What could be more terrifying than ghosts, goblins, or clowns? How about a shapeless pile of fright on your bedroom floor that only moves when you’re not looking at it? That’s the idea behind [Sciencish]’s nightmare robot, which is lurking after the break. The Minecraft spider outfit is just a Halloween costume.

In this case, “looking at it” equates to you shining a flashlight on it, trying to figure out what’s under the pile of clothes. But here’s the thing — it never moves when light is shining on it. It quickly figures out the direction of the light source and lies in wait. After you give up and turn out the flashlight, it spins around to where the light was and starts moving in that direction.

The brains of this operation is an Arduino Uno, four light-dependent resistors, and a little bit of trigonometry to find the direction of the light source. The robot itself uses two steppers and printed herringbone gears for locomotion. Its chassis has holes in it that accept filament or wire to make a cage that serves two purposes — it makes the robot into more of an amorphous blob under the clothes, and it helps keep clothes from getting twisted up in the wheels. Check out the demo and build video after the break, because this thing is freaky fast and completely creepy.

While we usually see a candy-dispensing machine or two every Halloween, this year has been more about remote delivery systems. Don’t just leave sandwich bags full of fun size candy bars all over your porch, build a candy cannon or a spooky slide instead.

Via r/duino

Electric utilities across the world have been transitioning their meters from the induction analog style with a distinctive spinning disc to digital “smart” meters which aren’t as aesthetically pleasing but do have a lot of benefits for utilities and customers alike. For one, meter readers don’t need to visit each meter every month because they are all networked together and can download usage data remotely. For another, it means a lot of analog meters are now available for projects such as this clock from [Monta].

The analog meters worked by passing any electricity used through a small induction motor which spun at a rate proportional to the amount of energy passing through it. This small motor spun a set of dials via gearing in order to keep track of the energy usage in the home or business. To run the clock, [Monta] connected a stepper motor with a custom transmission to those dials for the clock face because it wasn’t possible to spin the induction motor fast enough to drive the dials. An Arduino controls that stepper motor, but can’t simply drive the system in a linear fashion because it needs to skip a large portion of the “minutes” dials every hour. A similar problem arises for the “hours” dials, but a little bit of extra code solves this problem as well.

Once the actual clock is finished, [Monta] put some finishing touches on it such as backlighting in the glass cover and a second motor to spin the induction motor wheel to make the meter look like it’s running. It’s a well-polished build that makes excellent use of some antique hardware, much like one of his other builds we’ve seen which draws its power from a Stirling engine.

If you have any kind of business, chances are it involves stickers at some point in the process. More accurately it involves you peeling the backs off of sticker after sticker, slowly wasting time and working your way toward a repetitive stress injury. Why do that to yourself when you could have a machine do it for you?

That’s exactly the thinking behind [Mr Innovative]’s automatic label dispensing machine. All he has to do is load up the roll of labels, dial in the length of each label, and away the machine goes, advancing and dispensing and taking up the empty paper all at once. In fact, that’s how it works: the take-up reel is on the shaft of a NEMA-17 stepper motor, which gets its instructions from an Arduino Nano and an A4988 motor driver. Our favorite part is the IR sensor located underneath the sticker that’s ready to take — the machine doesn’t feed another until it senses that you’ve taken the previous sticker. We stuck the demo and build video after the break.

Our other favorite thing about this build is that [Mr Innovative] seems to have used the same PCB as his freaky fast bobbin winder.

The human body does plenty of cool tricks, but one of the easiest to take advantage of is persistence of vision (POV). Our eyes continue to see light for a fraction of a second after the light goes off, and we can leverage this into fun blinkenlight toys like POV staffs. Sure, you can buy POV staffs and other devices, but they’re pretty expensive and you won’t learn anything that way. Building something yourself is often the more expensive route, but that’s not the case with [shurik179]’s excellent open-source POV staff.

There’s a lot to like about this project, starting with the detailed instructions. It’s based on the ItsyBitsyM4 Express and Adafruit’s Dotstar LED strips. You could use the Bluetooth version, but it’s already quite easy to load images to the staff because it shows up as a USB mass storage device. We like that [shurik179] added an IMU and coded the staff so that the images look consistent no matter how fast the staff is spinning. In the future, [shurik179] might make a Bluetooth version that’s collapsible. That sounds like quite the feat, and we can’t wait to see it in action.

