Eva Taylor works at EKT Workshop and built an animatronic rod puppet Alien as a masterwork research project for the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) in Sydney Australia. It was inspired by the “bambi burster” built for the film Alien 3, although her creature is somewhat different.

The animatronics are controlled via a Playstation 3 controller, using a servoshock module between the controller and an Arduino Uno board:

It contains and 8 way 2 stage tail mechanism and animatronic lips, jaw and tongue. The remaining parts are rod controlled. A myriad of techniques were deployed in its construction – the torso and limbs were hand-carved from Queensland Maple while the joints were custom made from recycled parts of RC cars and planes. The skeleton of the tail was custom made from acrylic and cut on a laser cutter. The head contains an underskull of fibreglass, dental acrylic teeth and silicone skin. The muscle groups are also made of deadened, encapsulated silicone.

She shared with us the video above showing the main phases of the making-of process, while the one below gives you an idea of how  the puppet looks like in a more dramatic piece:

After the Bike Tachometer we posted back in September, Nikus  shared with us a new Instructable to show you how to build remote-controlled tank using a first person view (FPV) camera and Arduino Leonardo:

At the beginning I build only RC tank without FPV camera but when I was driving it in the house I have not seen where it is. So I came up with that I will add to it the camera mounted on a 2 servos. The range is about 100m, you can also ride with it at home. With this tank you can see what your cat is doing when you’re not looking. You can see it on a video

Watch it in action and follow the tutorial:

A week ago we were in London for an introductory workshop on the Arduino Yún. The participants were mainly beginners, knew the basics about Arduino and had the chance to learn about the Bridge library, how to control the board locally through the browser and to use Temboo to connect the plant to Twitter. See the pictures on the our Flickr account.

Arduino history is tied to the city of London: the first Arduino workshops ever took place right there.

We are now planning to organise more #ArduinoTour activities in UK and we are looking for teachers and ambassadors of the Arduino community in London and also UK in general. Are you interested? Fill the form!

Next workshop in the City is scheduled on the 20th and 21st of December and it’s focused on beginners. On the 19th from 6 to 8 pm there will be a public presentation on the Arduino project and also get in touch with possible collaborators. Take a look at the program and book your participation to the workshop – (location still to be defined, more news soon).

Jason from Make Magazine published a video tutorial on how to create an amazing choreography hacking your Halloween props using Arduino Uno:

Some of you may have noticed that words like rhythm, texture, pattern, can be used both to describe fabrics, as well as sound. Focused on building an interface as a whole, using mostly textiles, OCHO TONOS invites the user to interact through touch, and experience sound in a multi-sensorial way. Ocho Tonos is an interactive installation by EJTech duo (Esteban de la Torre and Judit Eszter Kárpáti) I met last July during etextile summer camp while they were working on this experimental textile interface for tactile/sonic interaction by means of tangibles:

Exploring the relation between sound and textile and experimenting with the boundaries of our senses whilst changing the way we perceive fabric, surfaces and their manifestation as sound. Recontextualizing our tactile interaction with textile acting as an interface, where each element triggers, affects and modifies the generated sound’s properties. Creating a soundscape through sensor technology enticing audiophiles to interact and explore with reactive textile elements.The nexus of the body, the senses and technology.
OCHO TONOS is a symbiosis of the unique hand-crafted traditional textile techniques and the immaterial digital media.

Thanks to Arduino Mega ADK , all inputs coming from the touch of the user on the soft sensors are translated into a digital platform, parsed and filtered through MaxMSP, in order to control the generation of a soundscape in Ableton Live.

Ocho Tonos was chopped, spiced and cooked at Kitchen Budapest. Sounds used are samples from the working machinery at  TextielLab.

