I read the other day that the hot career choice for kids these days is: YouTuber. That means every kid — yes, including mine — has two or three attempts at a YouTube show on their account and then they get into the next big thing and forget about it. On the other hand, sometimes you find someone who has a lot of ideas to share, and the dedication to keep sharing them.

[Kevin Zhou], an 11-year-old from Indonesia, has filmed around  70 videos in the past couple of years, with a fantastic variety of nerdy projects ranging from Mindstorms to Arduino to wood shop projects, and even a Blender tutorial. His projects show a lot of complexity, with serious, real-world concepts, and he shares the technical details about the various components in the project, and he walks you through the code as well.

He made a Mindstorms carving machine, pictured above, with a gantry system holding a motor steady while the user carves into a block of floral foam with LEGO bits. He does a lot of home automation projects using an Arduino and relay board, as well as a number of water-pumping robots. He doesn’t stick to one medium or technology. He has a jigsaw and in one video he shows how to build a Thor’s hammer out of wood. He prints out each layer’s design on office paper and glues the paper to a piece of wood, cutting out the cross-sections on his jigsaw. The whole stack is glued together and clamped. [Kevin]’s design featured a hollow space inside to save weight, which he cut by drilling a 1-inch hole in the center with his drill press, then threading the jigsaw blade through the hole to cut out the inside. As an amateur woodcrafter myself, I like seeing him branching out working on small wood projects.

[Kevin]’s full automatic water dispenser is one of a series of water-pumping projects including a couple of plant-watering robots. [Kevin] uses a relay-triggered pump and a water-level sensor, all running on an Arduino Mega plugged into a 1360-point breadboard.

He has a lot of common modules. He uses a LED display plugged directly into the breadboard, with its backpack plugged into same rows so it can lay flat. He plays around with an IR remote, as well as a 12 V / 5 A Peltier thermo-electric cooler running off of a relay. He has a couple of different relay boards making for a number of home automation projects, including a fairly complicated security system featuring RFID and keypad entry.

There are many LEGO and Mindstorms projects as well, including a complicated robot arm controlled by a smartphone app, as well as a Technic beam sorter that rolls the beams down a conveyor so that shorter elements fall through smaller holes, while longer pieces continue on to fall in larger holes down the line. Intriguingly to me, he did a couple of projects involving mixing Arduinos and LEGO/Mindstorms, and frequently uses the building set to build enclosures and support structure.

I suppose you could say the individual projects aren’t that challenging–connecting a relay board to an Arduino, for instance. All of these parts are fairly simple to run individually but together show he’s been working at this for a long time: 70 videos. A DIY security system is a far cry from turning on a LED.

Besides, I like how [Kevin] finishes projects, then riffs off of them. He tries out a few variants in a row, making changes and improvements. I just hope he keeps building–I can’t imagine what he’ll be making fifteen years from now.

Check out some of his videos:

Calling all developers in Italy and beyond! We will be hosting a three-day workshop in our Turin office, September 29th to October 1st, designed for students, hackers, and engineers ages 18 to 28 with a deep interest in microcontrollers, IoT, and open source development.

The workshop will focus on three main topics:

Teamwork and Open Source

• GitHub and GitHub Flow
• Hands-on collaborative projects on GitHub

Microcontrollers

• Review of framework for MCU development
• Introduction to Arduino core architecture
• Arduino ecosystem tools
• C++ and Stream
• Understanding the difference between Arduino and other frameworks
• Hands-on project with AVR, ARM, ARC32

Internet of Things

• The future of IoT
• Security, networks, protocols
• Low-power
• Hands-on “Chinese whispers” project involving multiple protocols, e.g. infrared, WiFi, BLE, Sigfox, LoRA, and Zigbee.

The workshop will be tutored by Martino Facchin, senior developer at Arduino, and is open to a maximum of 25 selected participants. The cost (150 EUR) covers all of the necessary materials, lunches, and social activities (breakfast with Massimo Banzi and aperitivo with the Arduino team).

Interested? You can start by applying here (deadline: September 10th). All confirmed participants will receive an email on September 12th with a link to buy their seat at the workshop (deadline: September 17th) via the Arduino online store. For more information, feel free to email us at events@arduino.cc.

ARDUINO DEVELOPERS WORKSHOP

DATES: September 29 – October 1, 2017, from 9.30am to 6pm

VENUE: Arduino c/o Toolbox Co-working, Via Agostino da Montefeltro 2, Torino

TUTOR: Martino Facchin

COST: 150 EUR + VAT

Application for the event can be found here. Additional information at events@arduino.cc.

Digital cameras have revolutionized the ways that we can record and share our lives. Action cameras, such as the GoPro and other similar models, have taken things one step further, allowing use in rugged environments. If you want to capture nature, however, you may want your camera to start recording automatically.

In order to add this ability, YouTuber “ItMightBeWorse” hooked up an ultrasonic sensor to his CA Kenai CA2001 camera using an Arduino Uno along with a transistor to act like the normal start/stop button. The output is soldered directly to the button leads, and he also tapped into the battery terminals to give himself more power supply options.

He can now record birds as they feed without being there to scare them away!

