No matter how good your telescope is, if you don’t know where to point it, it’s little more than a curiosity. Motorized GoTo telescopes are available at a very high price, but maker “DentDentArthurDent” has come up with an automated star-finder, showing you where your telescope needs to be aimed.

The system takes the form of a 3D-printed telescope pendant, allowing you choose from a database of objects displayed on a red LCD screen. A GPS module enables the device to know where it is, and potentiometers, initially calibrated using the North Star, tell where the telescope is pointed. Four LEDs then guide your telescope to the proper heading and elevation, so you can observe your selected object in no time!

Ready to explore galaxies, nebulae, and clusters? Check out the project’s write-up here!

When you need to access the Internet via WiFi, it’s not too hard to find a hotspot if you’re in the right location, and the SSID usually gives you some clue as to who is providing it. What if you instead generated network names in order to communicate with people attempting to log on?

That’s the idea behind Hot Ninja, made by Moscow-based artist Dmitry Morozov, better known as “::vtol::.” His device uses a trio of ESP8266 modules to form and name three different networks, giving him 96 characters with which to message the surrounding area. If other gadgets do log on, Hot Ninja can also create a registration page with more information and even the ability to message back and forth. An Arduino Mega serves as the brains of this portable device, and a keyboard and OLED screen form its user interface–shown in the video below. 

Multifunctional network device for autonomous activity in the city environment. Its main function is communication and propaganda through the WiFi wireless standard. This is the hacktivism DIY response to attempts by the authorities in different countries to control the Internet. The project serves as an example of the possible opposition and decentralisation of networks to ensure communications and provide notifications irrespective of whether there is access to the global internet or certain restrictions are applied.

A few years ago, Adafruit launched the Feather 32u4 Basic Proto. This tiny development board featured — as you would expect — an ATMega32u4 microcontroller, a USB port, and a battery charging circuit for tiny LiPo batteries. It was, effectively, a small Arduino clone with a little bit of extra circuitry that made it great for portable and wearable projects. In the years since, and as Adafruit has recently pointed out, the Adafruit Feather has recently become a thing. This is a new standard. Maxim is producing compatible ‘wings’ or shields. If you’re in San Fransisco, the streets are littered with Feather-compatible boards. What’s the deal with these boards, and why are there so many of them?

The reason for Adafruit’s introduction of the Feather format was the vast array of shields, hats, capes, clicks, props, booster packs, and various other standards. The idea was to bring various chipsets under one roof, give them a battery charging circuit, and not have a form factor that is as huge as the standard Arduino. The Feather spec was finalized and now we have three-phase energy monitors, a tiny little game console, LoRaWAN Feathers, and CAN controllers.

Of course, the Feather format isn’t just limited to Adafruit products and indie developers. The recently introduced Particle hardware is built on the Feather format, giving cellular connectivity to this better-than-Arduino format. Maxim is producing some development boards with the same format.

So, do we finally have a form factor for one-off embedded development that isn’t as huge or as wonky as the gigantic Arduino with weirdly offset headers? It seems so.

The trend in video games is toward not being able to differentiate them from live-action theatrical releases, and games studios are getting hard to tell from movie studios. But quality graphics don’t always translate into quality gameplay, and a lot can be accomplished with minimalist graphics. Turn the clock back a few decades and think about the quarters sucked up by classics like Pac-Man, Space Invaders, and even Pong if you have any doubts about that.

But even Pong had more than 64 pixels to work with, which is why this dungeon-crawler game on an 8×8 RGB matrix is so intriguing. You might think [Stolistic]’s game would be as simple as possible but think again. The video below shows it in action, and while new users will need a little help figuring out what the various colors mean, the game is remarkably engaging. The structure of the dungeon is random with multiple levels to unlock via the contents of power-up chests, and there are mobs to battle in a zoomed-in display. The game runs on an Arduino Uno and the matrix is driven by a bunch of 74HC595 shift registers.

It’s fun to see what can be accomplished with as little as possible. Looking for more low-res goodness? Check out this minimalist animated display, or a Geiger counter with a matrix display.

What’s a hacker to do to profess his love for his dearest beloved? [Nitesh Kadyan] built his lady-love this awesome LED pendant – the LED BLE Hearty Necklace Badge.

The hardware is pretty vanilla by today’s hacker standards. An ATMega328p  does most of the heavy lifting. An HM-11 BLE module provides connection to an Android mobile app. Two 74HC595 shift registers drive 16 columns of red LEDs and a ULN2803 sinks current from the 8 rows. The power section consists of a charger for the 320mAh LiPo and an LDO for the BLE module. All the parts are SMD with the passives mostly being 0603, including the 128 LEDs.

[Nitesh] didn’t get a stencil made for his first batch of boards, so all the parts were painstakingly soldered manually and not in a reflow oven. And on his first board, he ended up soldering all of the LED’s the wrong way around. Kudos to him for his doggedness and patience.

