Given an input and some sort of indicator, is there any device that can’t be hacked into a timepiece? With the help of an Arduino Nano and an ESP8266 module, Guilio Pons has created a unique clock out of a 1950s-era multimeter.

Pons’ project not only displays time with an indicator originally meant to reveal electrical values, but is also able to output sounds as needed using a speaker recovered from an old toy. He integrated three LEDs as well as a PIR sensor, so the unit can light up at night.

PWM control from the Arduino takes care of moving the gauge, while the ESP8266 allows the time to be synchronized via the Internet and the alarm adjusted over WiFi.

Want to retrofit a vintage tester of your own? Be sure to check out the Pons’ entire log on Hackaday.io. You can find the software library that he used to play sounds here.

Join us for a weekend of special events at the Arduino Store Berlin! Activities will kick off on Thursday, March 9th with teacher training. On Friday, March 10th and Saturday, March 11th, the Arduino team featuring Tenaya Hurst will present some of the latest products, like the Primo and the Otto; in the afternoon, the focus will shift towards the Arduino Uno WiFi and the Arduino Libretto Kit.

Everyone (ages 8 and up) is welcome to attend the workshops. Teachers, in particular, will have the opportunity to learn how to present and replicate projects with their students, as well as meet and greet each other during a social brunch on Sunday morning. The Arduino Store is also looking to collaborate with more educators, so don’t forget to bring your CV!

Registration is now open. The cost of each workshop, which includes an Arduino kit, is €59 +VAT and will be processed at the Berlin store. Please remember your laptop and power cord, and to download the Arduino IDE before attending! Have questions? Do not hesitate to contact events@arduino.org!

Arduino WORK/SHOP

Venue: Arduino Store, Danziger Str. 22, 10435 Berlin, Germany

Thursday, March 9th 
17:00-17:45: Meet, greet and network
18:00-20:00: Teacher training workshop
20:00-20:30: Followup Q&A for teachers interested in collaborating with Arduino Berlin Store

Friday, March 10th
12:30-13:45: New Arduino products introduction (Primo, Otto and more)
14:00-15:45: Workshop 1 – Getting started with Arduino Uno WiFi 
16:00-17:45: Workshop 2 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit
18:00-19:45: Workshop 3 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit

Saturday, March 11th 
9:30-10:45: New Arduino products introduction (Primo, Otto and more)
11:00-12:45: Workshop 4 – Getting started with Arduino Uno WiFi
13:00-14:45 Workshop 5 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit
15:00-16:45: Workshop 6 – Getting started with Arduino Primo 
17:00-18:45: Workshop 7 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit

Sunday, March 12th
10:00-12:00: Teacher brunch

Using a stepper motor, an Arduino Micro, and various mechanical bits, “Max Maker” shows us how to motorize a camera slider.

According to his video below, “There are many cheap sliders available, but none that are motorized.” On the other hand, in this project he demonstrates that with a little bit of work, and an excellent attention to detail, you can make the conversion yourself.

Even if you’re not interested in this kind of application, the video reveals some interesting tricks, such as transferring a hole pattern using tape at 0:30, and using nail polish/recessed lettering to label switches at 3:55. The slider can be set to slide down the rail between 10 seconds and 8 hours depending on your video or photography needs. Video results, seen around 5:00 in, are really amazing!

You can find more details on how to create a slider like this on the project’s Instructables page.

Join us for a special weekend of workshops at the Arduino Store Berlin! Activities will kick off on Thursday, March 9th with teacher training. On Friday, March 10th and Saturday, March 11th, the Arduino team featuring Tenaya Hurst will present some of the latest products, like the Primo and the Otto; in the afternoon, the focus will shift towards the Arduino Uno WiFi and the Arduino Libretto Kit.

Everyone (ages 8 and up) is welcome to attend the workshops. Teachers, in particular, will have the opportunity to learn how to present and replicate projects with their students, as well as meet and greet each other during a social brunch on Sunday morning. The Arduino Store is also looking to collaborate with more educators, so don’t forget to bring your CV!

