Modding vehicles to do something different and unique has been a pastime of “motorheads” almost since cars began to replace horses. Many modifications involve speed, but some like these fancy turn signals by Shravan Lal, simply supplement the looks of his ride.

An Arduino Nano was used as the brains of this hack in order to control strips of WS2812B LEDs acting as blinkers (similar to those on the new Audi A6) in the video below. In addition to signaling a right or left turn, Lal’s build also has a neat startup animation, and can act as a set of hazard lights if needed.

It’s a neat project, with lots of further potential; on the other hand, be sure to check the legality of this type of modification in your area before attempting something similar! You can find more information on his GitHub page. Speaking of customizing cars, don’t miss AtHeart’s Macchina M2 on Kickstarter now!

Using a pair of Arduino Unos and nRF24L01+ modules, this hacker can now remote control his lights.

After struggling with a wall switch that was just too far from his desk to turn off without getting up, “Guyfromhe” decided to take matters into his own hands and rig up a servo to do it for him. The servo is simply hot glued to the switch plate, and when it gets a command, it obediently switches the lights on or off. Though crude, it seems to get the job done, and it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine a good bracket setup.

An Arduino Uno controls the servo, and takes signals from another Arduino via an nRF24+ RF module. He chose this wireless device as a simple transmission method, and one that uses less power than an ESP8266 that he also tried out. The non-servo Arduino can potentially take signals from several sources, including a Raspberry Pi, laptop, or even a hacked Amazon Dash button.

You can see this makeshift system demonstrated in the video below, and read more about the build here.

Though this low-cost robotic hand by Maker “MertArduino” might not be the best platform for manufacturing, or even world domination, it does show off some interesting physical build techniques. The DIY device can mimic a human’s hand wirelessly via a pair of Arduino Unos and nRF24L01 modules.

For construction, the fingers and thumb are made out of springs and foam, and nylon cords are used to pull them closed with a small servo for each digit. Control is accomplished by flex sensors attached via zip ties to a glove. It’s a great demonstration of how you don’t actually need a 3D printer or other advanced CNC machinery to craft something really unique!

You can see the project in the video below, and check out more hacks on Mert Arduino’s YouTube channel!

This is a guest post from Vaughn Shinall, Head of Product Outreach at Temboo.

Making 20,000 cakes more safely and efficiently every day, improving engine manufacturing for lawnmowers so they run more quietly, and designing farms to need less water. These are just a few examples of how Arduinos are being used everyday by engineers, businesses, and researchers with Temboo. Our embedded code generation engine empowers all sorts of people and organizations to program Arduino to connect to any cloud service, enabling ideas and creative applications all over the world.

Today we’re excited to announce a big update to our support for Arduino devices. In line with the great advances that Arduino has made with its development boards and Internet-connectivity shields recently, we’ve upgraded our generated code and Arduino library to support the latest Arduino hardware.

Temboo’s code generation engine now officially supports the following boards:

• Arduino Yún
• Arduino Uno
• Arduino Mega
• Arduino Zero
• Arduino 101

As well as the following Internet connectivity shields:

• Arduino Yún Shield
• Arduino WiFi 101 Shield

Temboo will generate code for these Arduino boards that is production-ready and optimized for embedded devices. You can even select the sensors, actuators, and GPIO pins you are working with in our interface so that the generated code automatically converts sensor readings into real world units and handles conditional logic to, for example, send an SMS alert whenever high temperatures are detected.

Temboo also ensures that your sensor data and other information is protected in transit by establishing a secure connection from your board to the Temboo platform via HTTPS. As always, any information that you store on the Temboo platform is secured via military-grade encryption. Combining Temboo’s generated code with your Arduino board enables you to easily accomplish many common IoT tasks, from generating sensor data graphs viewable in any browser, to integrating with 100+ popular APIs, triggering sensor-based alerts via email and SMS, and remotely controlling actuators like LEDs, solenoids, fans, motors, and more.

Our customers in the food & beverage and manufacturing industries have been putting these features to good use on top of Arduino hardware, and they’re part of a growing trend. More and more types of engineers, from chemical and civil to mechanical and electrical, are incorporating Arduino and Temboo into their work and in the process acquiring new skills that can be applied to many engineering tasks, from retrofitting existing machinery for connectivity to remotely monitoring any type of physical asset.

We’re really excited about supporting the latest Arduino hardware, and will be regularly enhancing our Arduino library and generated code, so stay tuned for updates!

From PDPs to Connection Machines, the Hackaday crowd are big fans of blinkenlights. While this project isn’t an old CPU, RAM, ROM, and an S-100 bus wrapped up in a fancy enclosure, it is a great recreation of the Altair 8800, the historic kit computer that supposedly launched the microcomputer revolution.