After Anywhere, Turbo-gusli and Solaris, Dmitry Morozov shared with us Digioxide, a new interactive work using Arduino Nano, hc-06 bluetooth module, gas and dust sensors, LG mobile printer :

This project aims to raise public awareness of the environmental pollution by artistic means.
Digioxide is a portable wireless device equipped with sensors of air pollution gases and dust particles that is connected to computer via bluetooth. This allows a person with digioxide to freely move around a city, seek out ecologically problematic places and turn their data into digital artworks.

The information about the concentration of dust and harmful gases, such as CO, CO2, HCHO, CH4 and C3H8 and spme others is algorithmically transformed into generative graphics, forming an abstract image. The device’s mobile printer allows instant printing of this air “snapshot” that can be left as an evidence on the place, or given as a present to a passerby.

During Maker Faire Rome we announced and gave a preview of our new project called Arduino Materia 101, the 3d printer developed in collaboration with Sharebot.

We are happy to announce that starting today the 3d printer is available for pre-order (30 days delivery time) from Arduino Store :

• Arduino Materia 101  Kit Version  €570/USD727
• Arduino Materia 101 Assembled Version € 696/USD887

We can also share with you a list of documentation to learn all the details about it:

• Product page with downloadable PDFs of
  • Use Manual in English and Italian
  • Assembly Manual (soon online in Italian and  in English)

• Github repository with all the source files

In the next weeks we are going to post on the blog some cool hacks and user profiles to make it even easier to enjoy with the 3d printer.

Robin Andersson shared with us the link to his Instructable to create a robot controlled by (gloved) hand gestures and running on a couple of Arduino Unos and Xbee.

You can make it yourself following the 8 steps of the tutorial and then customize the gestures as you like.

Enjoy the video below:

An Interaction and Industrial Designer studying at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh tried to re-imagine the way we interact with radios to create a more meaningful relationship between the user and the artefact.

Radios have been around since the 1920s but the devices we have at home haven’t changed much even if they were designed nearly 100 years ago and share similar elements like switches, knobs, sliders.

Yaakov Lyubetsky worked on a prototype of The Experimental Form Radio using Arduino Uno:

When The Experimental Form Radio is laying on a tabletop, it is off. To turn the radio on, you pick it up and slot it onto a wall mount. The radio leverages the elastic qualities of fabric to control stations and volume. To change stations you press lightly and slide your finger along the fabric surface. To change the volume you press firmly into the fabric, and then slide your finger along the deeper cavity in the radio. The video below showcases the interaction.

Requiring the user to pick up and wall mount the radio to turn on creates a ritualistic experience with a very simple feedback mechanism. If the radio is hanging on the wall it’s on, if the radio is laying on a flat surface then it’s off. The visual and auditory feedback allows the user to have a clear understanding of the system state.

Even cooler than the video above is the next one, showing all the “Making of” process to build the wooden piece and the soft interface:

The project uses an Arduino Uno board with a custom circuit made with three independent layers of conductive fabric and conductive thread. Touching together two layers of conductive fabric completes one of twelve circuits that then either change the radio station or the volume.

Take a look at the additional documentation on his website.

Satellite Lamps is a project investigating one of the most important contemporary infrastructures, the Global Positioning System or GPS. It’s a project curated by Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen and Timo Arnall as part of the Yourban research project at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and continues their previous work on revealing the materials of technologies that started in 2009 with RFID and Immaterials: Light Painting Wifi. The project uses Arduino extensively, and is also thoroughly documented:

GPS is widely used yet it’s invisible and few of us really have any idea of how it works or how it inhabits our everyday environments. We created a series of Lamps that change brightness according to the accuracy of received GPS signals, and when we photograph them as timelapse films, we start to get a picture of how these signals behave in actual urban spaces.

They published a film that you can watch above, and published an article that details very thoroughly how it was made and why. If you are interested in the project, you can read more on how they explored GPS , how the visualisations were made, and about the cultural history of GPS.

This is a GPS receiver connected to Arduino that sends data to a piece of software running on a laptop. It is a quickly designed tool, a transparent plastic box that that allows us to observe the performance of the electronics, and still mobile enough to carry in hand or a backpack.