**To the members of the Arduino community interested in social innovation and tech for the greater good, this is a call for your help.**

Almost a year ago I was awarded with an Ashoka Fellowship, which got me to join a group of people working with projects all over the world having to do with social change through entrepreneurship. Issues covered by the Ashoka fellows range from gender equality, passing by collaborative economy, democratic access to all sorts of material resources, and ending with education using technology.

I have always been engaged in different social initiatives in my life: helped creating two Scout groups, joined several student associations (became president of one), played in a band (sorry we’re not on Spotify), taught martial arts to kids with visual impairments… and helped create the largest community dedicated to open hardware in the history of technology (so far).

During the last 10+ years I have been focused in building the Arduino platform, but also in reaching out to other communities, including arts, design, and more recently, education. Therefore, the Ashoka Fellowship feels like the perfect fit to encourage me to continue to be engaged with the development of our platform by making it more accessible to others.

(For those interested, the Ashoka Fellowship got me and Arduino to collaborate with the PUIG Foundation in helping Spanish speaking teachers to realize some of their educational tools, but that is material for a different blog post.)

The role of the Arduino founders is, among other things, engaging with the community in trying to improve the platform, but also society in general. Not in vain, we work with open source, use open tools and create open content. In the past, thanks to the Arduino community, we have translated the Arduino IDE and the Arduino reference to multiple languages, added features to the software (also some bugs), or corrected errors on the website. With this post, I (we) want to invite the Arduino community to engage in a larger effort for the greater good. Something that can help shaping the future of how technology engages in making the world a better place.

This year (as a matter of fact, starting next week) Arduino will be working with UNLEASH in an effort to help them accomplish their goals through the innovative use of our platform. From August 13th to 21st, 2017, Denmark will host the first UNLEASH event, where 1,000 top talents from 129 countries are going to meet to create innovative solutions to challenges within the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The talent pool draws from tech entrepreneurs, leading academics, and young development program officers. This year, talents will co-create solutions focusing on seven SDG-related themes: health, food, water, education & ICT, energy, urban sustainability, and sustainable consumption & production.

Over the nine days, the participants will work to create real, scalable solutions to the Sustainable Development Goals. The UNLEASH event has made a call for young talent and can only host 1,000 volunteers, but we want to augment their ability to share and collaborate online. Arduino has created a channel on the Arduino Forum named “UNLEASH 2017” where we invite all of you to participate in the online discussion to help those participating on site with possible technical challenges they may face. The channel will be open for as long as the collaborations go on. We expect some interesting projects to emerge, where some of the Arduino community members may even team up with those attending the event IRL.

Personally, I will be hosting an open seminar online (URL to be announced) on August 16th at 5pm CET to help the participants–but also anyone interested–in getting started with the use of Arduino tools. I will highlight examples of projects using Arduino, and there will be some time for questions via a chat. Later, I will follow the Arduino Forum and help with the moderation of the conversations happening there. I would love to see some of you there as well!

Instructables author Daniel Quintana loves mountain biking, but after having to interrupt a ride to continuously check the time, he did what any normal teenager would do in this situation: he created his own Google Glass-like headset from scratch.

His DIY AR device, called “Uware,” takes the form of a 3D-printed enclosure with a tiny 0.49″ OLED screen stuffed inside, along with an HC-06 Bluetooth module, an APDS-9960 gesture sensor, a 3.7V battery, and of course, a tiny Arduino Pro Mini for control.

In normal usage, the wearable displays the time and text messages transmitted from Quintana’s phone over Bluetooth via a custom app that he wrote. Swiping right in front of the gesture sensor puts it into camera mode, allowing him to capture the environment hands-free!

Want to see more? You can find Quintana’s write-up here, or check out Uware’s prototype electronics setup and custom magnetic charging rig in the videos below!

When you hear the words “Arduino alarm clock,” likely you think of something that uses a real-time clock (RTC) module to wake one up in a creative way, perhaps with light patterns or pleasant sounds. Though creative, the Duvet Eating Alarm Clock is not pleasant, literally ripping the covers off of your bed for a very “rude awakening.”

This project, the brainchild of YouTuber “1up Living,” uses a modified mechanical alarm clock to signal an Arduino Uno to start the duvet stealing machine. A powerful winch turns a custom-made drum that progressively wraps the bed cover around it, leaving no option but to get up and get dressed!

