For the release of his latest EP, Dario Marturano brought together electronic music, technology, science, and dance to create an awe-inspiring music video called “Pyrite.” The artist (and STEAM advocate), who goes by the stage name Holograph, built a set of illuminated cubes using plexiglass boxes and LED strips that are MIDI-triggered via Arduino circuitry.

As Make: Magazine explains, the setup consists of an Arduino, some MOSFET for 12V (in the LED cubes), and opto-triac for 220V (for the big lightbulb props). Holograph wrote a MIDI sequence in Ableton Live that syncs with the tunes, assigning every note to a light-up box. The sequence is sent to Arduino, which activates the LEDs as the dancers move through their choreography.

It should be noted that this isn’t the first time the musician has employed MIDI-driven lights either. See the magic in action below!

You’ve heard it before, smoking is bad for your health. However, despite the countless warnings, millions of people continue to use cigarettes–including 7th grade student Petter’s dad. Mindful of this, the young Maker came up with a new way to shame smokers into quitting.

The aptly named “Cigarette Smoke Detecting Shirt” consists of an Arduino LilyPad, a smoke sensor, and three LED sequins, all sewn into the t-shirt using conductive thread. When cigarette smoke is sensed, one of three different lights illuminate alongside a message to embarrass the wearer such as “stinky breath,” “yellow teeth,” or “lung cancer.”

In the future, Petter hopes to finish the prototype and start making more shirts to sell on Etsy. Whether or not this idea takes off, it’s pretty cool nonetheless. As Adafruit puts it, “This is such a fine example of a project that works on an issue and gets students excited about STEM.”

Great news, Makers! We’re excited to announce the immediate availability of the Arduino IDE 1.6.10, AVR core 1.6.12 and SAM core 1.6.9.

The most notable feature of this release is the introduction of an up-to-date bundled toolchain for AVR containing the latest goodies from Atmel, GCC and AVRDUDE devs.

Thanks to LTO (Link Time Optimization), making your sketches smaller and faster is now only a push of the “Compile” button away.

The AVRDUDE update brings out-of-the-box support for a wide range of microcontrollers and debuggers, making it is as simple as possible to deploy. (For example, problems with Gatekeeper on Mac and dependencies on Linux are a thing of the past.)

Likewise, the builder has received the love it deserves and some of its shortcomings are gone forever. You’ll never have to worry again about encountering weird errors if you need to use C++ advanced libraries like .

All these improvements have been shared with Arduino Create, our cloud-based IDE. Check it out if you’ve never tried it, or test out these enhancements if you’re already an active user!

Of course, we also fixed some corner cases for user experience, so now we have a better error reporting when the upload fails and a [nicer] way to include libraries containing lots of header files.

What’s more, we have gone ahead and developed a new firmware and certificate updater for MKR1000 / WiFi101 Shield users–it’s bundled with the IDE and available as a plugin for older installations.

Our community effort continue to grow well with tons of bugfixing, proposals, and libraries added to the Library Manager. As you can imagine, this makes us extremely happy–thank you all for the contributions!

As usual, be sure to check the entire changelog for a complete list of changes and credits. Don’t forget to report any issue you may find, either on GitHub or on the Arduino Forum–your help is very much appreciated.

Go ahead and download IDE 1.6.10! Happy hacking!

As part of a recent Microsoft HoloLens hackathon in San Francisco, Maker Ian Sterling developed a new app that interacts with you smart home via augmented reality. The proof of concept, dubbed “IoTxMR,” allows a user to simply glance at a gadget and control it through gestures.

As you can see in the video below, IoTxMR enables Sterling to connect various Android and Arduino-based devices with the HoloLens to create a customized interdependent network. It also features a mixed reality experience called “virtual zen mode,” complete with calming sounds and light orbs in his surrounding environment.

During a recent interview with Digital Trends, Sterling revealed:

The primary goal of the app is to provide a 3D spatial UI for cross-platform devices — Android Music Player app and Arduino-controlled fan and light — and to interact with them using gaze and gesture control.

The connectivity between Arduino and a mixed reality device is something which holds a huge amount of creative opportunity for developers to create some very exciting applications — be it [Internet of Things], robotics, or other sensor data visualization. Besides this, our app features some fun ways to connect devices. Our demo featured a connection between a music player and a light in order to set a certain mood in your home.

Although just a demo, IoTxMR does highlight the endless possibilities that AR platforms like HoloLens offer in the not-too-distant future.

A few weeks ago, we heard Pawel Zadrozniak’s computer hardware orchestra perform a cover of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Now, the Floppotron is back–this time with its own geeky rendition of the Pokémon theme song.

The Floppotron is comprised of 64 repurposed floppy disk drives, eight hard disks, and two scanners. Every column of floppy drives is connected to an 8-channel controller based on ATmega16 MCU. The higher the volume, the more drives are playing.

