After you’ve taken the plunge and decided to learn how to etch your own circuit boards, you’ll quickly find even the simplest boards are still out of your grasp. This is due mostly to the two-layer nature of most PCBs, and turn making a homemade Arduino board an exercise in frustration and improving your vocabulary of four-letter words.

After looking around for an easy-to-manufacture single-sided Arduino board, [Johan] realized there weren’t many options for someone new to board etching. He created the Nanino, quite possibly the simplist Arduino compatible board that can be made in a kitchen sink.

Billing it as something between the Veroduino and the Diavolino, [Johan]‘s board does away with all the complexities of true Arduinos by throwing out the USB interface and FTDI chip. A very small parts count makes the Nanino much less expensive to produce in quantity than even the official Arduino single sided board.

For an introduction to etching your own PCBs at home, we couldn’t think of a better first board. As an Arduino, you’re guaranteed to find some use for it and the ease of manufacture and low parts count makes it the perfect subject for your hackerspace’s next tutorial series.

Hello i am thinking of building a bigger version of the dagu 6wd wild thumper. a big one that can tow and go over larger obstacles much like the smaller current one. The motors i have selected to use are winshield wiper motors and will be powered by either a custom build lithium polymer battery pack (putting a bunch of  3 cell 2200mah batteries in parallel) or a car battery. I would probably go for the lithium polymer as they have a greater energy density.

What inspired me

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Mathematica creator Stephen Wolfram gave a talk at World Maker Faire New York 2012, but his 13-year-old son Christopher stole the show by doing some Mathematica programming on the fly to control a quadricopter.

His plan was to have a single line of Mathematica code that would make the quadricopter fly a specified 3D path. He had a list of points for a square, entered the line of code, and pressed Shift-Return, and… nothing happened!
I guess Christopher has debugged quite a lot of code in his 13 years. And now he set about doing it in front of the audience. A missing function definition. A missing command to connect to the device. He was finding quite a few things. And I was getting ready to call out that he should just give up.
But then… the sound of quadricopter blades, and up the quadricopter goes… flying its loop on the stage, and landing.
It had actually worked! It was pretty neat, being able to just type one line of code into Mathematica, and then having some physical object fly around in the pattern one had specified:

Stephen also mentioned the 3D koala bears that his daughter Catherine designed in Mathematica, and that they had printed at a local 3-D print shop:

Stephen says: “Every year there’s more and more for me to learn from my children. My oldest child, now age 16, has become a rather successful and uncannily sophisticated entrepreneur—from whom I’m trying to absorb what business wisdom I can. “

Kids, Arduinos and Quadricopters

CSI: Miami might be out of production, but that doesn't mean we'll be deprived of casual eyewear flipping. Not if Ben Heck has a say in the matter, at least. His latest DIY project automatically swings a pair of clip-on sunglasses into view whenever it's too sunny outside: a photocell attached to an AT Tiny microcontroller checks the light levels and, through an Arduino-based AVR MKII language, tells a rotor to spin the glasses into place. No one will be labeled a fashionista with the requisite battery pack strapped to their heads, but the construction doesn't require CNC milling and won't destroy a favorite frame. We're only disappointed that the sunglasses won't play The Who on command... yet.

Continue reading Ben Heck builds Arduino-based automatic sunglasses, beats David Caruso to the punch (video)

Filed under: Wearables

Ben Heck builds Arduino-based automatic sunglasses, beats David Caruso to the punch (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Oct 2012 22:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Well my boss is organizing a robot head building contest in China and asked me to make an example to inspire the contestants. I know many will just be made from cardboard and wood but I decided that if I was going to spend time on this project then I wanted to make the most of it and develop a new product.

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Using this tutorial, I set up my new HMC5883l compass module from china onto my robot, and I had a simple program to draw the readings onto a circle.

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This my version of a small hexapod with micro 9G servos. I'm using 2 DOF legs, that way I' need to control 12 servos. They are all controlled by an ATmega328. The board I'm using is my own design. I've named it the Bajduino 3A, it has an ATmega328P-PU and a LM2576 switch mode voltage regulator. The regulator should be good for 3A. Power comes from a 2S Lipo battery. I drew up some pieces in Autocad and had them laser cut by a local company. Not cheap but I prefer it this way, I'm not a mechanical man. I prefer to design things on a pc and let others make it.

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This is BrutBot.

He is my first robot and is based on the Arduino UNO with the Adafruit motor shield and a Parallax ping))) sensor.  I started with a "start here" kit but grew impatient with fried picaxe chips and infrared sensors, so I decided to try Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor instead.  

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Are you interested in starting out with Arduino but don’t know which kit to get? Check out the Microcontroller Quick Launch Pack from the Maker Shed! It’s the perfect “in between” kit for Arduino. This bundle includes a few more components than the Getting Started with Arduino Kit (like a Maker Shield) but not nearly as many as the Ultimate Microcontroller Pack (making it cost less.) So if you have been stuck “in-between” kits for a while, you’ve found the solution!

Pack Includes:

• Arduino Uno Rev. 3
• Maker Shield
• Mintronics Survival Pack
• Jumper Wires
• Transparent Solderless Breadboard
• Getting Started with Arduino 2nd Edition PDF