From magic to science, man has long dreamed about being able to manipulate objects from a distance. People have been able to push something using air or even sound waves for a while, but University of Bristol researcher Asier Marzo and colleagues have come up with a 3D-printable device that can not only repel small items, but can also attract them to the source.

It does this using an array of sound transducers arranged in a dome shape at the end of a wand. The acoustic tractor beam is also equipped with an Arduino Nano, a motor controller board, a DC-DC converter, and a LiPo battery, among some other easily accessible components.

Basically, an Arduino will generate 4 half-square signals at 5Vpp 40kHz with different phases. These signals get amplified to 25Vpp by the motor driver and fed into the transducers. A button pad can be used to change the phases so that the particle moves up and down. A battery (7.3V) powers the Arduino and the logic part of the motor driver. A DC-DC converter steps-up the 7.3V to 25V for the motor driver.

Aside from entertaining friends by levitating small pieces of plastic, the DIY tractor beams have many possible use cases, particularly in biological research. However, there are some limitations. Given the challenge of suspending objects more than half the wavelength of sound, the gadget can only trap things around a few millimeters in size.

Marzo and his team have published their project in the journal Applied Physics Letters, and shared step-by-step instructions so you could get started on building your own beam. You can read more on Phys.org as well.

You may know that a neodymium magnet is more powerful than something you usually find on a refrigerator, but by how much?

Most people, even those willing to harvest magnets from disk drives, accept that some magnets are stronger than others. This, however, wasn’t quite good enough for Anthony Garofalo, who instead converted a prototype voltmeter he made using an Arduino Uno and a tiny OLED display into something that displays the magnetic, or Gauss level. It also shows whether it’s observing the north or south pole of the magnet, which certainly could be useful in some situations.

Though full documentation isn’t available right now, Garofalo says that he’ll make it available once he repackages everything in a smaller format with an enclosure. If you’d like to see more of his work, including the voltmeter he based this off of, be sure to check out his Instructables page and some other neat stuff on his YouTube channel!

3D-printed appendages are, as one might suspect, generally meant for those that are missing a limb. Moreover, there are many other people that might retain partial functionality of a hand, but could still use assistance.

Youbionic’s beautifully 3D-printed, myoelectric prosthesis is envisioned for either application, capable of being controlled by muscle contraction as if it were a real body part.

As seen in the video below, the Youbionic hand can manipulate many different items, including a small box, a water bottle, and a set of keys. Functionality aside, the movement is extremely fluid and the smooth black finish really makes it look great.

The device is currently equipped with an Arduino Micro, servos, various sensors, a battery pack, and a few switches. Even the breadboard appears to be very neat, though one would suspect the final version will use some sort of PCB.

You can learn more and order yours on Youbionic’s website.

Arduino Education empowers educators with the necessary hardware and software tools to create more hands-on, innovative learning experience.

Later this month, we’ll be exhibiting our latest STEAM program for upper secondary education at Bett 2017 in London: CTC 101 – Creative Technology in the Classroom 101.

We’re looking for volunteers to join our team during the event, from staffing tables and displays, to helping with one-on-one demos, to providing technical assistance. Water and snacks will be provided, of course, and we’ve even prepared a small gift to show our appreciation at the end of your shift!

Interested? Please fill out this questionnaire and we’ll get back to you soon! 

• When: Wednesday-Saturday, January 25-28, 2017
• Location: ExCeL London, Royal Victoria Dock, 1 Western Gateway, London E16 1XL, United Kingdom

Aldric Negrier, a Portuguese Maker and owner of RepRap Algarve, has created an SLA 3D printer named RooBee One.

Most desktop 3D printers that you’ll see in Makerspaces or advertised for home use drop material onto a bed using a hot extrusion head. The open-source RooBee One, however, employs a DLP projector along with an Arduino Mega to light up each layer in a vat of resin. This causes each layer to solidify, thus making a complete object. You can see this process at around 0:30 in the video below.

RooBee One features an aluminum frame with an adjustable print area of 80x60x200 mm, with up to a 150x105x200mm build volume. Aside from the Arduino, additional electronics consist of a RAMPS 1.4 shield, a NEMA 17 stepper motor, a microstepping driver, an endstop, and a 12V transformer. Negrier also installed a fan on top of the printer to help guide the toxic vapors outside and away from the machine’s operator.

This process may be unfamiliar to those used to “normal” 3D printers, as it “magically” pulls a complete part out of a bath. The project is fairly involved, but the resulting ruby-red machine looks quite impressive. You can find out how to build one on its Instructables page.