As cool as it is to wave a POV staff around, there’s no real practical application. What’s more practical than a clock?

Plants are great to have around, but they all have different watering needs. If only they could cry out when they’re thirsty, right? Well, now they can. All you need to hear them suffer is your very own Klausner Machine. [RoniBandini] based the Klausner machine on one of Roald Dahl’s short stories, which features an inventor who builds a machine that can make audible the sound of plants shrieking whenever they’re cut.

In [RoniBandini]’s version of the Klausner Machine, the point is to judge the plant’s feelings based on its soil moisture content. An Arduino Nano reads in from the soil moisture sensor, and if the soil is dry, the plant screams. If the soil is moist, the plant emits happy sounds from DF Player Mini and SD card.  We think the analog meters are a great touch, and the jumping needles really anthropomorphize the plant.

Go forth and gain a better appreciation for your plants’ feelings, because this project is wide open. Maybe it will help you water them more often. Some plants need to be cut back, so we think it would be cool if you could make it scream when you take a cutting. Check out the demo after the break.

This is isn’t the first time we’ve seen an analog meter used in conjunction with soil moisture. What is a VU meter, anyway? Our own [Dan Maloney] really moved the needle on the subject a while back.

We around the Hackaday shop never get tired of seeing new ways to mark the passage of time. Hackers come up with all manner of interesting timekeeping modalities using every imaginable material and method of moving the mechanism once per whatever minimum time unit the hacker chooses to mark.

But honestly, there are only so many ways to make a clock, and while we’re bound to see some repeats, it’s still nice to go over old ground with a fresh approach. Take this linear sliding stencil clock for instance. [Luuk Esselbrugge] has included some cool design elements that bear a closer look. The video below shows that the display is made up of four separate stepper motors, each driving a vertical stencil via a rack-and-pinion mechanism. There a simple microswitch for homing the display, and a Neopixel for lighting things up.

The video below shows that the stencils move very, very slowly; [Luuk] says that this is to keep the steppers as quiet as possible. Still, this means that some time changes take more than a minute to accomplish, which is a minor problem. The Neopixel also doesn’t quite light up just one digit, which should be a pretty easy fix for version 2. Still, even with these issues, we like the stately movements of this clock, and appreciate [Luuk]’s attempts to make it easier to live with.

Don’t let the number of clocks you see on these pages dissuade you from trying something new, or from putting your twist on an old design. Start with fridge magnets, an old oscilloscope, or even a bevy of steel balls, and let your imagination run wild. Just make sure to tell us all about it when you’re done.

[via r/Arduino]

While you might think of radar pointing toward the skies, applications for radar have found their way underground as well. Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) is a tool that sends signals into the earth and measures their return to make determinations about what’s buried underground in much the same way that distant aircraft can be located or identified by looking for radar reflections. This technology can also be built with a few common items now for a relatively small cost.

This is a project from [Mirel] who built the system around a Arduino Mega 2560 and antipodal Vivaldi antennas, a type of directional antenna. Everything is mounted into a small cart that can be rolled along the ground. A switch attached to the wheels triggers the radar at regular intervals as it rolls, and the radar emits a signal and listens to reflections at each point. It operates at a frequency range from 323 MHz to 910 MHz, and a small graph of what it “sees” is displayed on an LCD screen that is paired to the Arduino.

Using this tool allows you to see different densities of materials located underground, as well as their depths. This can be very handy when starting a large excavation project, detecting rock layers or underground utilities before digging. [Mirel] made all of the hardware and software open-source for this project, and if you’d like to see another take on GPR then head over to this project which involves a lot of technical discussion on how it works.

We have no idea whether [Nick Goodey] is a trained engineer or not. But given the detailed design of this DIY energy recovery ventilator for his home HVAC system, we’re going to go out on a limb and say he probably knows what he’s doing.

For those not in the know, an energy recovery ventilator (ERV) is an increasingly common piece of equipment in modern residential and commercial construction. As buildings have become progressively “tighter” to decrease heating and cooling energy losses to the environment, the air inside them has gotten increasingly stale. ERVs solve the problem by bringing fresh, unconditioned air in from the outside while venting stale but conditioned air to the outside. The two streams pass each other in a heat exchanger so that much of the energy put into the conditioned air is transferred to the incoming unconditioned air.

