It’s no secret that Ethernet shields for the Arduino are a little expensive. With the official Ethernet shield selling for about $50 and other options not much cheaper, there’s a lot of room for improvement for Arduinofied Ethernet. [Boris] over at Open Electronics has a solution to this problem: his Ethercard powered by a $3 Ethernet controller.

The Ethercard uses the Microchip ENC28J60, a through-hole Ethernet controller. There isn’t much else on the board apart from an RJ45 jack, caps, resistors, and a cheap buffer chip. This board was designed to be easily produced, and we’re thinking it might be possible to etch this board at home.

There are a few drawbacks to this ENC28J60 Ethernet shield – the official Arduino Ethernet shield has a 10/100 Mbps connection where the Microchip-powered shield is limited to 10 Mbps. Given the reduced cost, ease of assembly, and the fact that it’s pretty hard to saturate a 100Mbps connection with an Arduino this flaw can be easily ignored.

Pretty neat, especially considering how much you can do with an Ethernet connection on your Arduino. Files and code available in the git.

Because everything is moving to a web app, [Vasilis Georgitzikis], a.k.a. [tzikis] developed codebender, a cloud-based Arduino IDE replete with built-in libraries, documentation, and the ability to upload your code to an Arduino from a browser.

To compile an Arduino sketch, codebender uses clang a wonderful compiler that will give you extremely descriptive warnings on terrible code. Like any good IDE, there’s built-in highlighting and documentation, and a small bit of Java allows you to upload your code and monitor the serial port right in the browser.

One of the more interesting innovations is codebender’s (upcoming) use of a TFTP bootloader. With this and an Ethernet shield, it’s easy to upload code to any Internet-connected Arduino, whether it’s on your desk or halfway across the world. We can see that being very useful for a data logger or even a UAV balloon, and can’t wait to see it in action.

The newly released Arduino Leonardo has a few very interesting features, most notably the ability to act as a USB keyboard and mouse thanks to the new ATmega 32U4 microcontroller. This feature isn’t exclusive to the Leonoardo, as [Michael] explains in a build he sent in – the lowly Arduino Uno can also serve as a USB HID keyboard with just a firmware update.

The Arduino Uno (and Mega) communicate to your computer through a separate ATmega8U2 microcontroller. Simply by uploading new firmware with the Arduino Device Firmware Upgrade, it’s easy to have your old Arduino board gain some of the features of newer boards such as the Teensy or Leonardo.

[Michael] goes through the steps required to make this upgrade work and ends his build by showing off an Arduinofied ‘cut, copy and paste’ button project as well as a few multimedia controls. You can check those builds out in the video after the break.

If emulating a USB keyboard isn’t your thing, it’s also possible to install LUFA firmware to emulate everything from joysticks to USB audio devices. Very cool, and very useful.

[Alexandre] wanted to set up a web-based temperature logger with his Arduino, but found the Arduino Ethernet shield a little finicky. Since his Raspberry pi was just delivered, he figured he could use the Raspi as an Ethernet shield with just a little bit of coding.

After [Alexandre] set up his Arduino to send a thermocouple through the USB, the only thing left to do was to add node.js to the Raspi’s Debian installation. Every five minutes, the Arduino wakes up, takes a temperature reading, and sends it over to the Raspberry pi. From there, it’s easy parse the Arduino’s JSON output and serve it up on the web.

In the end, [Alexandre] successfully set up his Raspberry pi as an Ethernet shield to serve a web page displaying the current temperature (don’t F5 that link, btw). One interesting thing we have to point out is the cost of setting up this online temperature logger: the Arduino Ethernet shield sells for $45 USD, while the Raspberry pi is available for $35. Yes, it’s actually less expensive to use a Raspberry pi as an Ethernet shield than the current Arduino offerings. There you have it, just in case you were still on the fence about this whole Raspi thing.

The Bullduino’s are starting to arrive. When [Arclight] received his in the mail the first thing he did was to share the hardware details. Of course this is the hardware that participants in the Red Bull Creation contest will be receiving ahead of this year’s contest.

The board is an ATmega328 Arduino clone. Instead of an FTDI chip for USB this one is sporting an ATmega8u2. That’s not too much of a surprise as it should translate to a cost savings. [Arclight] reports that the stock firmware flashes a message in Morse code. It seems the Hartford HackerSpace got their Bullduino several days ago and already decoded the message. It reads:

“Wouldn’t lou prefer a good game of chess?”

The guys that did the decoding speculate that this could be a type as ‘l’ and ‘y’ are inversions of each other in Morse code; or it could be some kind of clue. At any rate, if you want to do some disassembly and see if there’s anything lurking in the firmware, [Arclight] posted FLASH and EEPROM dumps from both ATmega chips along with his article.