Registration is now open. The cost of each workshop, which includes an Arduino kit, is €59 +VAT and will be processed at the Berlin store. Please remember your laptop and power cord, and to download the Arduino IDE before attending! Have questions? Do not hesitate to contact events@arduino.org!

Arduino WORK/SHOP

Venue: Arduino Store, Danziger Str. 22, 10435 Berlin, Germany

Thursday, March 9th 
17:00-17:45: Meet, greet and network
18:00-20:00: Teacher training workshop
20:00-20:30: Followup Q&A for teachers interested in collaborating with Arduino Berlin Store

Friday, March 10th
12:30-13:45: New Arduino products introduction (Primo, Otto and more)
14:00-15:45: Workshop 1 – Getting started with Arduino Uno WiFi 
16:00-17:45: Workshop 2 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit
18:00-19:45: Workshop 3 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit

Saturday, March 11th 
9:30-10:45: New Arduino products introduction (Primo, Otto and more)
11:00-12:45: Workshop 4 – Getting started with Arduino Uno WiFi
13:00-14:45 Workshop 5 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit
15:00-16:45: Workshop 6 – Getting started with Arduino Primo 
17:00-18:45: Workshop 7 – Getting started with Arduino Uno Libretto Kit

Sunday, March 12th
10:00-12:00: Teacher brunch

There are many designs for little two-wheeled robots available to download for constructors with an interest in simple robotics. You might even think there are so many that there could not possibly be room for another, but that has not deterred [Rob Miles]. He’s created HullPixelBot, a platform for a mobile pixel as well as for simple robotic experimentation.

So what makes HullPixelBot more than just Yet Another Arduino Powered Robot? For a start, it’s extremely well designed, and has a budget of less than £10 ($12.50). But the real reason to take notice lies in the comprehensive software, which packs in a language interpreter and MQTT endpoint for talking to an Azure IoT hub. This is much more than a simple Arduino bot on which you must craft your own sketches, instead, it is a platform for which the Arduino bot is merely the carrier.

The project has had quite a while to mature since its initial release, and now has the option of a single pixel or a ring of pixels. The eventual aim is to use swarms of networked HullPixelBots to create large autonomous moving pixel displays, containing more than a hundred individual pixels.

There is an early video of some PixelBots in action which we’ve placed below the break, but it serves more as eye candy than anything else. If you have a spare ten quid, download and print yourself a chassis, install Arduino and motors, and have a go yourself!

We’ve certainly come a long way since the days when a cheap Arduino robot cost $100.

When you already know exactly where and how you’d like your motor to behave, a code-compile-flash-run-debug cycle can work just fine. But if you want to play around with a stepper motor, there’s nothing like a live interface. [BrendaEM]’s RDL is a generic stepper motor driver environment that you can flash into an Arduino. RDL talks to your computer or cell phone over serial, and can command a stepper-driver IC to move the motor in three modes: rotary, divisions of a circle, and linear. (Hence the acronumical name.) Best of all, the entire system is interactive. Have a peek at the video below.

The software has quite a range of capabilities. Typing “?” gets you a list of commands, typing “@” tells you where the motor thinks it is, and “h” moves the motor back to its home position. Rotating by turns, degrees, or to a particular position are simple. It can also read from an analog joystick, which will control the rotation speed forward and backward in real time.

Division mode carves the pie up into a number of slices, and the motor spins to these particular locations. Twelve, or sixty, divisions gives you a clock, for instance. Acceleration and deceleration profiles are built in, but tweakable. You can change microstepping on the fly, and tweak many parameters of the drive, and then save all of the results to EEPROM. If you’re playing around with a new motor, and don’t know how quickly it can accelerate, or what speeds it’s capable of, nothing beats playing around with it interactively.

Right now, there’s not much documentation aside from the code itself and the attached video, but actually that looks like all you’d need to get started. So if you’re looking to replicate Hackaday’s [Moritz Walter]’s excellent stepper-driver shootout, a tool like this is just the ticket.

