Sometimes the technology part of a project isn’t the hard part. It is having an idea for something both useful and doable. Sure, a robot butler that would do your cleaning and laundry would be useful, but might be out of reach for most of us. On the other hand, there’s only so many use cases for another blinking LED.

[Martinhui] knows how to use an ultrasonic sensor with an Arduino. Driving a motor isn’t that hard, either. The question is: what do you do with that? [Martin’s] answer: Automate a trash can. You can see a video of the result, below.

You can find commercial versions of this, of course, but what fun is that? The can is a bit small, but a larger motor or a different mechanical design could scale it up easily.

As robotic trash cans go, this isn’t that ambitious, but it is highly doable. If only it connected to the Internet.

There was a time, not so long ago, when all the cool kids were dual-booting their computers: one side running Linux for hacking and another running Windows for gaming. We know, we were there. But why the heck would you ever want to dual-boot an Arduino? We’re still scratching our heads about the application, but we know a cool hack when we see one; [Vinod] soldered the tiny surface-mount EEPROM on top of the already small AVR chip! (Check the video below.)

Aside from tiny-soldering skills, [Vinod] wrote his own custom bootloader for the AVR-based Arduino. With just enough memory to back up the AVR’s flash, the bootloader can shuffle the existing program out to the EEPROM while flashing the new program in. For more details, read the source.

While you might think that writing a bootloader is deep juju (it can be), [Vinod]’s simple bootloader application is written in C, using a style that should be familiar to anyone who has done work with an Arduino. It could certainly be optimized for size, but probably not for readability (and tweakability).

Why would you ever want to dual boot an Arduino? Maybe to be able to run testing and stable code on the same device? You could do the same thing over WiFi with an ESP8266. But maybe you don’t have WiFi available? Whatever, we like the hack and ‘because you can’ is a good enough excuse for us. If you do have a use in mind, post up in the comments!

With All Hallow’s Eve looming close, makers have the potential to create some amazing costumes we’ll remember for the rest of the year. If you’re a fan of the hugely addict-*cough* popular game Minecraft, perhaps you’ve considered cosplaying as your favorite character skin, but lacked the appropriate props. [Graham Kitteridge] and his friends have decided to pay homage to the game by making their own light-up Minecraft swords.

These swords use 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, designed so as to hide the electronics for the lights and range finder in the hilt. Range finder? Oh, yes, the sword uses an Arduino Uno-based board to support NewPixels LEDs and a 433Mhz radio transmitter and receiver for ranged detection of other nearby swords that — when they are detected — will trigger the sword to glow. Kind of like the sword Sting, but for friendlies.

All of the files for the parts are available on the project’s Thingverse page and the board setup can be purchased here. If you want to have some fun controlling the real world from inside Minecraft, check out how this fan uses it to turn on lamps in their home.

Nobody’s perfect. Sometimes you’re up late at night writing a blog post and you stumble upon an incredible story. You write it up, and it ends up being, well, incredible. IEEE Spectrum took the bait on this video (embedded below) where [Keran McKenzie] claims to have built a self-driving car for under $1,000 AUS with Arduinos.

The video is actually pretty funny, and we don’t think it’s intended to be a mass-media hoax as much as a YouTube joke. After letting the car “take over” for a few seconds, it swerves and [Keran] pretends to have hit something. (He’s using his knees people!) There are lots of takes with him under the car, and pointing at a single wire that supposedly makes the whole thing work. Yeah, right.

We were a bit bummed, though. We don’t think you can even reliably interface a sensor system with the steering wheel, accelerator, and brakes for as little as one grand, but we would have been entirely happy to see it done. We’re not saying that the software to run an autonomous car is the easy part, but we’d love to have a hack at it if the hardware were affordable.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a real autonomous driving experience, we recommend starting by hacking RC cars and giving them substantially bigger brains than an Arduino. Once you’ve got that working, making progress to a real car is doable, but expensive. And it helps to be [geohot].

And lest you think we’re all holier-than-thou, check out our most embarrassing post ever. We could just curl up and die. Feel better soon, IEEE Spectrum!

Thanks [jpiat] for the tip!

[Tim] was tired of compromising his portrait-oriented digital photos by shoehorning them into landscape-only frames. Unable to find a commercial solution, he built his own rotating digital photo frame from a 27″ LCD TV.

It uses a Raspi 3 to find [Tim]’s pictures on a giant SD card. He originally wanted to have the Pi pull pictures from Google Photos and display them randomly, but the API doesn’t work in that direction. Instead, a Python script looks at the pictures on the SD card and determines whether each is landscape or portrait-oriented. If a picture was taken in portrait-mode, the display will rotate 90 degrees. Rotation is handled with an Arduino, a stepper motor, and some 3D-printed herringbone gears. The first version was a bit noisy, so [Tim] re-printed the motor mount and the pinion gear out of flexible filament.

[Tim] designed the mount and frame himself and laser-cut the pieces out of birch plywood. We like that he accounted for the front-heaviness and that he covered the high voltage circuitry with acrylic to mitigate the risk of shock. All the code and design files are available on his project page. Make the jump to see a brief demonstration followed by a walk-through and stay for the six-minute slide show.

In our eyes, there isn’t a much higher calling for Arduinos than using them to make musical instruments. [victorh88] has elevated them to rock star status with his homemade electronic drum kit.

