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.

Like many of us, [Benjamin Poilve] was fascinated when he took apart a broken printer. He kept the parts, but unlike most of us, he did something with them, building a neat little plotter called the Liplo. Most pen plotters work by moving the pen on two axes, but [Benjamin] took a different approach, using the friction drive bars from the printer to move the paper on one axis, and a servo to move the pen on the other. He’s refined the design from its initial rough state to create a very refined final product that uses a combination of salvaged, 3D-printed, and CNC-milled parts.

The Liplo is driven by a Teensy 3.1 and an Eibot board to drive the motors. [Benjamin] was planning to offer the plotter a kit on Kickstarter, but life got in the way. His loss is our gain, as he is now offering the plans and code for this neat build for free. If this one doesn’t plot your desires, we’ve seen lots of other home built plotters recently, including this one made from a 3D printer, and even one made of cardboard.

Apparently not satisfied with available timekeeping devices, ElegantAlchemist crafted a unique clock using an Arduino Nano, an RTC module, and three formerly 1000VAC analog meters. 

The first order of business for the build was converting the meters into something that could traverse its range with only 5V, accomplished by replacing the stock resistor, diode, and capacitor with a 2.2kohm resistor.

Now controllable via Arduino, new faceplate labels were designed in CorelDraw for a very professional look. Everything was encased in an aluminum stomp box enclosure—actually several as multiple clocks were constructed—and RGB LEDs were also added behind each display. 

Code for the project is available here, and more info can be found in this Imgur set.

Waking up before 9am can be a challenge for Nikodem Bartnik, but he also hates to waste time sleeping when he could instead make something.

In order to help him with this “joyous” task, he assembled a line-following robot that scoots his phone out of the room in the morning, forcing him to get out of bed and chase it down.

The device utilizes a pair of gearmotors in a standard tank-like configuration for movement, and sensors to follow a black line on the floor. A sound sensor allows its Arduino Uno controller to pick up on alarm sounds coming from his phone, which is mounted on the robot with a 3D-printed holder. When activated, it follows the path out of his room, waiting for Bartnik’s bleary eyed—but awake—arrival. 

When we last saw this omni robot by Jeremy S. Cook, it was lurching around under Arduino Nano and Bluetooth command. After much work, he finally has it to a state where it rolls nicely on a flat surface—even carrying a little strandbeest at just after 8:30 in the demo video.

The biggest revision for the robot was new “grippier” wheels, but electronics were also enhanced, including a LiPo battery (with a voltage divider monitoring circuit), potentiometer for speed control, and LED eyes. 

Changes were facilitated by a screw terminal board attached to the Nano, which minimized solder work, while keeping the robot’s wiring secure. More details and code are available here, while the upgrade/troubleshooting process can be seen in the video below.

Martin Mihálek took the leap into standing desks, and purchased a SKARSTA table from IKEA. Although being able to adjust things by hand is useful, who wants to do that nowadays? Instead of manually cranking it every time, he—with help from iLLiac4—decided to augment it with a motor in order to lower and raise things as needed.

Initial experiments used a FIXA electric screwdriver (also from IKEA) to power the SKARSTA, but he eventually settled on a DC gearmotor, attached to the desk via a 3D-printed assembly. 

Two versions are described in the project’s GitHub write-up; one employs an H-bridge board for control, the other uses relays. Both are controlled by an Arduino Nano. A keypad allows for calibration and three stored heights, while current position and feedback are shown on a TM1637 4-digit 7-segment display.

If you wear a self-winding watch—which uses your natural motions for power—you might notice that it stops working if it’s left off your wrist for too long. To avoid these situations, watch winders are available to turn them automatically, but tend to either be very expensive, or cheap and noisy.

With a bit of hacking, however, Kristopher Marciniak was able to get the best of both worlds. He replaced the stock motor of an inexpensive winder with a stepper, and used an Arduino along with a Trinamic SilentStepStick driver for silent and well-controlled movement. 

The result is a device that rotates quietly as programmed, then stops in exactly the desired position.