Like many hackers of late, [Rick] has been experimenting with connecting Arduinos to the Internet with a disused WiFi router and an installation of OpenWRT. Unlike his fellow makers, [Rick] thought it would be wasteful to dedicate a single router to one Arduino project, so he used a small, low power wireless module to connect up to 30 Arduinos to the Internet.

Just as in a few recent builds (1, 2), [Rick] found an old Fonera router sitting in a box at his local hackerspace. After installing OpenWRT, [Rick] connected a very small wireless module to the router’s GPIO pins and patched the firmware to put an SPI bus on the router.

Now, whenever [Rick] wants to connect an Arduino project to the Internet, all he needs is a $4 radio module. This radio module connects to the router, and the router handles the networking requirements of up to 30 DIY projects.

If you’re looking to build an Internet-enable sensor network, we honestly can’t think of a better or cheaper way of going about it. Nice job, [Rick].

CubeSats are nothing new – hundreds have been launched into Earth orbit by schools and universities over the past decade. Like anything cool, an Arduino eventually gets thrown into the mix. That’s what the folks behind ArduSat are doing: they’re launching an Arduino-laden satellite into orbit with a bunch of sensors to enable anyone to become a citizen space scientist.

On board the ArduSat is a suite of sensors including a spectrometer, Geiger counter, IR light sensor, electromagnetic wave sensor, a temperature sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS unit, CO2 sensor, and of course a few cameras. The rewards for this Kickstarter are fairly interesting: backers who pledge $500 are able to buy a week’s worth of time using the ArduSat sensors for your own personal experiment.

As for how this Arduino-powered satellite is getting a ride up to Low Earth Orbit, the team plans to send an application into NASA for the CubeSat Launch Initiative ride-along program. If NASA selects the ArduSat, it’ll get a ride into space along with other CubeSats on a larger commercial launch. If the ArduSat isn’t selected by NASA, the team behind this satellite has secured funding to piggyback on a commercial launch.

Tip ‘o the hat to [HackTheGibson] for sending this in.

[Travis Brown] just published a post about the traffic light controller he built. His number one goal was to make the device wireless (except for AC power) and he achieved this by using a WiFi shield for his Arduino. But there is also a separate board that provides a way for the chip to switch the AC lights.

He works for a web hosting company, and the boss wanted a fun way to display the status of the servers among other things. He chose to use the WiServer library which controls the CoperHead WiFi Shield and gives him the ability to serve simple web pages from the Arduino. When power is applied the sketch automatically connects to the AP and starts polling the company’s API for status data. If you’re not within eyesight of the traffic lights you can log into the web server and check that way.

We think [Travis] did a great job of explaining his code, and we applaud him for making proper use of the watchdog timer (something we don’t see in very many projects). This joins the pile of traffic-light display devices we’ve seen around here. We still don’t know where people are getting their hands on the things.

[Andy] needed a cheap Internet connection between a data-gathering Arduino and his home server. An Ethernet shield would suffice, but he couldn’t run CAT5 to the Arduino’s location. Wireless shields are hideously expensive, and after looking over the popular Zigbee modules, [Andy] had a few concerns about range and build complexity.

The obvious solution to this problem was getting a cheap WiFi router, flashing OpenWRT firmware on the device, and piping sensor data through the Arduino’s USB port, through the router, and over a WiFi connection to the server.

[Andy] used a TP-Link TL-WR703N wireless ‘travel router’ available on eBay £15 (~$30 USD when we checked). After flashing the router with OpenWRT, [Andy] had a wireless connection from a remote data-collecting Arduino directly to his server.

Attentive Hack a Day readers will note this is the third ‘wireless router + OpenWRT as a dev board’ build this week (first one, second one) . No, we don’t know what’s going on, or why the collective unconscious of makers around the globe decided to latch onto this type of build so suddenly. OpenWRT is available for hundreds of different routers, and anything that keeps disused routers out of the landfill (with the bonus of doing something useful) is alright in our book, so if you have another similar build, send it in and we’ll get around to it sometime.

Sure, we see hexapods all the time at [HAD], but moving around with four legs can be more tricky kinematics-wise. This Instructable shows you how to make one out of balsa wood.

Although one might not think of balsa to make their robot out of [vexedpheonix] explains that this was chosen because it’s extremely light and easy to work with. Since he was trying to keep costs down, the cheapest servos available were used. These weren’t all that powerful, so the lighter the body the better! According to the included bill of materials, he was able to keep the entire robot build under $100.

According to the article, the hardest part was making four copies of the same leg. We might suggest using a CNC router, but building one would obviously add a huge layer of complication to the project!

Thanks for the tip on this one [SteveT]! Be sure to check out the video of this little robot waving one of it’s legs or trying to walk after the break!

If you’d rather see a hexapod in action, why not check out this one!