Finding the perfect gift for everyone on your list it’s fun and inspiring. Let us help you choose the perfect gift: next to our classic Arduino, Genuino boards and goodies, we created 3 thematic guides to highlight the products in our stores that deserve a spot on your gift list. And to make it even more special, we added a FREE SHIPPING* feature for orders over 150$/100€.

TINKERING
Experience the magic of playing with technology. Your creative confidence is going to boost!

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to Tinkering

• Many people around the world had fun tinkering on the 15 projects featured in the Arduino Starter Kit and Genuino Starter Kit. Now you can make someone happy too for XMas! The Starter Kit is available in English and Italian.

• The 3rd edition of Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh introduces to the UNO board, gives you lots of ideas for projects, and helps you experiment with them right away.

• If you are looking for interacting with your surroundings in experimental ways, Arduino AtHeart Bare Conductive Touch Board and Touch Board Kit can turn almost any material or surface into a sensor. Connect objects to its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or any conductive material and create amazing musical instruments.

KIDS
Get inspired and make this holiday special for your kids! Get them to experiment with science and technology and the wonderful world of STEAM.

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to kids

• You can share your excitement with electronics playing with kids and teenagers on the TV-B-Gone Kit, a universal remote designed to shut off any TV. It’s fun making it and using it.

• Get started with paper circuits and stickers with Chibit Circuit Sticker Start Kit an imaginative and easy way to make fun electronics projects without coding, soldering, or hands-on experience.

• Play with the most hackable tiny synth ever! NS1nanosynth synthesizer is an handeld 220x85mm analog modular synthesizer coupled with an Arduino Leonardo platform. it’s a tool to explore the potential contamination between analog and digital music creation!

IOT & CONNECTIVITY
Create connected devices and master your IoT skills. It’s easier than you think.

Click and explore the product of the gift guide dedicated to IoT

•  Blend Micro is a RedBearLab Arduino AtHeart integrated development board. They “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a small single board. You can quickly and easily develop low power IoT projects.

• Making things Talk 2nd edition by Arduino co-founder Tom Igoe, shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest.In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands

On our stores we are offering FREE SHIPPING for all orders over 150$ (below 3 Lb) in USA via USPS Priority Mail, and for all orders over 100€ (below 3 Kg) via GLS in Europe.

Delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by December 24th, we strongly advise you to place the order before December 18th.

Free Shipping is available from November 27th 2015 until January 6th 2016.

Wing is an interactive installation created by Dmitry Morozov  and commissioned by the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, special for GLOBALE: Exo-Evolution exhibition, 2015. It’s a 2,5-meter wing that can be flapped by visitors thanks to compact dermal myLeaographic sensors (sensors measuring the electrical potential of muscles) installed  behind their ears and connected to an Arduino Uno:

The main idea of the project is an ironical and at the same time serious research on the topic of development of new instruments and prostheses as “extensions” of human body and accordingly its possibilities and potentials, which are being revealed by new technologies. At the same time, it’s an attempt to stimulate people to perceive and train the body in a different way, expanding the limits of self-control and self-organisation in order to adapt to the new conditions. At the same time, just like many spiritual practices aiming at the elevation of human soul through deep relaxation and control over seemingly uncontrollable muscles, this project uses the metaphor of flying as a reward for the ability to direct your mind to solving of non-standard tasks.

The robotic prototype swimming under water propelled by fins, it was developed at the Control Systems and Robotics Laboratory of the Technological Educational Institute of Crete, in Heraklion (Greece) and it’s controlled by an Arduino Mega:

Each fin is comprised of three individually actuated fin rays, which are interconnected by an elastic membrane. An on-board microcontroller generates the rays’ motion pattern that result in the fins’ undulations, through which propulsion is obtained. The prototype, which is fully untethered and energetically autonomous, also integrates an IMU/AHRS unit for navigation purposes, a wireless communication module, and an on-board video camera. The video contains footage from experiments conducted in a laboratory test tank to investigate closed loop motion control strategies, as well as footage from sea trials.

the Arduino runs a custom-developed real time firmware that implements two Central Pattern Generator (CPG) networks to generate the undulatory motion profile for the robot’s fins. The robot  contains a  7.4V lipo battery powering also a Bluetooth module for wireless communication and a video camera to record footage of the missions.

During the Physical Computing and Creative Coding course at School of Form a team composed by Ernest Warzocha, Jakub Wilczewski, Maciej Zelaznowski worked on a project starting from the keyword “the aesthetics of interaction”. With the help of their lecturers – Wies?aw Bartkowski and Krzysztof Golinski – they decided to rethink about typical button-like interface of audio sequencer and design a unique tangible interface for it.

The Wooden Sequencer runs on Arduino Uno and works by using familiarity of real objects and manipulating them similarly to the idea of Durell Bishop’s Marble Answering Machine:

Instead of regular buttons we created wooden discs (4×8 circles) that placed in holes generate audio sequence. Each line corresponds to different instrument and columns are responsible for time when sample is played. To know in which point at timeline our sequence plays there is hidden LED on top of each column that blink through wood and informs user which one is currently played.

To create good-looking round shapes of table we used CNC router at our university. After the milling process we connected all electronics with table and sensors for each hole. The core of our project is Arduino UNO with multiplexers and MP3 module. With rendered samples and build-in speakers our project doesn’t require computer plugged in.

Important and somehow unique in our sequencer is usage of IR reflective sensors to change played instrument sample. To decide which sample we want to play sensor recognizes different grayscale color and intensity of the reflected light at bottom of our discs – actually everything placed on table can generate sound. Creating grayscale-based controller is experimental way to interact with device. Furthermore, using grayscale palette might be great idea for MIDI instrument. For this project we used two colors to show the concept. It’s possible to add more but it’s more sensitive to non-constant background light.