The kit uses an Arduino Mega because of the number of inputs [victorh88] included. It’s not quite Neil Peart-level, but it does have a kick drum, a pair of rack toms, a floor tom, a snare, a crash, a ride, and a hi-hat. With the exception of the hi-hat, all the pieces in the kit use a piezo element to detect the hit and play the appropriate sample based on [Evan Kale]’s code, which was built to turn a Rock Band controller into a MIDI drum kit. The hi-hat uses an LDR embedded in a flip-flop to properly mimic the range of an actual acoustic hi-hat. This is a good idea that we have seen before.

[victorh88] made all the drums and pads out of MDF with four layers of pet screen sandwiched in between. In theory, this kit should be able to take anything he can throw at it, including YYZ. The crash and ride cymbals are MDF with a layer of EVA foam on top. This serves two purposes: it absorbs the shock from the sticks and mutes the sound of wood against wood. After that, it was just a matter of attaching everything to a standard e-drum frame using the existing interfaces. Watch [victorh88] beat a tattoo after the break.

If you hate Arduinos but are still reading for some reason, here’s a kit made with a Pi.

Building an arcade cabinet seems to be a rite of passage for many hackers and woodworkers. Not that there is anything wrong with that: as this series of posts from [Alessandro] at boxedcnc shows, there is an art to doing it well.

His final build is impressive, with quality buttons, a genuine-looking banner, and even a coin slot so he can charge people to play. His build log covers both the carpentry and electronic aspects of the build, from cutting the panels to his own code for running the coin acceptor that takes your quarter (or, as he is in Italy, Euro coins) and triggers the game to play.

To extract money from his family, he used the Sparkfun COM-1719 coin acceptor, which can be programmed to send different pulses for different coins, connected to an Arduino which is also connected to the joystick and buttons. The Arduino emulates a USB keyboard and is connected to an old PC running MAME with the Attract Mode front end. It’s a quality build, down to the Bubble Bobble banner, and the coin slot means that it might even make some money back eventually.

[Alain Mauer] wanted to build something like a Google Glass setup using a small OLED screen. A 0.96 inch display was too large, but a 0.66 inch one worked well. Combining an Arduino, a Bluetooth module, and battery, and some optics, he built glasses that will show the readout from a multimeter.

You’d think it was simple to pull this off, but it isn’t for a few reasons as [Alain] discovered. The device cost about 70 Euro and you can see a video of the result, below.

The video shows a common problem and its solution. You are probing a mains circuit and have to look away to read the voltmeter. With the glasses, you don’t have to look away, the voltage floats in your field of vision.

These reminded us of Pedosaglass which we covered earlier. Of course, it used a different optical solution. We’ve also seen Google Glass knockoffs as part of our Hackaday prize entries.

For the last two years, Arduino LLC (the arduino.cc, Massimo one) and Arduino SRL (the arduino.org, Musto one) have been locked in battle over the ownership of the Arduino trademark. That fight is finally over. Announced at the New York Maker Faire today, “Arduino” will now to Arduino Holding, the single point of distribution for new products, and a non-profit Arduino Foundation, responsible for the community and Arduino IDE.

Since early 2015, Arduino — not the Arduino community, but the organization known as Arduino — has been split in half. Arduino LLC sued Arduino SRL for trademark infringement. The case began when Arduino SRL, formerly Smart Projects SRL and manufacturers of the Arduino boards with a tiny map of Italy on the silk screen, began selling under the Arduino name. Arduino LLC, on the other hand, wanted to internationalize the brand and license production to other manufacturers.

While Arduino and Arduino have been tied up in court for the last few years, from the outside this has look like nothing else but petty bickering. Arduino SRL forked the Arduino IDE and bumped up the version number. Later, an update from SRL was pushed out to Amazon buyers telling them Arduino.org was the real Arduino. Resellers were in a tizzy, and for a time Maker Faires had two gigantic Arduino booths. No one knew what was going on.

All of this is now behind us. The open source hardware community’s greatest source of drama is now over.

I spoke with Massimo after the announcement, and although the groundwork is laid out, the specifics aren’t ready to be disclosed yet. There’s still a lot to work out, like what to do with the Arduino.org Github repo, which TLD will be used (we’re rooting for .org), support for the multitude of slightly different products released from both camps over the years, and finer points that aren’t publicly visible. In a few months, probably before the end of the year, we’ll get all the answers to this. Now, though, the Arduino wars are over. Arduino is dead, long live Arduino.

Well all know cellular automata from Conway’s Game of Life which simulates cellular evolution using rules based on the state of all eight adjacent cells. [Gavin] has been having fun playing with elementary cellular automata in his spare time. Unlike Conway’s Game, elementary automata uses just the left and right neighbors of a cell to determine the next cell ahead in the row. Despite this comparative simplicity, some really complex patterns emerge, including a Turing-complete one.

[Gavin] started off doing the calculations by hand for fun. He made some nice worksheets for this. As we can easily imagine, doing the calculations by hand got boring fast. It wasn’t long before his thoughts turned to automating his cellular automata. So, he put together an automatic cellular automator. (We admit, we are having a bit of fun with this.)

This could have been a quick software project but half the fun is seeing the simulations on a purpose-built ecosystem. The files to build the device are hosted on Thingiverse. Like other cellular automata projects, it uses LED matrices to display the data. An Arduino acts as the brain and some really cool retro switches from the world’s most ridiculously organized electronics collection finish the look of the project.

To use, enter the starting condition with the switches at the bottom. The code on the Arduino then computes and displays the pattern on the matrix. Pretty cool and way faster than doing it by hand.