[Tijmen Schep] sends in his project, Candle Smart Home, which is an exhibit of 12 smart home devices which are designed around the concepts of ownership, open source, and privacy.

The central controller runs on a Raspberry Pi which is running Mozilla’s new smart home operating system. Each individual device is Arduino based, and when you click through on the site you get a well designed graphic explaining how to build each device. The devices them

It’s also fun to see how many people worked together on this project and added their own touch. Whether it’s a unique covering for the devices or a toggle switch that can toggle itself there’s quite a few personal touches.

As anyone who’s had the sneaking suspicion that Jeff Bezos was listening in to their conversations, we get the need for this. We also love how approachable it makes hacking your own hardware. What are your thoughts?

Servos aren’t particularly hard to control with Arduinos, and in fact there’s a library available just for that purpose. Actually making the connection between the board and servo and managing one’s power usage will require a bit more finesse.

In the video below, Jeremy S. Cook explains how you can create an adapter that goes between your servo and an Uno, including a capacitor to help even out voltage spikes. While in most cases you would want to supply power your servos separately from the Arduino, this technique seems to work well in a quick round of tests. 

In addition, the clip shows how to attach a servo and then detach it to cut it off, using a function outside of the main loop and no additional hardware. This would be very helpful in applications where power is at a premium — or if you just don’t want the servo jittering back and forth!

Smartphones have become a part of our day-to-day lives, but for those with visual impairments, accessing one can be a challenge. This can be especially difficult if one is using a cane that must be put aside in order to interact with a phone.

The GesturePod offers another interface alternative that actually attaches to the cane itself. This small unit is controlled by a MKR1000 and uses an IMU to sense hand gestures applied to the cane. 

If a user, for instance, taps twice on the ground, a corresponding request is sent to the phone over Bluetooth, causing it to output the time audibly. Five gestures are currently proposed, which could expanded upon or modified for different functionality as needed.

People using white canes for navigation find it challenging to concurrently access devices such as smartphones. Build­ ing on prior research on abandonment of specialized devices, we explore a new touch free mode of interaction wherein a person with visual impairment can perform gestures on their existing white cane to trigger tasks on their smartphone. We present GesturePod, an easy-to-integrate device that clips on to any white cane, and detects gestures performed with the cane. With GesturePod, a user can perform common tasks on their smartphone without touch or even removing the phone from their pocket or bag. We discuss the challenges in build­ ing the device and our design choices. We propose a novel, efficient machine learning pipeline to train and deploy the gesture recognition model. Our in-lab study shows that Ges­ turePod achieves 92% gesture recognition accuracy and can help perform common smartphone tasks faster. Our in-wild study suggests that GesturePod is a promising tool to im­ prove smartphone access for people with VI, especially in constrained outdoor scenarios.

Taking photos or recording videos by hand is great, but in many situations you’d prefer to have your camera mounted on a movable or even programmable platform. Steve — now funding on Kickstarter — aims to fill that role as a remote-controlled vehicle that can maneuver your camera into places where you couldn’t reach before, all while capturing cinematic shots. 

The device is able to carry a payload of 20kg, and features a suspension system that allows it to traverse rough terrain, along with Mecanum wheels that let it slide in any direction. 

Best of all, it’s powered by an Arduino, meaning that when you’re ready to move on from manual RC operation, it can be customized for a wide variety of uses! 

Ads, notifications, and other messages surround us today, and if you were overwhelmed before, researchers at Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, Japan have figured out how to print text and images in your cup of coffee! This system, dubbed “BubBowl,” uses electrolysis to dynamically generate a dot-matrix pattern of 10 x 10 pixels on the surface of beverages.

The Arduino-based device utilizes a series of shift registers to control matrix outputs, along with MOSFETs to handle current through the liquid as it produces tiny amounts of (non-toxic) gas. 

Resolution is good enough to display four characters at once — meaning it can show the time, or even very short messages. The drinks are still consumable after messaging, though touch-sensitive electrodes are implemented to cut off power when imbibing!

