Arduinos are a handy tool to have around. They’re versatile, cheap, easy to program, and have a ton of software libraries to build on. They’ve only been around for about a decade and a half though, so if you were living in 1989 and wanted to program a microcontroller you’d probably be stuck with an 8-bit microprocessor with no built-in peripherals to help, reading from a physical book about registers and timing, and probably trying to get a broken ribbon cable to behave so it would actually power up. If you want a less frustrating alternate history to live in, though, check out the latest project from [Marek].

He discovered some 6502 chips (Polish language, Google Translate link) that a Chinese manufacturer was selling, but didn’t really trust that they were legitimate. On a lark he ordered some and upon testing them he found out that they were real 6502s. Building an 8-bit computer is something he’d like to do, but in the meantime he decided to do a project using one of these chips as a general-purpose microcontroller similar to a modern Arduino. The project has similar specs as an Arduino too, including 8kB of RAM memory, 8kB of I/O address space, and various EPROM capabilities. [Marek] went on to build a shield board for it as well, for easy access to some switches and LEDs. It’s a great build that anyone interested in microcontrollers should check out.

Keep in mind that an ATtiny45 has 8 bits like the 6502 but only costs around $1 USD, whereas a 6502 would have cost around $200 in today’s dollars. It’s really only in modern times that we can appreciate the 6502 as a cheap 8-bit microcontroller for that reason alone, but we can also appreciate how it ushered in a computer revolution since competing Intel and Motorola chips cost around six times more before it showed up. They became so popular in fact that people still regularly use them to build retrocomputers of all kinds.

Görkem Bozkurt has a bit of a problem. When he gets going with a build, sometimes safety glasses are forgotten in the excitement of making something new. While understandable, this doesn’t make things any less dangerous, so he came up with a novel idea to put on his safety specs on automatically.

His wearable creation attaches an Arduino Nano and a MAX4466 electret mic amplifier to the top of a previously normal hat, along with a small servo connected to a pair of lens below the bill. If a loud sound is heard, the goggles are lowered by the servo in response. They’re then retracted when the noise, and hopefully the danger, is gone. 

While the system is still very much a work-in-progress, it’s an entertaining concept that Bozkurt hopes to develop further.

According to musician/maker Ruben Dax, “Few things make him happier than being able to create things that create things.” As seen in the video below, what he’s created is a very strange cylindrical instrument with an array of buttons and what appears to be an auxiliary loop controller. 

What he creates with it is music that starts off as simple “plink-plonk” sounds, but builds up into something of an orchestral arrangement.

The DIY device utilizes an Arduino Mega for control, with a bunch of pushbuttons and a dual-axis joystick for inputs. Button info is then sent to his computer over Bluetooth, which takes care of actual MIDI generation. 

As cool as this is, a new gadget is in the works, which uses a Leonardo and other hardware for plug-and-play functionality. Whether this will interfere with the instrument’s unique rotating action remains to be seen!

Microfluidics deals with the manipulation of tiny amounts of liquid, and as such, specialized equipment must be used for any sort of measurable experimentation. While you could purchase an expensive commercial solution, the Poseidon system—developed by students at the California Institute of Technology—presents an excellent open source option which can be built for a fraction of the cost. 

Fluid distribution is managed by a computer GUI or via a terminal window. Steppers handle each of the system’s three “axes,” and push fluid out of syringes under control of an Arduino Uno and CNC shield. A microscope is also available for a full experimental setup. 

Specific information on the project can be found on GitHub, and a number of videos on Poseidon team member Sina Booeshaghi’s YouTube page explain things further.

The Poseidon syringe pump and microscope system is an open source alternative to commercial systems. It costs less than $400 and can be assembled in an hour. It uses 3D-printed parts and common components that can be easily purchased either from Amazon or other retailers. The microscope and pumps can be used together in microfluidics experiments, or independently for other applications. The pumps and microscope can be run from a Windows, Mac, Linux, or Raspberry Pi computer with an easy to use GUI.

The Poseidon system was designed to be customizable. It uses the Raspberry Pi and Arduino electronics boards, which are supported by a strong ecosystem of open source hardware and software, facilitating the implementation of new functionalities.

The pump driver uses an Arduino with a CNC shield to run up to three pumps. Each pump has a stepper motor that drives lead screw which in turn moves a sled that is mounted on linear bearings. The displacement of the sled moves the syringe forward or backward allowing the user to dispel or intake liquid.