If you need a little more motivation in the morning, you can find 1up Living’s build instructions here.

I read the other day that the hot career choice for kids these days is: YouTuber. That means every kid — yes, including mine — has two or three attempts at a YouTube show on their account and then they get into the next big thing and forget about it. On the other hand, sometimes you find someone who has a lot of ideas to share, and the dedication to keep sharing them.

[Kevin Zhou], an 11-year-old from Indonesia, has filmed around  70 videos in the past couple of years, with a fantastic variety of nerdy projects ranging from Mindstorms to Arduino to wood shop projects, and even a Blender tutorial. His projects show a lot of complexity, with serious, real-world concepts, and he shares the technical details about the various components in the project, and he walks you through the code as well.

He made a Mindstorms carving machine, pictured above, with a gantry system holding a motor steady while the user carves into a block of floral foam with LEGO bits. He does a lot of home automation projects using an Arduino and relay board, as well as a number of water-pumping robots. He doesn’t stick to one medium or technology. He has a jigsaw and in one video he shows how to build a Thor’s hammer out of wood. He prints out each layer’s design on office paper and glues the paper to a piece of wood, cutting out the cross-sections on his jigsaw. The whole stack is glued together and clamped. [Kevin]’s design featured a hollow space inside to save weight, which he cut by drilling a 1-inch hole in the center with his drill press, then threading the jigsaw blade through the hole to cut out the inside. As an amateur woodcrafter myself, I like seeing him branching out working on small wood projects.

[Kevin]’s full automatic water dispenser is one of a series of water-pumping projects including a couple of plant-watering robots. [Kevin] uses a relay-triggered pump and a water-level sensor, all running on an Arduino Mega plugged into a 1360-point breadboard.

He has a lot of common modules. He uses a LED display plugged directly into the breadboard, with its backpack plugged into same rows so it can lay flat. He plays around with an IR remote, as well as a 12 V / 5 A Peltier thermo-electric cooler running off of a relay. He has a couple of different relay boards making for a number of home automation projects, including a fairly complicated security system featuring RFID and keypad entry.

There are many LEGO and Mindstorms projects as well, including a complicated robot arm controlled by a smartphone app, as well as a Technic beam sorter that rolls the beams down a conveyor so that shorter elements fall through smaller holes, while longer pieces continue on to fall in larger holes down the line. Intriguingly to me, he did a couple of projects involving mixing Arduinos and LEGO/Mindstorms, and frequently uses the building set to build enclosures and support structure.

I suppose you could say the individual projects aren’t that challenging–connecting a relay board to an Arduino, for instance. All of these parts are fairly simple to run individually but together show he’s been working at this for a long time: 70 videos. A DIY security system is a far cry from turning on a LED.

Besides, I like how [Kevin] finishes projects, then riffs off of them. He tries out a few variants in a row, making changes and improvements. I just hope he keeps building–I can’t imagine what he’ll be making fifteen years from now.

Check out some of his videos:

Calling all developers in Italy and beyond! We will be hosting a three-day workshop in our Turin office, September 29th to October 1st, designed for students, hackers, and engineers ages 18 to 28 with a deep interest in microcontrollers, IoT, and open source development.

The workshop will focus on three main topics:

Teamwork and Open Source

• GitHub and GitHub Flow
• Hands-on collaborative projects on GitHub

Microcontrollers

• Review of framework for MCU development
• Introduction to Arduino core architecture
• Arduino ecosystem tools
• C++ and Stream
• Understanding the difference between Arduino and other frameworks
• Hands-on project with AVR, ARM, ARC32

Internet of Things

• The future of IoT
• Security, networks, protocols
• Low-power
• Hands-on “Chinese whispers” project involving multiple protocols, e.g. infrared, WiFi, BLE, Sigfox, LoRA, and Zigbee.

The workshop will be tutored by Martino Facchin, senior developer at Arduino, and is open to a maximum of 25 selected participants. The cost (150 EUR) covers all of the necessary materials, lunches, and social activities (breakfast with Massimo Banzi and aperitivo with the Arduino team).

Interested? You can start by applying here (deadline: September 10th). All confirmed participants will receive an email on September 12th with a link to buy their seat at the workshop (deadline: September 17th) via the Arduino online store. For more information, feel free to email us at events@arduino.cc.

