We’ve seen automated Rubick’s Cube solvers before, but never one that has garnered as many awards as [James]‘ popsicle stick and LEGO Rubick’s Cube solver.\

To keep the project complexity down, [James] opted not to use a webcam to detect the color pattern on each face of the cube. Instead, he wrote a little Python app to manually enter the pattern on each face before letting his algorithm loose on the cube and calculating how to solve it.

So far, [James] has seen a huge amount of success from his project. He entered it in the New Zealand Brightsparks competition netting him $1000. This competition led to a win in the Realize the Dream science competition where he won a major prize and an entry into the International Taiwan Science Fair held early next year. An awesome accomplishment from a budding hacker, and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

You can check out a video of [James]‘ cube solver after the break.

This anthropomorphized wood bowl will read Tweets out loud. It was built by [William Lindmeier] as part of his graduate work in the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at New York University. View the clip after the break to see and hear a list from his Twitter feed read in rather pleasant text-to-speech voices.

The electronics involved are rather convoluted. Inside the upturned bowl you’ll find both an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi. But that’s not the only thing that goes into this. The best sounding text-to-speech program [William] could find was for OSX, so there is a remote computer involved as well. But we think what makes this special is the concept and execution, not the level of hardware inefficiency.

The knob to the left sets the volume and is also responsible for powering down the device. The knob of the right lets you select from various Twitter lists. Each turn of the knob is responded to with a different LED color in the nose and a spoken menu label. You can get a quick overview of the project from this summary post.

The folks at Arduino seem to be stepping up their game. With the new Arduino Leonardo board able to emulate USB keyboards and mice right out of the box, it seems the perfect time for Arduino designers to come up with a proper video game controller. This new board is called the Arduino Esplora and packs enough buttons and sensors inside to capture just about any user input you can imagine.

On board the Esplora is the same ATMega 32U4 microcontroller found in the newest Arduino boards. For input, the designers included an analog joystick, four tact switches, a linear pot, a microphone, and light sensor. The Esplora also includes a three-axis accelerometer, RGB LED, buzzer, and a breakout for an SPI-controlled TFT LCD display, lest you would want to recreate something like the new Wii U controller on your own.

You can check out everything the Esplora can do over on the official Arduino site for the Esplora library.

When you don’t want to use I2C or SPI, and MIDI and DMX are old hat, [Scott] comes along and invents a very strange networking protocol that is just daisy chaining a few Arduinos together with serial connections.

Strange as it may seem, this networking protocol actually makes a whole lot of sense. [Scott] is working on an animatronic birdhouse in the vein of Disney’s Imagineers and needed to network a whole bunch of Arduinos without using up precious IO pins.

The networking stack [Scott] came up with capitalizes on the hardware UART in each Arduino by simply daisy-chaining several boards together. By adding an FTDI breakout at the beginning of the chain, [Scott] can control dozens of Arduinos straight from a terminal

[Scott] isn’t using off-the-shelf Arduinos for this project – a few months ago he found 100 Arduino-compatible stepper motor controllers while dumpster diving at his job, giving him more than enough nodes to come up with some pretty crazy networking protocols. It’s a great use of the hardware he has on hand, and a very clever solution to controlling dozens of microcontrollers at once.

Check out [Scott]‘s demo after the break.

[Rodrigo] has been working with Arduino for some time now, but always thought it lacked some features which advanced users would really find useful. He decided to devote some free time to fixing the problem and ended up coding an Arduino IDE for more advanced users. A screenshot of his work — called MariaMole — can be seen above. It is obviously different from the standard IDE, bot not so much as to scare off new users.

This is meant to complement the original IDE, so it actually uses those configuration settings as dependencies. Once running, the program allows you to have multiple projects open at once. These are managed with the tree in the left hand column and a series of tabs along the top of the code window. When it comes time to compile and load the sketch you can click one button like normal, or use the program to fine tune your compiler flags, libraries includes, and the like. It also allows for interaction through one or more serial terminal windows. We haven’t tried it ourselves, so please leave a comment with your thoughts after having given it a go.

[Massimo], one of the creators of the Arduino, is a little perturbed over what passes for the truth over on Kickstarter.

While [Massimo] does recognize that Kickstarter can be a force of good launching garage-designed projects into the hands of willing consumers, he noticed something was a little fishy with the recent smARtDUINO kickstarter (notice the capital letters, by the way). Right near the top of the smARtDUINO’s kickstarter page is the phrase, “For years we manufactured the ARDUINO in Italy. Now we created a new Open System: modular, scalable, the world’s cheapest and smallest!”