Always wanted to be a citizen of Fire Nation? Here’s one way to ace the citizenship exam: punch-activated flaming kung fu gauntlets of doom.

As with all the many, many, many flamethrower projects we’ve featured before, we’ve got to say this is just as bad an idea as they are and that you should not build any of them. That said, [Sufficiently Advanced]’s wrist-mounted, dual-wielding flamethrowers are pretty cool. Fueled by butane and containing enough of the right parts for even a minimally talented prosecutor to make federal bomb-making charges stick, the gauntlets each have an Arduino and accelerometer to analyze your punches. Wimpy punch, no flame — only awesome kung fu moves are rewarded with a puff of butane ignited by an arc lighter. The video below shows a few close calls that should scare off the hairy-knuckled among us; adding a simple metal heat shield might help mitigate potential singeing.

Firebending gloves not enough to satisfy your inner pyromaniac? We understand completely.

Thanks to [Nils Hitze] for the hot tip. Yep.

Kickstarter and its ilk seem like the Wild West when it comes to claims of being “The world’s most (Insert feature here) device!” It does add something special when you can truly say you have the world record for a device though, and [MellBell Electronics] are currently running a Kickstarter claiming the worlds smallest Arduino compatible board called Pico.

We don’t want to knock them too much, they seem like a legit Kickstarter campaign who have at time of writing doubled their goal, but after watching their promo video, checking out their Kickstarter, and around a couple of minutes research, their claim of being the world’s smallest Arduino-compatible board seems to have been debunked. The Pico measures in at an impressive 0.6 in. x 0.6 in. with a total area of 0.36 sq.in. which is nothing to be sniffed at, but the Nanite 85 which we wrote up back in 2014 measures up at around 0.4 in. x  0.7in. with a total area of around 0.28 sq.in.. In this post-fact, fake news world we live in, does it really matter? Are we splitting hairs? Or are the Pico team a little fast and loose with facts and the truth?

There may be smaller Arduino compatible boards out there, and this is just a case study between these two. We think when it comes to making bold claims like “worlds smallest” or something similar perhaps performing a simple Google search just to be sure may be an idea.

Not all projects are made equal. Some are designed to solve a problem while others are just for fun. Entering the ranks of the most useless machines is a project by [Vladimir Mariano] who created the 3D Printed Dancing Springs. It is a step up from 3D printing a custom slinky and will make a fine edition to any maker bench.

The project uses 3D printed coils made of transparent material that is mounted atop geared platforms and attached to a fixed frame. The gears are driven by a servo motor. The motor rotates the gears and the result is a distortion in the spring. This distortion is what the dancing is all about. To add to the effect, [Vladimir Mariano] uses RGB LEDs controlled by an ATmega32u4.

You can’t dance without music. So [Vladimir] added a MEMs microphone to pick up noise levels which are used to control the servo and lights. The code, STL files and build instructions are available on the website for you to follow along. If lights and sound are your things, you must check out the LED Illuminated Isomorphic Keyboard from the past.

Arduino announced an acquisition today that will merge Arduino.cc and Arduino.org.

Read more on MAKE

The post Acquisition Ushers in New Era for Arduino; Banzi Named Chairman appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

Arduino announced an acquisition today that will merge Arduino.cc and Arduino.org.

Read more on MAKE

The post Acquisition Ushers in New Era for Arduino; Banzi Named Chairman appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

BCMI, the company founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, co-founders of Arduino, announces that today it has acquired 100% ownership of Arduino AG, the corporation which owns all of the Arduino trademarks.

Following the acquisition, Mr. Massimo Banzi becomes the new Chairman and CTO of Arduino. Dr. Fabio Violante will be appointed as the new CEO, replacing Mr. Federico Musto who will pursue other opportunities outside Arduino AG.

“This is the beginning of a new era for Arduino in which we will strengthen and renew our commitment to open source hardware and software, while in parallel setting the company on a sound financial course of sustainable growth. Our vision remains to continue to enable anybody to innovate with electronics for a long time to come,” said Mr Banzi.

“I’m really excited and honoured to join Massimo, the co-founders and the amazing Arduino team as CEO. In the past two years we have worked very hard to get to this point. We envision a future in which Arduino will apply its winning recipe to democratize the Internet of Things for individuals, educators, professionals and businesses,” said Dr. Violante.

Perhaps you enjoy various flavors of electronic music, and would love to try making your own. Although this seems like a fun idea, after considering the amount of equipment and knowledge that you need to get started, many people simply move on to something else. On the other hand, the NOMNOM machine, seen here, allows you to create tunes visually using YouTube clips as samples.

The device has 16 buttons which can start and stop up to 16 clips displayed via a JavaScript web application. An Arduino Uno takes input from these buttons as well as four potentiometers to modify the clip sounds, and sends the appropriate signals to the computer running the app. There are also four knobs that control the repetition rate, volume, speed and playable length of each selected video. This enables you to make really interesting music without the normally steep learning curve.

For more details, you can check out the project log on Hackaday.io or on GitHub. NOMNOM will also be making an appearance at the World Maker Faire in New York City this fall, so be sure to see it in person if you’re there!