Last week we published our gift guides presenting you a list of products  available on the Arduino Store and divided by topic for Kids and people interested in IoT, Home Lab and Fashion Tech.

Now we’d like to give you some suggestions for gift ideas fitting anyone’s piggy bank:

Gifts Under 15€

Arduino ISP

It’s a tiny AVR-ISP (in-system programmer) based on David Mellis’ project FabISPand useful to anyone needing more space on the Arduino board

Flashing Card Set – Merry Resistivities by Bare Conductive

The Merry Resistivities Set contains all the materials you need to make three flashing greeting cards using Electric Paint. This fun activity is great for makers of all ages.

Minipov by Adafruit

A simple POV toy for beginners who are looking to learn how to solder, how to program microcontrollers, or make LED blinky toys. Because the programmer is built into the kit, one does not need a special “microcontroller programmer”.

Arduino Proto Shield

The Arduino Prototyping Shield makes it easy for you to design custom circuits for your next Arduino project. You can solder parts to the prototyping area to create your project with extra connections for all of the Arduino I/O pins.

Make Robot Notebook Moleskine

Pocket Moleskine Notebook – Fresh from the Maker Faire comes our exclusive mini-Moleskine (5.5″x3.5″, 30 pages) notebook, available with Robot logos.

Gifts Under 30€

Getting Started with Arduino – 2nd Edition

This classic book to start tinkering with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you work with them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is here!

Arduino Case + Breadboard Wires Kit

This lasercut (in Officine Arduino), wooden case is perfect to host your project and store electronic parts. It features two drawers, a confortable surface for a standard breadboard and the space for two Arduinos to be hooked up. It’s stackable, perfect for teaching material or group work.

Arduino UNO

If you want to make any beginner happy, this is the perfect gift. “Uno” means “One” in Italian and is named to mark the upcoming release of Arduino 1.0. The Uno and version 1.0 will be the reference versions of Arduino, moving forward. The Uno is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards, and the reference model for the Arduino platform.

Lumi Red or Blu

Lumi is a new DIY alternative to screen printing.The process works on cotton, linen, silk, rayon, canvas, and any other natural & absorbent fiber. Once finished, your print is permanent and can be machine washed without fading.

Blend Micro by RedBearLab

Arduino At Heart Blend Micro is RedBearLab first integrated developement board, they have “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a single board. It is targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily.

Gifts Under 60€

Arduino Esplora

The Arduino Esplora is a ready-to-use, easy-to-hold controller that lets you explore the infinitive possibilities you have in the world of sensor and actuators, without having to deal with breadboards, soldering or cable. There is no limits to the sensors applications! Adding a LCD module you can make your personal videogame!

Bare Conductive Touch Board

Touch Board can turn almost any material or surface into a sensor by connecting it to one of its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or anything conductive. It’s designed as an easy-to-use platform for a huge range of projects, whether it’s painting a lightswitch on your wall, making a paper piano or something nobody’s thought of yet.

Intel Edison

The Intel Edison is an ultra small computing platform that will change the way you look at embedded electronics. This kit also includes a Arduino Breakout, which essentially gives your Edison the ability to interface with Arduino shields or any board with the Arduino footprint.

Arduino Yún

Arduino with onboard Wi-Fi connectivity and a Linux computer. Great for IoT projects. The Arduino YÚN is the combination of a classic Arduino Leonardo (based on the Atmega32U4 processor) with a WiFi system-on-chip running OpenWrt-Yun.

Remember

FREE SHIPPING to European Union for all orders over €100 (below 3Kg overall weight). Should you need delivery by Dec 24th, we strongly advise you to place the order before Dec 15th. FREE SHIPPING is available from Dec. 2nd 2014 until Jan 6th 2015. Read more about the shipping policy.

December is finally here and we can start thinking about indoor or outdoor decorations for the holiday. Christmas lights are an excellent way to light up any event and a user on instructables wanted to be able to control the lights remotely with text messages.

Check his 12-step tutorial  and take a look at the bill of materials:

• An Arduino Yún – You could use another Arduino with a Wifi Shield though.
• A Protoshield with (or without) a tiny breadboard
• A regular breadboard will work as well, but will be less compact.
  If you want to solder more, you can just use a small circuit board instead.
• A 5V relay
• A piezo buzzer
• Wires
• A battery operated Christmas decoration (It’s not even Thanksgiving, so I’m using a Halloween decoration)
• A Temboo account
• A Twilio account

 

Sometimes even Santa Claus needs help. Thankfully, the jolly fat guy's got one of our favorite modders on his side. We visited Ben Heck's Madison, Wisconsin workshop a few weeks ago for an Engadget Show segment and got to watch as the master put together a special holiday-themed project, the Naughty or Nice Meter, a big candy cane-accented box that'll help tired parents "keep the kids in line" this holiday season. The box itself is actually a mostly hollow shell, with an Arduino, TI LaunchPad and a few other select select components in the rear that communicate with a specialized app, letting the parent in question adjust the needle based on their kids' behavior. Nothing like a little manipulative fun in the spirit of the holidays! Check out our segment on Mr. Heckendorn just after the jump and click on through the source link to find out how to make a Naughty or Nice meter or your very own.

Gallery: Ben Heck's Naughty or Nice Meter

Continue reading Ben Heck's Naughty or Nice Meter knows if you've been bad or good (so be good for Arduino's sake)

Filed under: Misc

Comments

Source: Element 14

Hi LMRtians,

this is my actual christmas project. A star build out of Plexi and an Adafruit RGB LED strip. Controlled by an Arduino controller. It will be used as christmas decoration behind a window of our house. Looks pretty cool at night.

read more

[Jason] and his father took advantage of a week off of work over Thanksgiving to design and build a Christmas light decoration that can flash fancy patterns. He calls it the Uno Christmas Tree. It’s sixteen strands of lights draped between a pole and the ground to form the shape of a tree. The main controller is an Arduino UNO, but what really makes this work is a mechanical relay board with sixteen channels.

Using trigonometry they figured out that the decoration would be fifteen feet tall and have a five-foot radius at the base. A pipe was installed to act as the trunk, with an old toilet flange at the top and stakes at the bottom to anchor the lights. They all make their connections at the controller box using extension cords that were labelled with channel numbers. You can see the final product in the video after the break. But you’ll also want to watch the clip on [Jason's] blog which shares the sonic symphony created when the mechanical relays really start working.

Continue reading Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit

Arduino hack lights up the tree with every email, spammers get in spirit originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 19 Dec 2011 01:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.