Using an Arduino Uno with a CNC shield,  Thimo Voorwinden has made his own CNC out of MDF for just over €200 ($212).

CNC routers really open up what the type of item you can make, but tend to be expensive. Voorwinden’s homemade version, however, features a work area of 200mm x 250mm x 100mm. As shown in the results video below, it’s accurate enough to cut two pieces of MDF so that they can nest securely inside of one another. Impressively, the whole assembly was created using basic tools.

Two interesting features on this build are that the workpiece is fastened down with wood screws into the Y-axis gantry, and that it employs an offset motor with a flexible shaft to transfer power to the cutting head. 12 bearing blocks and 8mm diameter steel rod are used to keep everything lined up.

You can see more of this project in Voorwinden’s write-up, including several other videos as well.

In what is perhaps the most Arduino boards used together, 130 Arduino Nanos, (plus an Arduino Mega), 130 RFID readers, and 750 RGB LEDs power this interactive crossword puzzle.

As you might suspect, bringing a giant crossword puzzle to life was lot of work. If you’d like to know how much, you can see the process laid out in the video below. Like many great hacks, this project starts out with a lot of prep, making sure the mechanical pieces go together as they should. Everything is then wired and programmed, and on day six, it finally goes out the door, destined for the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland.

Each letter has an RFID tag. Under the table are custom made circuits with Arduino Nano, RFID reader, and WS2812B. There is 130 of those circuits and the are connected by I2C interface together to Arduino Mega 2560, which is the main brain. So basically, the table recognizes letters and takes proper actions.

• When there is no letter: LED are dimmed white
• When letter is good: LED are green
• When letter is bad: LED are red
• When whole word is completed: LED play colorful animation

The main controller (Arduino Mega) communicates with a PC via RS-232. This PC plays special graphic visualization on the wall. When the whole crossword is completed, the whole table begins doing disco + sound effects.

It’s quite a colorful display, and it looks like the kids playing with it in the “Anything Goes” exhibition love it! You can see more about this project in Robert Mordzon’s write-up.

For the fourth year, we invite the open source community to join us in celebrating Arduino’s birthday on Saturday, April 1st!

Arduino Day is a 24-hour-long worldwide event – organized by our team and the community – where people interested in Arduino can get together, share their experiences, and learn more about the platform through all sorts of activities, tailored to local audiences. Participation is open to anyone, from young Makers and students to professional engineers and designers.

More than 330 were held by Arduino enthusiasts across the globe in 2016. This year, we are hoping to make that number 500! If you want to organize Arduino Day festivities of your own, please fill out the online form and submit your proposal here by March 11th.

In the coming weeks, be sure to visit the official website to learn more or find an event in your area. And don’t forget to post, engage, and follow along on social media using the hashtag #ArduinoD17!

When your microwave is done with its food, it generally beeps… and beeps… and beeps. Though you definitely want to know when your frozen burrito is edible, if you get to it right when it wants, things can get quite annoying. Tim Gremalm decided to do something about it, and replaced the buzzer in his appliance with an Arduino Nano, an amplifier, and small speaker.

His initial speaker/amplifier combination wasn’t loud enough so he replaced it with more appropriate options. After this hack, he now has something that can play a more pleasing tone—in his case, the Windows XP startup sound—and do so only once!

You can see more of this project on Gremalm’s page, as well as check out his code here or this Arduino program that inspired his code. It’s a neat hack, and a great example of what can be done with an Arduino, but you probably shouldn’t mod your microwave unless you really know what you’re doing!

Once solved via a series of brain teasers and a physical challenge, this puzzle box opens to reveal an engagement ring.

When proposing to your significant other, the normal course of action is to hopefully do something romantic, get on one knee, and present your hopefully soon-to-be fiancé with a ring. David Hoskins however, apparently confident that his girlfriend would have the will as well as the mental and physical capacity to pass his test, instead created “The Box.”

This device put the user through challenges including a water weight puzzle that will be familiar to Die Hard fans, an audio puzzle, a visual puzzle, and even an endurance challenge involving an exercise bike. Of course, if his girlfriend failed to complete the puzzle, that would really ruin the setup, so Hoskins, who got the idea for the game while studying for a masters degree in user experience design, tested things thoroughly beforehand.

Things apparently proceeded as planned, since she said “yes!”

