Nobody’s perfect. Sometimes you’re up late at night writing a blog post and you stumble upon an incredible story. You write it up, and it ends up being, well, incredible. IEEE Spectrum took the bait on this video (embedded below) where [Keran McKenzie] claims to have built a self-driving car for under $1,000 AUS with Arduinos.

The video is actually pretty funny, and we don’t think it’s intended to be a mass-media hoax as much as a YouTube joke. After letting the car “take over” for a few seconds, it swerves and [Keran] pretends to have hit something. (He’s using his knees people!) There are lots of takes with him under the car, and pointing at a single wire that supposedly makes the whole thing work. Yeah, right.

We were a bit bummed, though. We don’t think you can even reliably interface a sensor system with the steering wheel, accelerator, and brakes for as little as one grand, but we would have been entirely happy to see it done. We’re not saying that the software to run an autonomous car is the easy part, but we’d love to have a hack at it if the hardware were affordable.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a real autonomous driving experience, we recommend starting by hacking RC cars and giving them substantially bigger brains than an Arduino. Once you’ve got that working, making progress to a real car is doable, but expensive. And it helps to be [geohot].

And lest you think we’re all holier-than-thou, check out our most embarrassing post ever. We could just curl up and die. Feel better soon, IEEE Spectrum!

Thanks [jpiat] for the tip!

With Timothy Giles’ rotating digital picture frame, you’ll never have to endure black bars around your vertical images again!

Rather than accept the poor presentation of vertical images that normal displays offer, Giles instead made his own out of a discarded 27-inch LCD TV. A Raspberry Pi displays the images sideways, then uses an Arduino with a stepper shield to rotate the TV to compensate.

Mechanically, he uses a herringbone gear set to turn the TV, while the Arduino accelerates and decelerates the TV’s rotation to give a smooth transition. It’s a very cool project, and one that makes you wonder “why didn’t I think of that?”

You can find more about Giles’ FlipFrame project at his Hackaday.io page, including code and mechanical design files if you want to build your own!

With Timothy Giles’ rotating digital picture frame, you’ll never have to endure black bars around your vertical images again!

Rather than accept the poor presentation of vertical images that normal displays offer, Giles instead made his own out of a discarded 27-inch LCD TV. A Raspberry Pi displays the images sideways, then uses an Arduino with a stepper shield to rotate the TV to compensate.

Mechanically, he uses a herringbone gear set to turn the TV, while the Arduino accelerates and decelerates the TV’s rotation to give a smooth transition. It’s a very cool project, and one that makes you wonder “why didn’t I think of that?”

You can find more about Giles’ FlipFrame project at his Hackaday.io page, including code and mechanical design files if you want to build your own!

The team at [2PrintBeta] required a bunch of cables, heat shrink, and braid to be cut for their customers. They looked into an industrial cable cutter, but decided the price was a little too high, so they decided to make their own. They had a bunch of ideas for cutting: Using a razor blade?  Or a Dremel with a cutting wheel? What they came up with was a DIY cable cutter that uses a pair of scissors, a pair of stepper motors, a pair of 3D printed wheels and an Arduino.

The first thing the team had to do was to mount the scissors so they would cut reliably. One of the stepper motors was attached to a drive wheel that had a bolt mounted on it. This went through one of the scissors’ handles, the other handle was held in place on the machine using screws. The second stepper motor was used to rotate the wheels that drives the cable through to the correct length. [2PrintBeta] used a BAM&DICE shield and two DICE-STK stepper motor drivers on an Arduino Mega to control the cutter.

The [2PrintBeta] team are pretty good at doing things themselves, as we’ve seen previously with their DIY plastic bender. And again, with this automatic cable cutter, they’ve seen a need and resolved it using the things at their disposal and some DIY ingenuity.

Last year, we featured an awesome audiovisual project from ANGLE that applied videomapping techniques to their livesets. Now, the Florence-based duo is back with their latest A/V system, “Shining Back,” which was designed in collaboration with JoinT Studio’s Stefano Bonifazi.

Essentially, it’s a grid structure consisting of LED lights that pulse in a geometric matrix to the duo’s live rhythms. The installation runs on an Arduino Uno and uses Mad Mapper and Modul8 software.

The immersive atmosphere created by the music is emphasized by a new research in the visual realm. Taking an architectural form of a kaleidoscope the lighting visually weaves and refracts the music into a surreal yet symbiotic form.

Last year, we featured an awesome audiovisual project from ANGLE that applied videomapping techniques to their livesets. Now, the Florence-based duo is back with their latest A/V system, “Shining Back,” which was designed in collaboration with JoinT Studio’s Stefano Bonifazi.

Essentially, it’s a grid structure consisting of LED lights that pulse in a geometric matrix to the duo’s live rhythms. The installation runs on an Arduino Uno and uses Mad Mapper and Modul8 software.

The immersive atmosphere created by the music is emphasized by a new research in the visual realm. Taking an architectural form of a kaleidoscope the lighting visually weaves and refracts the music into a surreal yet symbiotic form.

