy!

[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.

In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, switches, and a wire maze that requires the player to navigate without bumping into the wire (think 2D Operation).

In addition to the code and hardware diagrams, there is a PDF file on GitHub describing more about the game. It is in Portuguese, though, so most of us will probably need a little translation help. However, a Brazillian site did have an English post about the game, which might be a good place to start.

You might not want to replicate the game, but it is a great example of how much an Arduino can do with some simple externals devices and some attention to packaging.

Sadly, most of our projects look more like this game (no offense to that hacker). Projects like this are way more likely to spark young people’s interest than a blinking LED or a capacitor meter. If you are more in the mood for arcade play, you can also check out Arduinocade.

There’s an iconic scene from the movie Big where [Tom Hanks] and [Robert Loggia] play an enormous piano by dancing around on the floor-mounted keys. That was the first thing we thought of when we saw [jegatheesan.soundarapandian’s] PC joystick rug. His drum playing (see the video below) wasn’t as melodious as [Hanks] and [Loggia] but then again they probably had a musical director.

At the heart of the project is, of course, an Arduino. An HC-05 provides a Bluetooth connection back to the PC. We thought perhaps an Arduino with USB input capability like the Leonardo might be in use, but instead, [jegatheesan] has a custom Visual Basic program on the PC that uses SendKeys to do the dirty work.

The switches are more interesting made with old CDs, foil, and sponges. The sponge holds the CDs apart until you step on them and the foil makes the CDs conductive. He uses a lot of Fevicol in the project–as far as we can tell, that’s just an Indian brand of PVA glue, so Elmer’s or any other white glue should do just as well.

The glue also handles the fabric parts. When a project says “no sewing” we realize how some people feel about soldering. The CD/foil/sponge switches might be useful in other contexts. We’d be interested in how the sponges wear with prolonged use.

We’ve seen other giant controllers before. Of course, if you really want a big controller, you can’t beat a Nissan (the link is dead, but the video will give ou the idea).

A tachometer used to be an accessory added to the dash of only the sportiest of cars, but now they’re pretty much standard equipment on everything from sleek coupes to the family truckster. If your daily driver was born without a tach, fear not – a simple Arduino tachometer is well within your reach.

The tach-less vehicle in question is [deepsyx]’s Opel Astra, which from the video below seems to have the pep and manual transmission that would make a tach especially useful. Eschewing the traditional analog meter display or even a digital readout, [deepsyx] opted to indicate shift points with four LEDs mounted to a scrap of old credit card. The first LED lights at 4000 RPM, with subsequent LEDs coming on at each 500 RPM increase beyond that. At 5800 RPM, all the LEDs blink as a redline warning.  [Deepsyx] even provides a serial output of the smoothed RPM value, so logging of RPM data is a possible future enhancement.

The project is sensing engine speed using the coil trigger signal – a signal sent from the Engine Control Unit (ECU) which tells one of the ignition coilpacks to fire. The high voltage signal from the coilpack passes on to the spark plug, which ignites the air-fuel mixture in that cylinder. This is a good way to determine engine RPM without mechanical modifications to the car. Just make sure you modify the code for the correct number of cylinders in your vehicle.

Simple, cheap, effective – even if it is more of a shift point indicator than true tachometer, it gets the job done. But if you’re looking for a more traditional display and have a more recent vintage car, this sweeping LED tachometer might suit you more.

[via r/Arduino]

RC flying is one of those multi-disciplinary hobbies that really lets you expand your skill set. You don’t really need to know much to get started, but to get good you need to be part aeronautical engineer, part test pilot and part mechanic. But if you’re going to really go far you’ll also need to get good at electronics, which was part of the reason behind this Arduino servo tester.

[Peter Pokojny] decided to take the plunge into electronics to help him with the hobby, and he dove into the deep end. He built a servo tester and demonstrator based on an Arduino, and went the extra mile to give it a good UI and a bunch of functionality. The test program can cycle the servo under test through its full range of motion using any of a number of profiles — triangle, sine or square. The speed of the test cycle is selectable, and there’s even a mode to command the servo to a particular position manually. We’ll bet the build was quite a lesson for [Peter], and he ended up with a useful tool to boot.

Need to go even further back to basics than [Peter]? Then check out this primer on servos and this in-depth guide.

[via r/Arduino]

In the Red Dwarf TV series, Talkie Toaster wants to know if you want toast, and if not toast, then maybe a muffin or waffle, and it will pester you incessantly until you smash it with a 14lb lump hammer and throw it in a waste disposal. Now [slider2732] has actually gone and made one of the infernal machines!

He’s hidden a PIR sensor in the toaster handle to tell an Arduino Pro Mini when someone is unfortunate enough to be passing by. The Arduino then reads sound files from an SD card reader and plays them through a 3 watt amplifier out to a speaker. For that he uses the TMRpcm library available on github.

[slider2732] cleverly mounted the speaker to the side of the toaster along with some appropriately shaped bits and pieces, and some LEDs to make it appear and work much like the circular panel that lights up on the real Talkie Toaster. We dare you to watch the video after the break, unless you really are looking for toast. As a consolation, the video also walks through making it.

These links will take you to clips of Talkie Toaster in the TV series before he was smashed and after he was repaired.

And what else can you do with a toaster? Why not make a flying one. Of course what seems to be most popular here on Hackaday is making reflow ovens from toaster ovens.