The controller station uses a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen to connect to the Arduino and microscope via USB. Because the microscope and Arduino use USB connections, they can alternatively be connected to a computer instead of a Raspberry Pi.

If there’s a happier word ever imported into the English language than “Glockenspiel”, we’re not sure what it is. And controlling said instrument with a bunch of servos and an Arduino makes us just as happy.

When [Leon van den Beukel] found a toy glockenspiel in a thrift store, he knew what had to be done – Arduinofy it. His first attempt was a single hammer on a pair of gimballed servos, which worked except for the poor sound quality coming from the well-loved toy. The fact that only one note at a time was possible was probably the inspiration for version two, which saw the tone bars removed from the original base, cleaned of their somewhat garish paint, and affixed to a new soundboard. The improved instrument was then outfitted with eight servos, one for each note, each with a 3D-printed arm and wooden mallet. An Arduino runs the servos, and an Android app controls the instrument via Bluetooth, because who doesn’t want to control an electronic glockenspiel with a smartphone app? The video below shows that it works pretty well, even if a few notes need some adjustment. And we don’t even find the servo noise that distracting.

True, we’ve featured somewhat more accomplished robotic glockenspielists before, but this build’s simplicity has a charm of its own.

When you build one-off projects for yourself, if it doesn’t work right the first time, it’s a nuisance. You go back to the bench, rework it, and move on with life. The equation changes considerably when you’re building things to sell to someone. Once you take money for your thing, you have to support it, and anything that goes out the door busted is money out of your pocket.

[Brian Lough] ran into this fact of life recently when the widget he sells on Tindie became popular enough that he landed an order for 100 units. Not willing to cut corners on testing but also not interested in spending days on the task, he built this automated test jig to handle the job for him. The widget in question is the “Power BLough-R”, a USB pass-through device that strips the 5-volt from the line while letting the data come through; it’s useful for preventing 3D-printers from being backfed when connected to Octoprint. The tester is very much a tactical build, with a Nano in a breakout board wired to a couple of USB connectors. When the widget is connected to the tester, a complete series of checks make sure that there are no wiring errors, and the results are logged to the serial console. [Brian] now has complete confidence that each unit works before going out the door, and what’s more, the tester shaved almost a minute off each manual test. Check in out in action in the video below.

We’ve featured quite a few of [Brian]’s projects before. You may remember his Tetris-themed YouTube subscriber counter, or his seven-segment shoelace display.

[via r/Arduino]

Sometimes you have an idea, and despite it not being the “right” time of year you put a creepy skull whose eyes tell the time and whose jaw clacks on the hour into a nice wooden box for your wife as a Christmas present. At least, if you’re reddit user [flyingalbatross1], you do!

The eyes are rotated using 360 degree servos, which makes rotating the eyes based on the time pretty easy. The servos are connected to rods that are epoxied to the spheres used as eyes. Some water slide iris decals are put on the eyes offset from center in order to point in the direction of the minutes/hours. An arduino with a real time clock module keeps track of the time and powers the servos.

Check out the video after the break:

The jaw opens and closes on the hours – springs are screwed to the inside of the jaw to the outside of the skull behind the bones that surround the eyes; they’re hidden when the skull is in its box. A third servo is used as a winch to pull the jaw open from the inside of the bottom of the chin. When it releases, the springs close the mouth and the clack of the teeth replaces an hourly chime.

A bit late (or early) for Halloween, but it’s a really fun project. [Flyingalbatross1] has made the arduino code available, as well as showing plenty of images of how the parts are put together. Take a look at this this atomic clock-in-a-skull, or you make your own talking skull for Halloween!

via Reddit

Drone racing is nifty as heck, and a need all races share is a way to track lap times. One way to do it is to use transponders attached to each racer, and use a receiver unit of some kind to clock them as they pass by. People have rolled their own transponder designs with some success, but the next step is ditching add-on transponders entirely, and that’s exactly what the Delta 5 Race Timer project does.

The open-sourced design has a clever approach. In drone racing, each aircraft is remotely piloted over a wireless video link. Since every drone in a race already requires a video transmitter and its own channel on which to broadcast, the idea is to use the video signal as the transponder. As a result, no external hardware needs to be added to the aircraft. The tradeoff is that using the video signal in this way is trickier than a purpose-made transponder, but the hardware to do it is economical, accessible, and the design is well documented on GitHub.