Imagine if your watch wasn’t mounted on your wrist, but was instead integrated into a sort of temporary tattoo on the back of your hand? Such an idea is now one step closer to reality, thanks to new research into alternating-current electroluminescent (ACEL) display technology.

While normally such displays require well over 100VAC to produce sufficient brightness, scientists have worked to get this number down into the 10-35V range, allowing them to be used in much closer proximity to human skin. 

To demonstrate this technology, the team constructed a 4-digit 7-segment display that can be applied to one’s hand, using an Arduino Mega and driver circuitry to turn it into a digital timepiece.

More information can be found in the researchers’ paper published in ACS Materials Letters.

If you’d like your jack-o’-lantern to stand out, a pair of animatronic eyes should do the trick. While there are numerous ways that you can go about this, few (if any) look as good as the set made by Will Cogley in the first video below.

The incredibly realistic 3D-printed eyeballs are installed into the hollowed out pumpkin using skewers as supports, and glance in all directions, along with orange eyelids that open and close for an even more human(ish) appearance. 

The second clip delves deeper into the eyeballs themselves, which come in several forms. Control is via a Wii Nunchuk-esque joystick interface, with the help of an Arduino.

If you find yourself debating between a pen plotter or laser engraver, this project by Patrick Panikulam lets you have the best of both worlds in style. The DIY device pulls a writing instrument in the X-axis using a belt-driven overhead system, while the base itself moves in the Y direction.

Motion is handled by an Arduino Uno, along with a CNC shield and two A4988 drivers that actuate modified 28BYJ-48 steppers. The shield also outputs laser control signals, which are converted into PWM signals for the lifting servo when in pen mode. 

It’s an extremely clean build, and even features a Bluetooth module for wireless communication with your computer. Panikulam provides more details here if you’d like to create your own!

A couple of months back while checking out a few laser engravers on aliexpress, I came across some USB powered laser engravers. It was awesome that these could engrave on a variety of materials and also cut out shapes and designs from sticker sheets and paper and doing all this powered by a 5V USB supply. But the downside of these engravers was that they had a small work area, in most cases just 40mm X 40mm which is definitely way too small for my needs.

So I thought why not design and 3D print my own laser engraver from scratch. I started the designing process in Fusion 360 while keeping in mind all the 3D printing tolerances. And finally came up with something really cool. Along the way, I decided to make the laser holder modular so that I can easily replace the laser with a pen or marker for pen plotting. I also added a Bluetooth connectivity feature so that wired connection between your PC and the engraver can be eliminated while transmitting G-codes.

Are you waiting for something that may never happen? Maybe it’s the end of your ennui, or the release of Half Life 3. While you wait, why not build a Godot Machine? Then you can diversify your portfolio and wait for two things that could happen today, tomorrow, or at sunrise on the 12th of Never.

The Godot Machine is a functional art piece that uses a solar panel and a joule thief to charge a bank of capacitors up to 5V. Whenever that happens, the Arduino comes online and generates a 20-bit random number, which is displayed on an LED bar. If the generated number matches the super-secret number that was generated at first boot and then stashed away in EEPROM, the Machine emits a victory beep and lights a green LED. Then you can go back to complaining about whatever.

We like that [kajnjaps] made his own chaos-based random number generator instead of just calling random(). It uses a guitar string to collect ambient electronic noise and an entropy generator to amplify it. Then the four least significant digits are used to seed the logistical map, so the initial value is always different.

You don’t have to create your own entropy for truly random numbers, though it’s probably more fun that way. Did you know that someone wrote an Arduino entropy library?

If you want to whip up a cocktail, you can measure out the components by hand, or you could use a robotic assistant like this setup by creator Sven Tantau.

Tantau’s project employs an Arduino Nano to control 24 peristaltic pumps via a relay card, plus an ESP32 to run a web interface and send I2C commands to the Arduino letting it know which pumps to enable.  

The pumps, along with the relays and other components, are arranged inside the stripped shell of two Cisco Catalyst switches. In fact, the only electrical part from the router that’s still in use is the 12V power supply. 

This does, however, do a fantastic job of looking good while hiding the electronics inside, and transport tubing is nicely arranged on a 3D-printed grid where the Ethernet plugs once connected!