ARDUINO DEVELOPERS WORKSHOP

DATES: September 29 – October 1, 2017, from 9.30am to 6pm

VENUE: Arduino c/o Toolbox Co-working, Via Agostino da Montefeltro 2, Torino

TUTOR: Martino Facchin

COST: 150 EUR + VAT

Application for the event can be found here. Additional information at events@arduino.cc.

Digital cameras have revolutionized the ways that we can record and share our lives. Action cameras, such as the GoPro and other similar models, have taken things one step further, allowing use in rugged environments. If you want to capture nature, however, you may want your camera to start recording automatically.

In order to add this ability, YouTuber “ItMightBeWorse” hooked up an ultrasonic sensor to his CA Kenai CA2001 camera using an Arduino Uno along with a transistor to act like the normal start/stop button. The output is soldered directly to the button leads, and he also tapped into the battery terminals to give himself more power supply options.

He can now record birds as they feed without being there to scare them away!

BCMI, the company founded by Massimo Banzi, David Cuartielles, David Mellis and Tom Igoe, co-founders of Arduino, announces that today it has acquired 100% ownership of Arduino AG, the corporation which owns all of the Arduino trademarks.

Following the acquisition, Mr. Massimo Banzi becomes the new Chairman and CTO of Arduino. Dr. Fabio Violante will be appointed as the new CEO, replacing Mr. Federico Musto who will pursue other opportunities outside Arduino AG.

“This is the beginning of a new era for Arduino in which we will strengthen and renew our commitment to open source hardware and software, while in parallel setting the company on a sound financial course of sustainable growth. Our vision remains to continue to enable anybody to innovate with electronics for a long time to come,” said Mr Banzi.

“I’m really excited and honoured to join Massimo, the co-founders and the amazing Arduino team as CEO. In the past two years we have worked very hard to get to this point. We envision a future in which Arduino will apply its winning recipe to democratize the Internet of Things for individuals, educators, professionals and businesses,” said Dr. Violante.

Perhaps you enjoy various flavors of electronic music, and would love to try making your own. Although this seems like a fun idea, after considering the amount of equipment and knowledge that you need to get started, many people simply move on to something else. On the other hand, the NOMNOM machine, seen here, allows you to create tunes visually using YouTube clips as samples.

The device has 16 buttons which can start and stop up to 16 clips displayed via a JavaScript web application. An Arduino Uno takes input from these buttons as well as four potentiometers to modify the clip sounds, and sends the appropriate signals to the computer running the app. There are also four knobs that control the repetition rate, volume, speed and playable length of each selected video. This enables you to make really interesting music without the normally steep learning curve.

For more details, you can check out the project log on Hackaday.io or on GitHub. NOMNOM will also be making an appearance at the World Maker Faire in New York City this fall, so be sure to see it in person if you’re there!

While using a metal detector to find valuable jewelry, and less valuable aluminum cans, can be interesting, the more accurately you can pinpoint the “treasure,” the easier it is. For excellent accuracy while maintaining a wide sensing field, Maker “TechKiwiGadgets” built a detector with not one, but four sets of sensing coils, all controlled using an Arduino Mega.

The device generates and senses a magnetic pulse from each set of coils, which is modified if there is a metallic object present. In search mode, the four signals are combined into a single display, and once an object is located, the four sensors can be shown in a split-screen. You can then dig where, and only where, it’s needed, minimizing work and your environmental impact!

Want to create your own? Check out TechKiwiGadgets’ Instructables page for more details and see a demo of it below!

If you’re having trouble finding time to work out because you’d rather play video games, then this is the solution you’ve been waiting for. The Cykill device modifies a normal exercise bike into a device that won’t let you power on your Xbox unless you’re pedaling sufficiently fast enough.

Making this even more motivating, is that if you stop pedaling fast enough, it immediately cuts power, ruining any in-progress game, and potentially even damaging your hard drive!

To implement this hack, Instructables user “Fuzzy-Wobble” used an Arduino Uno to intercept the bike’s normal control signals. From this data, as well as settings on a custom control panel, it decides whether or not to activate switchable plug that provides power to the Xbox.

If you’d like to build your own forced-fitness setup, be sure to check out the project’s write-up here. Gaming not your thing? Perhaps it’s Netflix binge-watching getting in the way of your healthy lifestyle instead…