The hardware consists of RX508 video receiver PCBs modified slightly to enable them to communicate over SPI. Each RX508 is attached to its own Arduino, which takes care of low-level communications. The Arduinos are themselves connected to a Raspberry Pi over I2C, allowing the Pi high-level control over the receivers while it serves up a web-enabled user interface. As a bonus, the Pi can do much more than simply act as a fancy stopwatch. The races themselves can be entirely organized and run through the web interface. The system is useful enough that other projects using its framework have popped up, such as the RotorHazard project by [PropWashed] which uses the same hardware design.

While rolling one’s own transponders is a good solution for getting your race on, using the video transmission signal to avoid transponders entirely is super clever. The fact that it can be done with inexpensive, off the shelf hardware is just icing on the cake.

Do you like grilled cheese? Would you rather not make it yourself? If so, then the Cheeseborg by Taylor Tabb, Mitchell Riek, and Evan Hill could be the perfect device for you! 

This assembly line-like robot first stacks bread-cheese-bread using a vacuum gripper, and passes the unheated sandwich onto the grill via a pusher mechanism. Butter spray is first added to the bottom of the grill, then the top of the sandwich when present in order to coat both sides. Upon heating, the finished sandwich is pushed into a “food slot” for consumption.

Electronics are controlled using an Arduino Mega, while Google assistant running on a Raspberry Pi allows for voice activation. So the next time you’re hungry, all you have to do is ask, “Hey Google, make me a grilled cheese please!”

Our goal was to make an easy snack even easier. The design combines 7 individual subsystems enabling the assembly, cooking, and serving of a perfect, repeatable, tasty grilled cheese. 

A big learning was how challenging it is to manipulate bread and cheese repeatedly. After several iterations, we converged on a vacuum lift mechanism, inspired by industrial robotic manipulation of small electronics. Due to the porosity of bread and the gloss of cheese, it was very challenging to find a mechanism working for both, but vacuum certainly seemed to do the trick! 

For the actuation of of the electromechanical subsystems, we use stepper motors and servos combined with linkages, lead screws, linear bearings, a winch, and other mechanical components.  For buttering (not pictures) we have a delightful spray butter can attached to an acrylic stand beside the grill.

Beyond the mechanisms, which are controlled by an Arduino Mega, the system is enabled with Google Assistant SDK running on an Raspberry Pi 3B, so the whole thing can be activated just by saying “Hey Google, make me a grilled cheese please!” From there, the machine stacks the bread, cheese, bread, then slides over the platform toward the grill as the buttering station sprays the bottom of the grill. Once the sandwich is placed on the grill, the butter sprays again (to coat the top of the sandwich). Then the grill closes, and cooks for the precise amount of the time for the perfect gooey grilled cheese! Then the grill opens and the sandwich is kicked to the serving slot for a hungry friend to enjoy.

Whether one of your senses is weak or non-existent, or you would simply like a way to augment your perception and control options, the Cthulhu Shield can be applied in either situation. 

The device takes the form of an Arduino Uno or Mega shield, with a strange flexible electrode setup that is placed directly on the user’s tongue.

When these electrodes are fired, they activate nerve fibers on the tongue, producing a feeling like that of carbonated bubbles popping. This can then be used to convey information to the user, whether this is visual, sound, or even Internet updates or other non-traditional stimuli. Importantly, it can also be utilized as an interface for tongue computer control. 

The Cthulhu Shield lets anyone experiment and make devices that can expand your sensory experience!

We’ve made android apps and example programs that will let you use the Cthulhu Shield and your smartphone to ‘see’ and ‘hear’ with your tongue without needing to write a single line of code!

For those of you interested in making your own projects, we’ve written an easy to use Arduino library and provided example code to get you started on projects including tongue-heat-vision, tongue-based GPS directions, and soon, tongue-ultrasonic hearing. But don’t limit yourselves to the examples we’ve provided, the only limit to what you can make is your imagination!

Finally, we designed the Cthulhu to be used as a tongue based computer interface (because if you already have something in your mouth, why not use it to control your computer)? Write your own code to hotkey video game actions, send text messages, or control a wheelchair or mobility device with your tongue. 

If you’d like to get your hands on one, the Cthulhu Shield is now being funded on Kickstarter, while code and board schematic are available on GitHub.