[Justin] says his project is just another Altair 8800 clone, but this one is cut down to the size of an Arduino shield. This is in stark contrast to other Altair recreations, whether they are modern PCs stuffed in an old case, modern replicas, or a board that has the same functionality using chunky toggle switches.

On board [Justin]’s pocket-sized Altair are a few LEDs, some DIP switches, and an octet of spring-loaded dual throw switches that wouldn’t look out of place in a 40-year old computer.

This shield targets the Arduino Due rather than the Mega, but only because the Due performs better running an Altair simulation. Everything is there, and a serial terminal is available ready to run BASIC or any other ancient OS.

What do you do if your light switch is too far from your desk, and you’re in a rental property so you can’t put in extra wiring to install an electronic control for it? Get up and turn it on or off by hand? Of course not!

If you are [Guyfromhe], you solve this problem with a servo attached to a screw-on light switch faceplate, and you control it with a pair of Arduino/nRF24L01 combos. It’s a pretty simple arrangement, the wireless link simply takes the place of a serial cable that instructs the Arduino on the light switch to operate the servo that in turn moves the switch. The whole thing is triggered through his home automation system, which in turn responds to an Amazon Dash button on his desk. Yes, it’s complex. But turning on the light has been automated without intrusion into his landlord’s domain, and that’s all that matters.

On a more serious note, he’s put some Arduino code up on his write-up, as well as a YouTube video we’ve put below the break.

This is by no means the first such switch we’ve seen, after all we featured a nicer 3D printed servo light switch the other month, and one with a breadboarded Arduino in 2015. While we’re at it though, it would be nice to see a few designed for European switches too.

We can’t decide if [MertArduino’s] robotic hand project is more art or demonstration project. The construction using springs, fishing line, and servo motors isn’t going to give you a practical hand that could grip or manipulate anything significant. However, the project shows off a lot of interesting construction techniques and is a fun demonstration for using nRF24L01 wireless in a project. You can see a video of the contraption, below.

A glove uses homemade flex sensors to send wireless commands to the hand. Another Arduino drives an array of servo motors that make the fingers flex. You don’t get fine control, nor any real grip strength, but the hand more or less will duplicate your movements. We noticed one finger seemed poorly controlled, but we suspect that was one of the homemade flex sensors going rouge.

The flex sensors are ingenious, but probably not very reliable. They consist of a short flexible tube, an LED and a light-dependent resistor. We’re guessing a lot of factors could change the amount of light that goes around a bent tube, and that may be what’s wrong with the one finger in the video.

We’d love to try this project using some conductive bag flex sensors. Although this hand doesn’t look like a gripper, we wondered if it could be used for sign language projects.

Using an Arduino Uno along with a Raspberry Pi for control, hacker “HomoFaciens” came up with this clever delta-style robot.

If you were going to make a robot with five servos, many Makers would make a robot arm with them and call it a day. HomoFaciens, however, who is known for making amazing machines with minimal tools and improvised materials, instead made something that seems to be a cross between a delta robot and a Skycam.

His device, called “WinchBot,” uses three winches attached to an equilateral triangle frame to move a slider on a central pivoting square rod. This allows the robot’s 5-axis “hand” to be positioned within the robot’s work area. The servos are then tasked with keeping everything in the correct orientation, as well as opening and closing the gripper as needed.

If you’d like more details than given in the very entertaining video seen here, be sure to check out the project’s write-up.

If you’re building a smart watch these days (yawn!), you’ve got to have some special sauce to impress the jaded Hackaday community. [Dominic]’s NeoPixel SmartWatch delivers, with his own take on what’s important to have on your wrist, and just as importantly, what isn’t.

There’s no fancy screen. Instead, the watch gets by with a ring of NeoPixels for all its notification needs. But notification is what it does right. It tells [Dominic] when he’s got an incoming call of course, but also has different flashing color modes for SMS, Snapchat, and e-mail. Oh yeah, and it tells time and even has a flashlight mode. Great functionality for a minimalistic display.

But that’s not all! It’s also got a light sensor that works from the UV all the way down to IR. At the moment, it’s being used to automatically adjust the LED brightness and to display current UV levels. (We imagine turning this into a sunburn alarm mode.) Also planned is a TV-B-Gone style IR transmitter.

The hardware is the tough part of this build, and [Dominic] ended up using a custom PCB to help in cramming so many off-the-shelf modules into a tiny space. Making it look good is icing on the cake.

Thanks [Marcello] for the tip!