Being at the top of the Arduino organization, you’d think [Massimo] would have heard of these former Arduino manufacturers. The name didn’t ring a bell to him, so he called up the factory. No one at the factory had heard of them, and after a long search it was finally revealed the head of the smARtDUINO project hired two factory workers who worked for a supplier the official Arduino manufacturer uses.

[Massimo] makes the comparison of, “if he hires two factory workers from Ford he can claim he used to manufacture Ford cars.” We’re thinking that’s a little generous. It’s more like hiring two people who used to restock the vending machines in a Foxconn plant and claiming you used to build Apple computers.

With a simple trademark infringement on his hands, [Massimo] contacted Kickstarter to see what could be done. Kickstarter replied:

Thanks for writing in and bringing this to our attention. This is a matter that must be taken up directly with the project creator. You can contact them by clicking “Contact me” on the project page.
Best,
Kickstarter

For [Massimo], and us, that’s just not a sufficient answer. We’re thinking Kickstarter has an obligation to vet their projects and make sure the creators of these projects are who they say they are.

But enough about what we think. What do you, the Hackaday reader, think about this situation?

There’s a new Arduino in town, this time designed in conjunction with Adafruit. It’s the Arduino Micro, a very neat little board designed for breadboard use.

Ostensibly an upgrade of the long in the tooth Arduino Nano, the new Micro takes all the best features of the new Arduino Leonardo and shrinks them down to a convenient stick of gum-sized package. It’s powered by the ATmega32u4 microcontroller, and with a MicroUSB port is able to emulate keyboards, mice and other USB input devices.

Of course with any microcontroller dev board, comparisons must be drawn between the Arduino Micro and the very popular Teensy USB dev board. Like the Teensy boards (and the new Arduino Leonardo), the Micro is able to function as a USB keyboard or mouse. The Teensys, though, is loaded with LUFA making it able to emulate just about anything from mice, USB audio devices, and MIDI synths.

Are you bored with just drinking beer? Are your friends constantly sneaking into your house and stealing your sacred beverages? If so, perhaps you need KegDroid – the Android controlled beer tap created by [Paul Carff].

Looking for a way to add more excitement to drinking his beer, [Paul] spiced up his tap with a little extra technology. He added an Android tablet for touchscreen navigation of the menus, an Arduino to control the flow sensors and solenoid valves, and an NFC reader to act as security for restricted access.  Users must be authenticated before they are allowed to pour any alcohol.

Your name and photo are pulled from your Google+ account as you’re logged in, then you simply select your beverage of choice, and if you’d like a one, eight, or twelve ounce pour. Flow sensors automatically shut off when you have the desired quantity.

Seems like you get more foam than beer, but all in all it’s a cool bar top app.

Check out the video after the break.

Never one to pass up the recycle pile at work, [Scott] usually doesn’t find much. A few old hard drives, maybe a ancient laptop every once in a while, but on very rare occasions he finds something actually useful. This latest haul is a gaggle of stepper motor drivers that, with a bit of work, can be reverse engineered and turned into an Arduino.

After prying into one of the plastic-enclosed boards, [Scott] found a LED, a quartet of transistors for powering the motor, and an ATMega168 microcontroller. Interestingly, most of the pins for the 168 were already broken out on the DA15 connector on each controller. The only thing needed was to build a programmer to dump the Arduino bootloader onto these little widgets.

After much trial and error (and building a new programming interface), [Scott] now has 100 Arduinos with a single stepper motor controller built in. He’s already made a toy light cycle rotate on a small stepper (after the break) and blink a LED, but with this many widgets, we’re wondering what crazy contraption [Scott] will come up with.

The Arduino IDE is extremely similar to C++, but judging from the sketches you can find on the Internet, you’d never know it. Simpler Arduino projects can make do with just toggling IO pins, reading values, and sending serial data between two points. More complex builds fall into the category of real software development, and this is where the standard Arduino IDE falls miserably short.

[Andy] saw this lack of proper libraries for more complicated pieces of software as a terrible situation and decided to do something about it. He ported the SGI Standard Template Library to bring all those fun algorithms and data structures to any AVR chip, including the Arduino.

Going over what’s included in [Andy]‘s port reads just like a syllabus for an object-oriented programming class. Stacks, queues, and lists make the cut, as do strings and vectors. Also included is just about everything in the   and headers along with a few Arduino-oriented additions like a hardware serial and liquid crystal streams.

With all these objects floating around, [Andy] says it will make an impact on Flash and SRAM usage in an AVR. Still, with all the hullabaloo over faster and larger ARM micros, it’s nice to see the classic 8-bit microcontroller becoming a bit more refined.