Whether you’re lodged in an apartment with a poor view of the sky like [Becky Stern] or are looking for an at-a-glance report of the current weather, you might consider this minimalist weather display instead of checking your computer or your phone every time you’re headed out the door.

The first order of business was to set up her Feather Huzzah ESP8266 module. [Becky] started with a blink test to ensure it was working properly. Once that was out of the way, she moved on to installing a few libraries. Temperature data fetched by an IFTTT feed is displayed on a seven-segment display, while additional feeds separately retrieve information for each basic weather type: sunny, overcast, rain, snow.

All it took to create the sleek display effect was a few pieces of cardboard inside a shadow box frame, a sheet of paper as a diffuser, and twelve Neopixel RGB LEDs hidden inside. Trimming and securing everything in place as well as notching out the back of the frame for the power cable finished the assembly. Check out the build video after the break.

Pair this weather frame with a shoe rack that spotlights the appropriate footwear depending on the weather to really streamline your exit.

Using a couple Arduinos, a team of Makers at a recent McHacks 24-hour hackathon developed a speech-to-sign language automaton.

Alex Foley, along with Clive Chan, Colin Daly, and Wilson Wu, wanted to make a tool to help with translation between oral and sign languages. What they came up with was an amazing animatronic setup that can listen to speech via a computer interface, and then translate it into sign language.

This device takes the form of two 3D-printed hands, which are controlled by servos and a pair Arduino Unos. In addition to speech translation, the setup can sense hand motions using Leap Motion’s API, allowing it to mirror a person’s gestures.

You can read about the development process in Foley’s Medium write-up, including their first attempt at control using a single Mega board.

After he’d just finished a project using RGB LEDs, Imgur user nolobot’s brother mentioned he needed a new computer desk. Most people would probably just let their brother buy one, others would make something out of wood, but nolobot instead decided to create something truly amazing using more than 1,200 WS2812 RGB LED modules, an Arduino Mega, aluminum extrusion, and translucent polycarbonate.

The Mega controls these LEDs with the FastLED library, which are sandwiched between a base piece of plywood and a strip of polycarbonate using custom spacers. This diffuses the light nicely, allowing for beautiful light animations directly on the desk’s surface.

You can find more on this awesome build on the project’s Imgur page!

In today’s digital era, we almost take for granted that all our information is saved and backed up, be it on our local drives or in the cloud — whether automatically, manually, or via some other service.  For information from decades past, that isn’t always the case, and recovery can be a dicey process.  Despite the tricky challenges, the team at [Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante] and [mera400.pl], as well as researchers and scientists from various museums, institutions, and more all came together in the attempt to recover the Polish CROOK operating system believed to be stored on five magnetic tapes.

Originally stored at the Warsaw Museum of Technology, the tapes were ideally preserved, but — despite some preliminary test prep — the museum’s tape reader kept hanging at the 800 BPI NRZI encoded header, even though the rest of the tape was 1600 BPI phase encoding. Some head scratching later, the team decided to crack open their Qualstar 1052 tape reader and attempt to read the data directly off the circuits themselves!!

Using an Arduino Mega as a sampling device and the tape in test mode, the team were able to read the tapes, but the header remained inscrutable and accompanied by errors in the rest of the data. Promising nonetheless!

Switching gears, the decision was made to use a logic analyzer to read the tapes and use software to decode the data. While they waited for their new analyzer to ship, one of the team members, [Jacob Filipowicz] harnessed the power of Python to write a program called Nine Track Labs (pictured below) which would allow them to read any kind of magnetic tape, at any speed, BPI, and writing standard. Armed with the software and analyzer, the team was able to successfully recover the data from the tapes in its entirety without errors!

Among the data recovered, there were numerous versions of the CROOK operating system — allowing them to reproduce the OS’s development process, as well as hundreds of other files containing programs and tools hitherto believed to be lost. There was also a backup of a ‘live’ MERA-400 system with a binary CROOK-3 OS, ready to run in emulation. All things considered, the techno-archeological tour-de-force was a smashing success.

If — in your more modern travels — you need to recover an audio recording gone awry, know that you can retrieve that data with a hex editor.