In the Earth’s atmosphere, a drone can adjust its heading by varying the speed of the propellers, and thus the thrust output of each. If you wanted to land something on a lunar surface, or maneuver a spaceship, the lack of atmosphere means a different technique must be used.

While not going to space (yet), Tom Stanton decided to create a demonstrator for this technique, similar to how the manned Lunar Landing Research Vehicle (LLRV) operated in the 1960s and ’70s. Stanton’s device employs a central electric ducted fan (EDF) to hold the craft up, while three compressed air nozzles provide most of its directional control. 

In action, an RC flight controller’s signals are modified by an Arduino Nano to accommodate this unique control scheme, pulsing out bursts of air via three solenoid valves.

Check out the build and experimental process in the video below, culminating with untethered tests starting at around 17:30.

If you’re a fan of novel timepieces, then you’ll want to check out Christine Thompson’s VFD Alarm Clock.

The device features a USSR-manufactured IV-27V 7-segment tube, capable of displaying 13 numbers or letters via a 24V supply, though the MAX6921 chip used here means that only 10 grids are used.

10 characters, however, are plenty to show time, date, humidity, temperature, and pressure, plus the text “WAKE UP!” when an audible alarm sounds.

The clock runs on an Arduino Mega, along with an RTC module, a keypad, and secondary LCD screen on the back to assist with setting it up.

While most 3D printers deposit melted plastic in carefully controlled positions to build up a physical model, a similar process called “bioprinting” can be accomplished with biological materials. Commercial bioprinters can cost tens of thousands of dollars or more, but as shown here you can make your own using the shell an inexpensive desktop machine. 

In this example, a Monoprice MP Select Mini V2 is stripped down to its bones and motors, subbing in an Arduino Mega and RAMPS 1.4 stepper driver board.

A syringe-like extruder is added to push out custom bioink, and the Z-axis switch mounting and Marlin firmware is modified to accommodate the new device. The homing sequence is modeled in the video below, giving a short snippet of how it works.

Embedded programming using the Arduino IDE has become an important part of STEM education, and while more accessible than ever before, getting started still requires some coding and basic electronics skills. To explore a different paradigm for starting out on this journey, researchers have developed Flowboard to facilitate visual flow-based programming.

This device consists of an iPad Pro and a set of breadboards on either side. Users can arrange electrical components on these breadboards, changing the flow-based program on the screen as needed to perform the desired actions. Custom ‘switchboard’ hardware, along with an Arduino Uno running a modified version of Firmata, communicate with the iPad editor via Bluetooth.

With maker-friendly environments like the Arduino IDE, embedded programming has become an important part of STEM education. But learning embedded programming is still hard, requiring both coding and basic electronics skills. To understand if a different programming paradigm can help, we developed Flowboard, which uses Flow-Based Programming (FBP) rather than the usual imperative programming paradigm. Instead of command sequences, learners assemble processing nodes into a graph through which signals and data flow. Flowboard consists of a visual flow-based editor on an iPad, a hardware frame integrating the iPad, an Arduino board and two breadboards next to the iPad, letting learners connect their visual graphs seamlessly to the input and output electronics. Graph edits take effect immediately, making Flowboard a live coding environment.

Want to learn more? Check out the team’s research paper here. 

While the hoverboard craze has faded somewhat, the good news is that this means their powerful wheel motors can easily be found on online auction sites. Lukas Kaul took advantage of this component’s availability and created his own “HoverBot,” which as shown in Felix von Drigalski’s video below, acts as something in between a radio-controlled skateboarder and a rather large self-balancing bot.

The device is built around an Arduino Mega, which takes input from an RC receiver, along with a Bosch BNO055 IMU, and passes appropriate signals to the motors through an ODrive controller. 

The HoverBot is a bit unsteady at high speeds, requiring close operator supervision. However, it looks like a lot of fun, especially when attempting tricks—sometimes successfully—at a skate park.

The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the ‘fuel cubes’ that went into one of Germany’s unsuccessful reactor experiments. This is a five-centimeter cube that recently showed up in the hands of a uranium collector. In the test reactor, six hundred of these cubes were strung along strings and suspended like a chandelier. This chandelier was then set inside a tub surrounded by graphite. This reactor never reached criticality — spectroscopy tells us the cube does not contain fission products — but it was the best attempt Germany made at a self-sustaining nuclear reaction.

