Hackers seem intent on making sure the world doesn’t forget that, for a brief shining moment, everyone thought Big Mouth Billy Bass was a pretty neat idea. Every so often we see a project that takes this classic piece of home decor and manages to shoehorn in some new features or capabilities, and with the rise of voice controlled home automation products from the likes of Amazon and Google, they’ve found a new ingredient du jour when preparing stuffed bass.

[Ben Eagan] has recently completed his entry into the Pantheon of animatronic fish projects, and while we’ll stop short of saying the world needed another Alexa-enabled fish on the wall, we’ve got to admit that he’s done a slick job of it. Rather than trying to convince Billy’s original electronics to play nice with others, he decided to just rip it all out and start from scratch. The end result is arguably one of the most capable Billy Bass updates we’ve come across, if you’re willing to consider flapping around on the wall an actual capability in the first place.

The build process is well detailed in the write-up, and [Ben] provides many pictures so the reader can easily follow along with the modification. The short version of the story is that he cuts out the original control board and wires the three motors up to an Arduino Motor Driver Shield, and when combined with the appropriate code, this gives him full control over Billy’s mouth and body movements. This saved him the trouble of figuring out how to interface with the original electronics, which is probably for the better since they looked rather crusty anyway.

From there, he just needed to give the fish something to get excited about. [Ben] decided to connect the 3.5 mm audio jack of an second generation Echo Dot to one of the analog pins of the Arduino, and wrote some code that can tell him if Amazon’s illuminated hockey puck is currently yammering on about something or not. He even added a LM386 audio amplifier module in there to help drive Billy’s original speaker, since that will now be the audio output of the Dot.

A decade ago we saw Billy reading out Tweets, and last year we presented a different take on adding an Alexa “brain” to everyone’s favorite battery powered fish. What will Billy be up to in 2029? We’re almost too scared to think about it.

After purchasing a new television, maker Andreas Spiess’ remote no longer worked seamlessly with the controller his family had been using. While a universal remote could have solved the problem, in order to keep things simple to use, he instead came up with an infrared “babel fish” signal translator—named after the language translation animal Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s.

The device receives infrared signals from the original remote, then uses an Arduino Nano to pass the properly translated pulses on to his TV and receiver. A 3W IR diode transmits these new signals with the help of an N-channel MOSFET, giving it enough power to control each component, even without the proper line-of-sight orientation. 

It’s a hack that could be useful in many situations, and Speiss goes over how it was made, along with design requirements in the video below.

If you’d like to visualize your music, VU meters make an excellent tool. While they are generally built into audio equipment, maker James Bruton had the idea to construct his own using lasers. His setup features an MSGEQ7 module to separate sound frequencies, sending data on seven different ranges to an Arduino Mega board.

The Arduino then uses this information to selectively lower seven shutters via servos. When lowered, these shutters hide part of the lines formed by lasers and a spinning mirror assembly to indicate each sound frequency’s intensity.

The resulting machine not only effectively projects a visual of the music playing on a nearby wall, but also looks like some sort of mythical beast or contraption, progressively waving its appendages while emitting eerie green light!

Although this kind of project can be fun, be sure to wear the proper safety equipment when dealing with powerful lasers!

Love it or hate it, for many people embedded systems means Arduino. Now Arduino is leveraging its more powerful MKR boards and introducing a cloud service, the Arduino IoT Cloud. The goal is to make it simple for Arduino programs to record data and control actions from the cloud.

The program is in beta and features a variety of both human and machine interaction styles. At the simple end, you can assemble a dashboard of controls and have the IoT Cloud generate your code and download it to your Arduino itself with no user programming required. More advanced users can use HTTP REST, MQTT, Javascript, Websockets, or a suite of command line tools.

The system relies on “things” like temperature sensors, LEDs, and servos. With all the focus on security now, it isn’t surprising that the system supports X.509 authentication and TLS security for traffic in both directions.

Honestly, we tried it and the web-based IDE couldn’t find our MKR1000 board under Linux. That could be a misconfiguration on our part, but it is frustrating how little information you get from many web-based tools. It decided we had multiple Arduinos connected (we didn’t). Then removing a multiport serial adapter made it see no Arduinos even though there was an MKR1000 Vidor attached.

Naturally, there are plenty of options when it comes to putting devices on the cloud. However, if you are only using Arduino boards, this one is going to be pretty seamless — assuming it works for you.

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]