Meanwhile, the eight hard disks with a pair of 4-channel controllers act as percussion. The sound generated depends on the driving speed–the higher the frequency, the greater the pitch. Hard disks use a magnet and a coil to tilt the head. When voltage is supplied for long enough, the head speeds up and hits the bound making the “drum” sound.

To drive the coils, Zadrozniak says he employed a pair of push-pull outputs built using discrete SMD MOSFETs. Most of the tunes are made by the two scanners, both of which are connected to Arduino devices. Data is received over UART (USB-UART) and buffers messages to keep the music in time.

The host application is written in Python 2.7 and parses the language that is used to write note sequences and arrange tracks that go to a specific controller. You can read more about the Floppotron here, or just listen to the Pokémon anthem below!

When the Golf GTI and the Jetta GLI were born, Volkswagen packed both with turbocharged engines, precision performance, and a whole lot of vroom. But aside from their stylish exteriors, a rivalry between the vehicles was forged. And, what better way to settle this rivalry than with a massive RC car race on a custom, Tron-like track?

As part of their “Rival Road: GTI vs. GLI” virtual experience, Volkswagen built a giant 1,800 square-foot track equipped with illuminated walls, low-polygon-looking mountains, and nine Arduino-powered obstacles (connected to a laser-etched control panel) that are activated by viewers on Twitch. These barriers include everything from a turntable that spins the cars around, to whack-a-mole-style pillars that pop up randomly, to rumble strips.

From July 26-27th, fans can tune in to the live stream to support their favorite team and vote on the obstacles that’ll be raised from the track to thwart opponents. The RC Golf GTI and Jetta GLI vehicles will be operated by professional RC drivers Tanner Foust and Scott Speed.

Pretty sweet, right? Jalopnik had the chance to get a firsthand look at the project, where Volkswagen showed off everything from how it was made to how it works.

Spinphony is a bike installation that was built in collaboration with 72andSunny‘s Google team and their Made with Code initiative, with hopes of inspiring teenage girls to take an interest in coding.

As its name would suggest, the project combines spinning (indoor cycling) and music with each bike representing a different instrument stem of a song.

For instance, bike one controls drums, bike two might control bass and so on. The way we made it all come together was to have the volume of each stem depend on the speed at which the bike was being pedaled (i.e. the slower the RPM the quieter the stem of the song and vice versa). This is where Arduino came into play.

The prototype is based on an Arduino Uno and uses two magnets, a reed switch, RPM values, and MIDI to produce some spincredible sounds. You can see it in action below!

Just when you thought you’ve seen every possible kind of Arduino-driven clock, another one emerges. This “DIY strange-looking” device takes the form of a wheel with times written on it, which is rotated using an Arduino Micro and a 5V stepper motor. And while it may not be the most accurate timekeeper out there, it’s an excellent way for Makers to explore electronics, programming, and even geometry.

Unlike most clocks that have either two or three hands going around a 12-hour face, 17-year-old Instructables user “Electronics for Everyone” chose a fixed pointer to denote the time in 10-minute intervals instead.

The idea behind the clock is a circle with a circumfrence of 72cm that ticks at 1cm every 10 minutes, which means every 72 ticks will equal 12 hours…

In this video, our friends at PubNub are going to create a smart home network that builds upon their previous Johnny Five tutorial. They again hack an Arduino Uno using JavaScript, but this time to create the simplest smart bulb. Because by “smart bulb,” we really just mean an LED.

The tutorial was developed by Tomomi Imura from PubNub and also uses Johnny-Five. No, not the robot from the movie Short Circuit. It is an open-source JavaScript robotics framework that lets you program an Arduino with Node.js. The bulb itself is remotely controlled via a web portal.

To establish the realtime communication between the Arduino and a web browser, the PubNub Data Stream Network (DSN) is used. PubNub provides global infrastructure and allows you to build and scale real-time apps and IoT devices quite easily.

The remote controller (web app) is written in JavaScript. This is a simple user interface that includes only one button. While a completed code sample is available on CodePen, this tutorial employs a simplified version so that it’s easier to follow along.

Do you just really hate yellow Skittles? Only love the red ones? Well, why waste your time sorting them out yourself when an automated machine can do it for you? As part of a recent tutorial, Dejan Nedelkovski has built what we calls the “Arduino Color Sorter” using a TCS3200 color sensor, two hobbyist servo motors, and an Arduino Nano.

How it works is fairly straightforward: The candies are stored within a plastic tube on top of the contraption and dropped onto a platform attached to the first servo. The motor then rotates the platform, bringing the Skittle to the color sensor. From there, the bottom servo moves into position while the top servo rotates again until the candy falls into the guide rail and into its respective bin.

So whether you’re tired of grouping your Skittles or need to meet the request of rockstars like Van Halen (no brown M&Ms!), you can find the Arduino Color Sorter’s 3D model, code and instructions here.