Bunnie Huang recently toured the Arduino production facilities and wrote a great post about what he saw (with lots of photos!):

Arduinos are made in Scarmagno, Italy, a small town near the Olivetti factories on the outskirts of Torino. All of the circuit board fabrication, board stuffing and distribution is handled out of that small town. I was really excited to see the factories, and I’d like to share some photos of them with you.

Planning another Arduino build? If you’re just doing something simple like switching a relay or powering a LED, you might want to think about the Digispark. It’s a very small ATtiny-based Arduino compatible board developed and Kickstarted by [Erik].

The Digispark is based on the very popular Atmel ATtiny85, an 8 pin microcontroller that provides a quarter of the Flash storage and RAM as the ‘official Arduino’ ATMega328p. The lower storage space and RAM doesn’t mean the ’85 is a slouch, though; it can run Arduino code without a hitch, providing six pins for whatever small project you have in mind.

Right now, [Erik]‘s Kickstarter is offering three Digisparks for the price of a single Arduino. At that price, it’s cheap enough to leave in a project and not be repurposed after the build is over. [Erik] is also working on a few shields for the Digispark – only RGB LED shield for now, but hopefully he’ll get some more finished by the time the Kickstarter ends.

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Still lots to do, but I finally got this guy printed and assembled. He has 3DOF per leg using cheap 9g servos :( I'm using Inverse kinematics for his movement. I just started programming him and got the IK working for one leg. The ping((( is just stuck in the mega2560 for now. I'll be adding a tilt/pan head when I get more servos, and the wiring needs some cleaning up :p I just found out about LMR last week and so far it's awesome! Hopefully by the end of next weekend I'll have some walk sequence video to show off.

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Hey guys, its me again.
This is the third project I submit here.
Vacuuminator is a (obviously) vacuum cleaning robot. It is quite similar to a roomba. I have this problem about not buying robots if I can build one. As you would expect from a guy like me (and you) I don't clean much. I needed something to do that for me.

Therefore, I built vacuuminator (and made him clean the mess I've made while building it.)

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In addition to being a great replacement for that aging eye patch, these specs act as a light switch. By watching your eyelids, they are able to kill the lights whenever you blink.

The installation is a shared experience piece conceived by [Michal Kohút]. He wanted to illustrate the constant blinking we all do but rarely think about. The system uses an Arduino to capture events from the blink sensors and switch the lights accordingly. This way the wearer doesn’t experience a loss of illumination, but the observer does. Check out the video after the break for a quick demonstration.

One of the commenters from the source article shared a video link to another blink-based light project. That one uses electrodes attached to skin around your eye in order to detect eyelid motion.

[via Reddit]

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Hi there LMR, here is another one of our projects, as promised. :)
This is Xylomatron. It is a robot that you can play a game similar to "Simon Says" but with a xylophone interface. Basically, it does play a note and expect you to repeat it, if you succeed it adds another note to the previous sequence and expect you to do the same. Therefore the game gets harder at each level, depending on your memory.
When you fail, it gets quite angry thinking "The puny human couldn't memorize X notes" (it does really trace it in fact :D)

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For Weekend Projects makers looking for an introduction to Arduino, this is a great project to learn from. Once you’ve gathered all your parts, this project should only take a couple hours to complete – you’ll be playing 3D Tic Tac Toe before the weekend is over!

Once your touchless 3D tracker is up and running, what you do with it is only limited by your own imagination! The original implementation of this project comes from media artist Kyle McDonald, who has suggested the following uses and applications:

• Make an RGB or HSB color picker
• Control video or music parameters; sequence a beat or melody
• Large, slightly bent surface with multiple plates + a projector = “Minority Report” interface

Sign up below for the Weekend Projects Newsletter to receive the projects before anybody else does, get tips, see other makers’ builds, and more.

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This giant-size version of Operation from Brian of the Lansing Makers Network was an enormous hit at Maker Faire Detroit. The game is played just like the original and uses scaled up pieces and kitchen tongs as tweezers. An Arduino detects any false moves and reports them to a computer running a custom Processing sketch. In addition to keeping score, the sketch also keeps track of the the fastest times, peak usage, number of games played and any other information Brian, a self proclaimed data fanatic, could think of. I was a bit disappointed that the ‘scare you to death’ buzzer of the original was left out. Maybe he could work that in on the even larger version he’s building for next year?

This robot was built to care for the graves and honor the dead in the Jewish tradition. It is called “Stoney” and was developed by [Zvika Markfeld] based on a concept by [Itamar Shimshony] who is working toward an MFA degree. The image above shows it in action as part of an installation; to our knowledge it has not been used for actual grave sites. But the concept is not a joke; it’s something that makes the observers think.

The base of the robot is an iRobot Roomba on top of which is built a platform for a robot arm. The arm has easy access to two palettes, one holds small stones, and the other flowers. There is also a small box which holds a rag. It navigates around the grave, placing stones, flowers, and using the rag and a water dispenser to symbolically clean the headstone. All of this is controlled by an Arduino Mega board which controls another Arduino running the arm, as well as the microcontroller in the Roomba.

The details of the ritual, as well as the components of the robot are well explained in the clip after the break.

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Hey guys,
Just found out about LMR and wanted to share some of the robots we have made in past. (so, I will post 4-5 more projects soon)

Jeffrey The Quadruped is a quite small walker with 4 legs. It has printed circuit board with a custom arduino setup, using an Atmega328.
It has a Sharp IR Rangefinder attached on 2 servos and uses a simple rotational object tracking algorithm to let him create temporary low resolution visual maps. This way it can stay on a table, stay away from objects and even track your hands with a single sensor.

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