“The Box” was an interactive puzzle game not too dissimilar to the likes of the Crystal Maze or Escape the Room, where the user has to solve a series of puzzles (in my case, 4) to unlock the final prize (for me, an engagement ring). The game utilized a mixture of spatial engagement technology, utilizing Arduinos to connect physical objects and beacons to guide and inform the user as they passed through physical spaces undertaking each challenge.

You can read more about Hoskins’ project and the testing that went into it here.

With a DVD pick-up, an Arduino Uno, a laser, and an LDR, Instructables user “Venkes” has managed to create a DIY Laser Scanning Microscope (LSM).

A laser microscope works by shining a beam of light on a subject in an X-Y plane. The intensity of the reflected light is then detected by a photoresistor (or LDR) and recorded. When the various points of light are combined, you get an image.

Obviously you need a very small laser beam. Since a DVD laser unit has to work with the extremely small bit markings on these disks and has coils to steer the lens built-in, this seems like a logical choice to use with a custom microscope. Though it took quite a bit of effort to make, it’s capable of 1300x magnification to attain a resolution of 65,6536 pixels (256 x 256) in an area of .05 x .05mm. Results start around 3:00 in the video below.

More details of this impressive build can be found on the project’s Instructables page.

Have you ever wondered what television would look like if transposed onto string and wrapped around another object? If so, you’re not the only one, as shown in this teleknitting sculpture.

Although it’s hard to say where the idea for this piece came from, Moscow-based artist ::vtol::’s teleknitting installation resolves a TV signal down into one pixel by lowering its resolution in eight steps. This process is displayed as video on an Android tablet, and the results are transferred to thread via a unique dying mechanism involving “dye arms.”

This multi-colored string is then wrapped around an object (or objects) rotating on a pedestal, the height of the string being controlled by the TV signal’s volume.

As you can see below, the character Bender from Futurama along with an alligator bearing an accordion act as the items being wrapped in TV-string. You can find more details of this build on ::vtol::’s website, along with a number of his other Arduino-based interactive projects.

If you need motivation to actually wake up rather than sleep more, this Nerf target clock from “Normal Universe” could be a great solution!

For many of us, traditional alarm clocks have given way to smartphones, but the concept is still the same: an annoying sound, followed by either waking up, or hitting the virtual snooze button just… one… more… time. On the other hand, when this alarm goes off, you need to shoot it with a Nerf gun in order to silence it.

The alarm/target works using a piezoelectric sensor attached to the clock’s housing. When the alarm sounds, if it senses a dart hit by counting the signal pulses generated, it turns off. Ingeniously, and perhaps annoyingly, it can tell if it’s tapped by a finger, and not respond accordingly!

The clock uses a programmable RGB ring controlled by an Arduino Uno to display the time, and is nicely modeled in Fusion 360. Definitely worth a watch.

You can see more details in the video below!

We are excited to announce that UnlimitedHand is now an officially licensed Arduino AtHeart product. Created by Japanese startup H2L, the wearable controller straps around your forearm like an Ace bandage and allows you to actually touch and feel things within the gaming world.

UnlimitedHand consists of a 3D motion sensor, an array of muscle sensors, a multi-channel electronic muscle stimulator, and a vibration motor, which together, enable you to interact with objects and characters in VR. It does this by syncing the movement of a user’s hand and fingers with its virtual counterpart, and contracting the muscles on the wearer’s forearm to simulate haptic feedback.

With UnlimitedHand, not only will you be able to experience the ricochet of a gunshot or pet animals, but also hack various customized gestures thanks to its full compatibility with the Arduino IDE.

According to H2L:

Arduino, with their commitment to open-source, has reached out with their technology to muster a great force of Makers and inventors. This omni-present community has no doubt supported us in many ways during the development of UnlimitedHand. By joining the program, we can now present our results back to the community.

UnlimitedHand–which surpassed its Kickstarter goal in less than a day–is now available for purchase on Amazon and its website, as well as in retail stores throughout Japan.

Heavy duty coffee makers are good for, well, making coffee. On the other hand, if you were to look at the frame without the preconception of what it can do, you might notice that there is space on top where equipment could be attached, and space on the bottom with a built-in heating pad on which to place an object… in other words, a perfect 3D printer frame!

Tropical Labs realized this, and turned the ordinary household appliance into a delta printer with three steppers for motion and another to feed the printing media. An Arduino Mega serves as the brains of the operation along with a popular RAMPS 1.4 shield.

Frame aside, it’s a neat mechanism, and definitely worth checking out. You can see more about the project on Hackaday.io.