While ERV systems are readily available commercially, [Nick] decided to roll his own after a few experiments with Coroplast and some extensive calculations convinced him it would be a viable idea. One may scoff at the idea of corrugated plastic for the heat exchanger, but the smooth channels through the material make it a great choice. He built up a block of Coroplast squares with the channels in alternate layers oriented orthogonally, letting stale inside air pass very close to fresh outside air to exchange heat without every mixing directly. The entire system, including fans, an Arduino for control, sensors galore, and the Hubitat home automation hub, is powered by DC, so no electrician was needed. [Nick] has a ton of detail in his build log, including all the tools and calculators he used to design the system.

Given the expense of ERV systems, we’re surprised we haven’t seen more stories about DIY versions. We have talked about HVAC systems a lot, though — after all, HVAC techs are hackers who make housecalls.

Our old math teacher famously said, “You have to take what you know and use it find what you don’t know.” The same holds true for a lot of microcontroller designs including [rgco’s] clever metal detector that uses very little other than an Arduino. The principle of operation is simple. An Arduino can measure time, a coil and a resistor will create a delay proportional to the circuit values, and metal around the coil will change the coil’s inductance. As the inductance changes, so does the delay and, thus, the Arduino can sense metal, as you can see in the video below.

The simple principle is also simple in practice. Besides the Arduino and the coil, there’s a single resistor. You want a small coil since larger coils won’t detect smaller objects. If you don’t want to wind your own coil, [rgco] suggests using a roll of hookup wire as long as the resistance is under 10 ohms.

You could omit it, but the original design has a buzzer and an electrolytic capacitor connected to generate a buzz in addition to the built-in LED indicator when metal is near. The LED also shows a blink pattern if the coil is open, too short, too long, or has too much resistance.

The biggest problem is that the poor Arduino needs to measure delays down in the nanosecond range. It can’t actually do this directly, so the code takes a ranging measurement to get in the ballpark and then produces appropriately-sized pulses and adds them up to get a better idea of the total delay. There are several videos in the post of a prototype and the final device built in a Tic Tac container, which you can see below.

If you want something a bit fancier, here’s another simple design that has a few more parts. Or you can go for one that is ultrasensitive.

One of the worst things about sewing is finding out that your bobbin — that’s the smaller spool that works together with the needle and the larger spool to make a complete stitch — ran out of thread several stitches ago. If you’re lucky, the machine has a viewing window on the bobbin so you can easily tell when it’s getting dangerously close to running out, but many machines (ours included) must be taken halfway apart and the bobbin removed before it can be checked.

Having spare bobbins ready to go is definitely the answer. We would venture to guess that most (if not all) machines have a built-in bobbin winder, but using them involves de-threading the machine and setting it up to wind bobbins instead of sew. If you have a whole lot of sewing to do and can afford it, an automatic bobbin winder is a godsend. If you’re [Mr. Innovative], you build one yourself out of acrylic, aluminium, and Arduinos.

Here’s how it works: load up the clever little acrylic slide with up to twelve empty bobbins, then dial in the speed percentage and press the start button. The bobbins load one at a time onto a drill chuck that’s on the output shaft of a beefy 775 DC motor. The motor spins ridiculously fast, loading up the bobbin in a few seconds. Then the bobbin falls down a ramp and into a rack, and the thread is severed by a piece of nichrome wire.

An important part of winding bobbins is making sure the thread stays in place at the start of the wind. We love the way [Mr. Innovative] handled this part of the problem — a little foam doughnut around a bearing holds the thread in place just long enough to get the winding started. The schematic, BOM, and CAD files are available if you’d like to make one of these amazing machines for yourself. In the meantime, check out the demo/build video after the break.

Still not convinced that sewing is cool enough to learn? Our own [Jenny List] may be able to convert you. If that doesn’t get you, you might like to know that some sewing machines are hackable — this old girl has a second life as a computerized embroidery machine. If those don’t do it, consider that sewing machines can give you a second life, too.

Thanks for the tip, [Baldpower]!