Before the Arduino took over the hobby market (well, at least the 8-bit segment of it), most hackers used PIC processors. They were cheap, easy to program, had a good toolchain, and were at the heart of the Basic Stamp, which was the gateway drug for many microcontroller developers.

[AXR AMR] has been working with the Pinguino, an Arduino processor based on a PIC (granted, an 18F PIC, although you can also use a 32-bit device, too). He shows you how to build a compatible circuit on a breadboard with about a dozen parts. The PIC has built-in USB. Once you flash the right bootloader, you don’t need anything other than a USB cable to program. You can see a video of this below.

You will need a programmer to get the initial bootloader, but there’s plenty of cheap options for that. The IDE is available for Windows, Linux, and the Mac. Of course, you might wonder why you would use a PIC device instead of the more traditional Arduino devices. The answer is: it depends. Every chip has its own set of plusses and minuses from power consumption to I/O devices, to availability and price. These chips might suit you, and they might not. That’s your call.  Of course, the difference between Microchip and Atmel has gotten less lately, too.

We’ve covered Pinguino before with a dedicated board. If you never played with a Basic Stamp, you might enjoy learning more about it. If you’re looking for more power than a PIC 18F can handle, you might consider the Fubarino, a PIC32 board you can use with the Arduino IDE.

I would like to add wifi control to my robot.  Right now it uses an Arduino Mega2650 to run the main control program.  I'd like to add to this contol inputs from an Android smartphone app over Wifi.  What do you recommend to do this?  

I would like to add wifi control to my robot.  Right now it uses an Arduino Mega2650 to run the main control program.  I'd like to add to this contol inputs from an Android smartphone app over Wifi.  What do you recommend to do this?  

I would like to add wifi control to my robot.  Right now it uses an Arduino Mega2650 to run the main control program.  I'd like to add to this contol inputs from an Android smartphone app over Wifi.  What do you recommend to do this?  

I would like to add wifi control to my robot.  Right now it uses an Arduino Mega2650 to run the main control program.  I'd like to add to this contol inputs from an Android smartphone app over Wifi.  What do you recommend to do this?  

[Ryan Bates] loves arcade games, any arcade games. Which is why you can find claw machines, coin pushers, video games, and more on his website.

We’ve covered his work before with his Venduino project. We also really enjoyed his 3D printed arcade joystick based off the design of a commercial variant. His coin pushing machine could help some us finally live our dream of getting a big win out of the most insidious gambling machine at arcades meant for children.

Speaking of frustrating gambling machines for children, he also built his own claw machine. Nothing like enabling test mode and winning a fluffy teddy bear or an Arduino!

It’s quite a large site and there’s good content hidden in nooks and crannys, so explore. He also sells kits, but it’s well balanced against a lot of open source files if you’d like to do it yourself. If you’re wondering how he gets it all done, his energy drink review might provide a clue.

Imgur user “Bodaciousbus” set up his apartment window fans to only circulate air when not filled with smoke.

Living in a communal area like an apartment or condo has its benefits, but there are several hassles to deal with as well. One in particular are neighbors who smoke right outside. If you’d like to leave a window open for ventilation, perhaps in combination with a fan, this can be quite annoying.

Bodaciousbom solved this issue with a series of fans connected to a smoke detector sensor and an Arduino. If the air is OK, the fans are allowed to blow, pushing homemade flaps out of the way and ventilating the apartment. There is also a series of LEDs to show the current status of the outside air.

I’m still a rookie with Arduino, but an experienced tinkerer. This project took me a couple of hours to complete, but overall was not too bad. I can relax now, knowing that my window fan will only run when the air outside is free of cigarette smoke (among other things).

Are you faced with a similar problem? Be sure to check out the project in more detail here.

Turn a Circuit Playground into a light-generating "paintbrush" for long-exposure photography.

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The post How to Easily Build a “Light Paintbrush” appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers.

We’ve been waiting for this one. A worm was written for the Internet-connected Arduino Yun that gets in through a memory corruption exploit in the ATmega32u4 that’s used as the serial bridge. The paper (as PDF) is a bit technical, but if you’re interested, it’s a great read.

The crux of the hack is getting the AVR to run out of RAM, which more than a few of us have done accidentally from time to time. Here, the hackers write more and more data into memory until they end up writing into the heap, where data that’s used to control the program lives. Writing a worm for the AVR isn’t as easy as it was in the 1990’s on PCs, because a lot of the code that you’d like to run is in flash, and thus immutable. However, if you know where enough functions are located in flash, you can just use what’s there. These kind of return-oriented programming (ROP) tricks were enough for the researchers to write a worm.

In the end, the worm is persistent, can spread from Yun to Yun, and can do most everything that you’d love/hate a worm to do. In security, we all know that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and here the attack isn’t against the OpenWRT Linux system running on the big chip, but rather against the small AVR chip playing a support role. Because the AVR is completely trusted by the Linux system, once you’ve got that, you’ve won.

Will this amount to anything in practice? Probably not. There are tons of systems out there with much more easily accessed vulnerabilities: hard-coded passwords and poor encryption protocols. Attacking all the Yuns in the world wouldn’t be worth one’s time. It’s a very cool proof of concept, and in our opinion, that’s even better.

Thanks [Dave] for the great tip!

A few days ago, we launched the MKR2UNO Adapter, which enables you to easily turn an Arduino Uno form factor project into a MKR1000-based one. Simply mount your IoT board to the adapter, plug in any Uno shield and have a wireless device in no time.

Our newly-published tutorial provides a step-by-step overview of how to build a WiFi-controllable robot using the MKR2UNO Adapter with a MKR1000 and an Arduino Motor Shield.

This project combines the Arduino MKR1000’s web server and Arduino Motor Shield’s capabilities to drive a pair of different DC motors. A basic interface is hosted and hard-coded in the MKR1000, allowing the user to maneuver the robot up, down, left or right.

Check out all of the schematics and code here!