The Arduino code on the ATmega is also quite straightforward. All characters are stored as eight bytes each in program memory and occupy 8×8 pixels on the matrix. The bytes to be displayed are stored in a buffer and the columns are left shifted fast enough for the marquee text effect. The Android app is built by modifying a demo BLE app provided by Google. The firmware, Android app, and the KiCAD design files are all hosted on his Github repository.

[Nitesh] is now building a larger batch of these badges to bring them to hillhacks – the annual hacker-con for making and hacking in the Himalayas. Scheduled for later this month, you’ll have to sign up on the mailing list for details and if you’d like to snag one of these badges. To make it more interesting, [Nitesh] has added two games to the code – Tetris and Snakes. Hopefully, this will spur others to create more games for the badge, such as Pong.

There have been a rash of short videos popping onto the Adafruit youtube channel recently that depict Limor Fried showing off a new board driving some fun cardboard based projects. This new board, which we can hear Limor explain is the CRICKIT, appears to be in prototype stages. It got […]

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Alorium rolled out a new product late last year that caught our attention. The Sno (pronounced like “snow”) board is a tiny footprint Arduino board that you can see in the video below. By itself that isn’t that interesting, but the Sno also has an Altera/Intel Max 10 FPGA onboard. If you aren’t an FPGA user, don’t tune out yet, though, because while you can customize the FPGA in several ways, you don’t have to.

Like Alorium’s XLR8 product, the FPGA comes with preprogrammed functions and a matching Arduino API to use them. In particular, there are modules to do analog to digital conversion, servo control, operate NeoPixels, and do floating point math.

However, you can reprogram the FPGA to have other functions — known as XBs or Xcelerator Blocks — if you like. The only problem we see is that, so far, there aren’t many of them. In addition to the stock XBs, there is one that will do quadrature decoding for dealing with things like shaft encoders. There are a few others you can find on their GitHub page. You can get an idea for the workflow by looking at this tutorial for the XLR8 board.

Of course, you can write your own FPGA configurations as you see fit, but they also provide a standard workflow — OpenXLR8 — that lets you build your own blocks that operate just like their blocks. It would be easy to imagine an “app store” concept where people develop custom blocks and make them available.

We really like the idea of this device and it is certainly inexpensive. You can prototype on the XLR8 which looks like a UNO or you can put headers in the Sno. They also sell a breakout board that will make the Sno physically more like an UNO. We are surprised, though, that there are not more XBs created over the last two years.

The FPGA onboard is similar to the one on the Arrow board we looked at earlier this year, although that has some additional components like SDRAM. If you are looking for a project, it might be interesting to convert our PWM code into an XB.

Thanks to [K5STV] for showing us one of these.

Linux programs, when they misbehave, produce core dumps. The reason they have that name is that magnetic core memory was the primary storage for computers back in the old days and many of us still refer to a computer’s main memory as “core.” If you ever wanted to have a computer with real core memory you can get a board that plugs into an Arduino and provides it with a 32-bit core storage. Of course, the Arduino can’t directly run programs out of the memory and as designer [Jussi Kilpeläinen] mentions, it is “hilariously impractical.” The board has been around a little while, but a recent video shined a spotlight on this retro design.

Impractical or not, there’s something charming about having real magnetic core memory on a modern CPU. The core plane isn’t as dense as the old commercial offerings that could fit 32 kilobits (not bytes) into only a cubic foot. We’ll leave the math about how much your 8-gigabyte laptop would have to grow to use core memory to you.

Honestly, this is purely a novelty, but we do miss core memory somewhat. It was inherently nonvolatile. You could turn the computer off, turn it back on, and everything was just how you left it. Sure, it was peculiar that reading a bit also destroyed it, but many of the old computers had the write after read cycle built into the CPU architecture so that it wasn’t a big deal.

If you want to look at how it was to repair a big core system, we looked at that earlier. Surprisingly, though, this isn’t the first Arduino core memory rig we’ve seen.

What could be better than a lamp that expands with the pull of a control cord? How about one that looks like the Death Star and is controlled with your voice? 

That’s exactly what maker Adi Singh created using a popular IKEA lamp and embedding it with an Arduino MKR1000 to take voice commands via Alexa. A stepper motor is tasked with opening and closing the exterior segments, and a solid-state relay turns the light on and off. It also features a spectacular custom paint job, making this lamp/superweapon stand out even more.

You can see the results in the video below as it changes shape and blinks to the soothing sounds of the Imperial March!

While some toy vehicles perform quite well out of the box, others are just begging to be equipped with supplemental electronics. This was the case for YouTuber Tanner Tech, who after receiving a capable 4WD truck in the mail with no control system, outfitted it with a transmitter and receiver, along with an Arduino Uno.

That’s interesting enough by itself, highlighting the fact that Arduino boards can take in PWM signals from a normal RC receiver. What really sets this build apart is the coil gun that he constructed in the bed. This device is powered by three capacitors, and a servo pan/tilt assembly aims it. While the projectile isn’t particularly dangerous in its current configuration, one would need to use caution when dealing with capacitors here, as they can be charged to the “shockingly” high potential of 400 volts.

More info on the project can be found here or in the video below!