[Mathieu] wrote in with his laser target practice game. It’s not the most amazing hack in the history of hackery, but it’s an excellent example of the type of simple and fun things you can do with just a little bit of microcontrollering.

First off, the gun is a broken toy gun that used to shoot something other than red collimated light beams. The Arduino knockoff inside reacts to a trigger pull and fires the laser for around 200 milliseconds. The gun also has a “gas gauge” that fills up with repeated shots and cools down over time. And therein lies the game — a simple race to ten, where each player only has a fixed number of shots over time.

The targets are simply a light sensor, scorekeeping LED display, and a buzzer that builds tension by beeping at you as the countdown timer ticks down. The bodies are made out of 3D-printed corners that connect some of [Mathieu]’s excess wooden goat-cheese lids.

All the code is up on GitHub so you can make your own with stuff that you’ve got lying around the house. The “gun” can be anything that you can embed a laser in that makes it aimable. Good clean fun!

Just days after celebrating the Arduino 101‘s first birthday at Maker Faire Rome, we’ve partnered with Hackster, Intel, and Seeed Studio to launch an exciting new contest. We’re challenging you to unleash the powers of the Intel® Curie™ Module-based board and “Invent Your Future.”

Perhaps you want to build an autonomous boat for collecting ocean pollution data, or a pair of shoes that play different sounds for different exercises, or maybe even a wireless gesture-based home automation controller? Whatever you choose, we want to see how you use the Arduino 101 as the brains behind your next creation.

For those who may not be familiar with the 101, the board combines the performance and low-power consumption of the Intel® Curie™ Module with the simplicity of Arduino. It keeps the same robust form factor and peripheral list as the Uno with the addition of Bluetooth LE capabilities and a six-axis accelerometer/gyro to help you easily expand your creativity into the connected world.

The Arduino 101 is designed with two tiny 32MHz cores: an x86 (Curie™, a Quark™ module) and a 32-bit ARC architecture core. Even with this added power, the Arduino 101 is still programmable using sketches from the Arduino IDE.

And now back to the contest… To kick off things, Hackster is giving away 150 Arduino 101 and Seeed Studio Grove Starter Kits to the best ideas submitted by November 20, 2016. But that’s not all, top entries in each category?—?smart home, environment, and healthcare—will receive a Microsoft Surface Pro 4! You have until February 26, 2017 to submit your projects!

Want to learn more? Head over to the contest’s official page on Hackster.io.

Just days after celebrating the Arduino 101‘s first birthday at Maker Faire Rome, we’ve partnered with Hackster, Intel, and Seeed Studio to launch an exciting new contest. We’re challenging you to unleash the powers of the Intel® Curie™ Module-based board and “Invent Your Future.”

Perhaps you want to build an autonomous boat for collecting ocean pollution data, or a pair of shoes that play different sounds for different exercises, or maybe even a wireless gesture-based home automation controller? Whatever you choose, we want to see how you use the Arduino 101 as the brains behind your next creation.

For those who may not be familiar with the 101, the board combines the performance and low-power consumption of the Intel® Curie™ Module with the simplicity of Arduino. It keeps the same robust form factor and peripheral list as the Uno with the addition of Bluetooth LE capabilities and a six-axis accelerometer/gyro to help you easily expand your creativity into the connected world.

The Arduino 101 is designed with two tiny 32MHz cores: an x86 (Curie™, a Quark™ module) and a 32-bit ARC architecture core. Even with this added power, the Arduino 101 is still programmable using sketches from the Arduino IDE.

And now back to the contest… To kick off things, Hackster is giving away 150 Arduino 101 and Seeed Studio Grove Starter Kits to the best ideas submitted by November 20, 2016. But that’s not all, top entries in each category?—?smart home, environment, and healthcare—will receive a Microsoft Surface Pro 4! You have until February 26, 2017 to submit your projects!

Want to learn more? Head over to the contest’s official page on Hackster.io.

[Tim] was tired of compromising his portrait-oriented digital photos by shoehorning them into landscape-only frames. Unable to find a commercial solution, he built his own rotating digital photo frame from a 27″ LCD TV.

It uses a Raspi 3 to find [Tim]’s pictures on a giant SD card. He originally wanted to have the Pi pull pictures from Google Photos and display them randomly, but the API doesn’t work in that direction. Instead, a Python script looks at the pictures on the SD card and determines whether each is landscape or portrait-oriented. If a picture was taken in portrait-mode, the display will rotate 90 degrees. Rotation is handled with an Arduino, a stepper motor, and some 3D-printed herringbone gears. The first version was a bit noisy, so [Tim] re-printed the motor mount and the pinion gear out of flexible filament.

[Tim] designed the mount and frame himself and laser-cut the pieces out of birch plywood. We like that he accounted for the front-heaviness and that he covered the high voltage circuitry with acrylic to mitigate the risk of shock. All the code and design files are available on his project page. Make the jump to see a brief demonstration followed by a walk-through and stay for the six-minute slide show.