Take a look at the video below and explore more pictures on Behance:

To enable easy documentation of pin assignments, BusyDuckMan created a couple of ASCII art of Arduino Uno and Mega boards marking ports, PWM and coms. You can now then simply copy and paste as a comment into your code and document in an easy way how the arduino is connected to other devices:

They can be pasted into code comments, (use /* and */ in the arduino IDE to create a block comment). They can also be useful in forums, when you need a quick arduino diagram, but don’t want to fire up an image editor.

Murad is a student of Mechatronics and Engineering at Tafila Technical University in the town of Tafila, in Jordan. He made a submission to our blog presenting his DIY project of a Heart Pulse Alarm based on Arduino Uno.

The HPA (Heart Pulse Alarm) is a portable device prototyped to measure the pulse rate and the body temperature of who’s wearing it. If the device receives an unusual heart pulse, it will send a sms message to paramedics to act quickly. He designed the device to help people who have cardiac problems and they lack  the resources for personal and professional assistants in his country.

Check the bill of materials and code on his blog.

Arduino user SamJBoz needed a way to quickly gain access to his garage when he did not have the remote. He designed a simple entry system with 4 digit access codes to allow himself, family and friends to gain quick access to the garage when a remote is not at hand, running on a 5V Arduino Pro Mini. The keypad allows for up to 10 4-digit pin numbers, has a user set master pin number to create and delete user pin numbers and flashes 2 color error codes if something goes wrong.

The hardware BoM consists of a 4×4 keypad, an Arduino Pro Mini, a small custom PCB and a few external electronic parts to complete the design.

He’s been using it flawlessly for a year and you could try to build one too: all the documentation is on github comprehensive of Eagle PCB files for the main board, the Arduino code, BoM, a user manual and some useful construction tips.

Leonardo Lupori and Raffaele Mazziotti are active in the field of neuroscience at Tommaso Pizzorusso’s lab at Neuroscience Institute CNR of Pisa respectively as molecular biologist and experimental psychologist. They created an Arduino-based and MATLAB-controlled tool called IOSIC (Intrinsic Optical Signal Imaging Chamber), powered by an Arduino Micro and focused on intrinsic optical signal (IOS) imaging apparatus to run experiments on the plasticity of the brain.

Intrinsic optical signal (IOS) imaging is a functional imaging technique that has revolutionized our understanding of cortical functional organization and plasticity since it was first implemented, around 30 years ago. IOS is produced by the brain when processing information and is similar to the information recorded with the plethysmograph (the instrument to measure heart rate from a finger) and it is useful to investigate how the brain works. The researchers are especially interested to investigate how the brain is able to adapt to the environment to store information but also acquire new skills and these studies are really useful to understand what happens to the brain when is in good health or during a disease.

Even if their lab has a long-standing expertise in electrophysiological studies, they decided to  developed a fully functional apparatus for IOS with tools already available and low-cost:

To set up the entire system we used a mix of components commercially available and custom-made. The most expensive tool we used is an imaging camera from Hamamatsu (it is necessary because we need to analyze data quantitatively), but you can also use a cheaper camera (at least with a CCD chip 12-bit depth is recommended). The rest is stuff collected from old tools of the lab. For example, the microscope, that in our case is an old Olympus confocal microscope, but any transmitted light microscope or macroscope should be ok, was already in the lab and is currently used also for other purposes. For light illumination, we used a custom made crown-shaped LED holder that can be attached to the objective and provide a really stable light source. Afterwards, we wrote a MATLAB script to control the camera and then we built an imaging chamber to analyze the animal preparation. The imaging chamber is essential to keep the animal stable during the imaging session (about 7 minutes) and also to maintain its physiological temperature during the time course of anesthesia. An additional feature added to the chamber is the possibility to change the animal’s visual field automatically allowing us to measure rapidly, efficiently and repeatedly a very important parameter of plasticity called ocular dominance. The chamber is composed by a 3D printed structure on which an Arduino MICRO, two servo motors, a heating pad, an IR thermometer and a magnetic ring have been installed. Currently we are using this system with success and we hope to discover something really relevant.

You can download IOSIC code for the Arduino MICRO here. The code uses third-party libraries : TMP006 and Servo. MATLAB code to control shutters is available here.

“The color Visualizer” is an immersive installation to understand how color is used in nature to communicate between living organisms and to explore biodiversity through the lens of color:

By plucking an array of multi-colored strings, which are layered over the large array of high resolution screens, visitors can explore over 100 unique color stories as vibrant images and short videos appear before them. Strum a red cord, for example, and learn how a male cardinal bird colors his vibrant red feathers with pigments from food; strum a yellow cord and see how a yellow leopard’s spotted coat allows this predator to blend in with shadow and light while moving through tall grass.

The eye-catching cylindrical installation is part of the permanent exhibition “The color of Life” that opened in June 2015 and was created by Tellart in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences. It was prototyped using Arduino Uno and it’s currently shortlisted for the Interaction Awards, representing excellence in interaction design.

In the video below the team working at the project explain the main features of the educational installation and show a bit of the making of:

Rebel Geeks is a seven-part series on Al Jazeera English channel, featuring profiles of people around the world challenging power structures and offering a different vision of our technological future.

During Makers Faire in Shenzhen, in southeastern China, the authors of the series met Massimo Banzi and produced‘ Meet Your Maker’, a video interview about Arduino and how thousands of people are adopting it to build everything from 3D printers to drones, smart home devices to robotics.

‘Meet Your Maker’ can be seen on Al Jazeera English from November 16 at 22.30GMT. 

Watch the trailer and read the article now.