The biggest failing of the Arduino is the pinout. Those header pins aren’t all on 0.1″ centers, and the board itself is too wide to fit on a single solderless breadboard. Here’s the solution to that problem. It’s the BreadShield, an Arduino Uno-to-Breadboard adapter. Plug an Uno on one end, and you get all the pins on the other.

There’s a new listing on AirBnB. this time from NASA. They’re planning on opening the space station up to tourism, starting at $35,000 USD per night. That’s a cool quarter mil per week, launch not included. The plan appears to allow other commercial companies (SpaceX and whoever buys a Boeing Starliner) to accept space tourists, the $35k/night is just for the stop at the ISS. Costs for launch and landing are expected to be somewhere between $20 and $60 Million per flight. Other space tourists have paid as much: [Dennis Tito], the first ‘fee-paying’ space tourist, paid $20M for a trip to the ISS in 2001. [Mark Shuttleworth] also paid $20M a year later. Earlier space ‘tourists’ paid a similar amount; Japanese journalist [Toyohiro Akiyama] flew to Mir at a cost of between $12M and $37M. Yes, the space station is now an AirBnB, but it’s going to cost twenty million dollars for the ride up there.

We’re getting into conference season, and there are two hardware cons coming up you should be aware of. The first is Hardwear.io, keynoted by [Christopher Tarnovsky], famous for DirecTV hacks. There will be other talks by [@TubeTimeUS] on cloning the Sound Blaster and [John McMaster] on dropping acid. All of this is going down this week at The Biltmore in Santa Clara, CA. The second upcoming conference of note is Teardown, the hardware conference put on by Crowd Supply. That’s in Portland, June 21-23, with a presence from the Church of Robotron.

Microcontroller demo boards such as the Arduino UNO are ubiquitous on Hackaday as the brains of many a project which inevitably does something impressive or unusual. Sometime someone builds a particularly tiny demo board, or an impressively large one. In the case of the board featured here, the Arduino is a gorgeous labor of love which can’t really be called a board since there is no PCB. Instead of the traditional fiberglass, [Jiří Praus] formed brass bars into the circuitry and held it together with solder.

This kind of dedication to a project leaves an impression. His notes show he saw the barest way to operate an ATMega328, built it, tested, and moved on to the power supply to make it self-sustaining, then onto the communication circuit, and finally the lights. The video below shows a fully-functional Arduino happily running the blink program. He plans to encase the brass portion in resin to toughen it up and presumably keep every bump from causing a short circuit. The components are in the same position due to a custom jig which means a standard shield will fit right into place.

The Arduino started far less flashy yet nearly as fragile, and it has grown. And shrunk.

If your kids aren’t thrilled about doing chores, you could resort to a whiteboard, or simply create your own RFID tracking system like maker “alastair-a.” 

His project uses an Arduino Nano, along with an RFID reader and RTC module to track when a job has been completed. The chore is selected using a rotary encoder and displayed on a 16×2 LCD screen. When it’s done, the child who completed it can then scan in with their RFID fob to claim it as his or her own.

While there was initially some cash payment in mind for each task that’s accomplished, the novelty factor of using the system is reportedly so interesting that alastair’s children have entirely forgotten about it. Whether it works this well or not in all cases is an open question, but Arduino code and build info is available here if you’d like to make your own!

If you want to keep your Arduino project or other circuit boards safe from exposure, an electrical box is the traditional choice. But what if you want to apply protection directly to the board?

In the video below, “TheRainHarvester” shows us a novel and inexpensive method for hardening a Nano from short circuits and other minor exposure by simply melting plastic on the top. 

The Nano’s new armor is sourced from a lid that you might find on a coffee or oatmeal container, and after cutting it to size, a “plasti-shell” is fused to the board with a heat gun. The procedure couldn’t be simpler, and appears to provide a good amount of protection for the little board!

Since its invention in 1974, Rubik’s cubes have been entertaining and frustrating those that choose to take on the challenge of aligning their shapes. More recently, however, people have been building algorithms and machinery to do it for them, including Mario Milanesio’s Arduino Rubik Solver, or ARS.

ARS, which was constructed with the help of Milanseio’s students, is comprised of several 3D-printed and laser-cut parts. The device utilizes a series of four stepper motors to rotate the cube, along with two more to pull the grippers back when needed. 

Solving is assisted by the ARS Studio software package, which lets users program in the existing color sequence. It then sends movement commands to an Arduino Uno over serial, which controls the motors via six A4988 Pololu drivers to complete the puzzle.