Following the announcement at this year’s World Maker Faire, we’re excited to reveal the release of Arduino IDE 1.8.0—the new official desktop editor for all Arduino boards, both .org and .cc alike.

This should come as great news to the entire Arduino community, representing a key milestone in our journey moving forward.

You will now be able to use the desktop IDE 1.8.0 when working with any Arduino board from .org or .cc family. The latest and greatest unified Arduino Software can be downloaded here.

Arduino IDE 1.8.0 works out of the box with AVR boards, like the Uno, Mega, Yun, and Micro, among the most popular. Additionally, it supports the Leonardo Ethernet, Yun Mini, Industrial 101, and Uno WiFi.

The updated SAMD core will provide support for the M0, M0 PRO, and Tian, completing the product line that includes the Zero, MKR1000, and the newly-launched Primo and MKRZero.

More tech notes: You can run the IDE on Linux directly in command line, no longer requiring the X11 display. Also on the Arduino Builder paths with strange UTF8 chars are now correctly handled.

Release after release, the community continues to play an integral role in our development. Be sure to check the entire revision log for a complete list of changes and credits. As always, don’t forget to report any issues you may find, either on the Arduino Forum or by writing to support@arduino.cc and support@arduino.org. Your help is very much appreciated. And while in the holiday giving spirit, please consider supporting the Arduino Software by contributing to its progress!

A special thanks to all developers and management team for their efforts in making this big step forward. Happy Holidays!

Imgur user Peter Clough recently created his own colorful “Magic Box” Bluetooth speaker assembly with a NeoPixel visual display.

If you need a speaker (or rather a speaker with an enclosure) the easiest way is usually to just buy one. On the other hand, if you want something really awesome and unique, why not build it yourself? Clough did just that using an Arduino Pro Mini and a Bluetooth receiver along with a strip of programmable LEDs that react to the emitted sounds–made possible by an electret microphone amp.

Cleverly, the case was sourced from a hobby supplies store, while neodymium magnets were used to keep the lid in place. Clough also employed a “really beefy” 20W 4Ohm speaker, as well as a rotary encoder with push button for volume and play/pause control.

You can find more details, including a schematic, on the project’s Imgur page.

If you had a Teddy Ruxpin in the ’80s and ’90s, you probably remember inserting special tapes and hearing him read stories to you. Whether you loved or hated the little bear, it was hard to forget his weirdly moving mouth and eyes. Today though, with small and cheap development boards readily available, this mechanical system is just begging for a retrofit.

In this project, hacker “Tinkernut” employed an Arduino to sense the intensity of a sound input, and in turn used it to allow Ruxpin to lip sync to any audio source. This could be a song, story, or even output from a virtual assistant.

He chose the latter option, and after installing Alexa on a Raspberry Pi, used the two boards in tandem to control the retro toy. With this setup, he can ask it such questions as “how tall is the empire state building?” and have it answer back with audio and a semi-synced bear mouth.

Have an old Ruxpin lying around? Give new life to it by following Tinkernut’s instructions here.

If you don’t want to bother putting up your own lights this year, you can just control Tom Hammond’s!

As seen on Good Morning America, Hammond recently put up a Christmas display that can be controlled via a simple online interface between the hours of 5pm and midnight (EST). The setup consists of an Arduino Mega along with a Raspberry Pi running Falcon Player, while the animations were created using xLights.

The website offers nine lighting options that anyone can select and play. Thanks to a webcam on Hammond’s property, the page even features a live stream that lets users see the animation they chose in real-time. However, due to the number of people trying to access it, the video is not always available.

Hammond, who lives in Akron, Ohio, told ABC News:

“I wanted people outside of my community to enjoy it. The nicest thing I got was an email from an older lady who lives with her mother who said they couldn’t decorate their house this year and she showed her mom my website and said that was one of the best gifts, that she got to decorate.”

Want a fun holiday distraction? Check out the Internet-connected lights here! You can also look at these other Arduino-powered dazzling displays to help get you in the festive spirit!

Microscopes are common pieces of equipment in laboratories (or even high school science classes for that matter), but making movies of living cells usually requires more expensive and specialized tools… until now. With a 3D-printed mount for a smartphone and an Arduino, researchers at Sweden’s Uppsala University have been able to retrofit ordinary microscopes to take time-lapse sequences.

To accomplish this, an Arduino was used to control a shutter for the smartphone to minimize light exposure when capturing intermittent images, while a heating unit was employed to maintain a constant temperature for the tiny organisms.

The control unit was built using an Arduino Nano, a Bluetooth communication module, a power transistor, and a voltage regulator. The control unit was connected to a standard computer power supply unit and then used to provide power at the appropriate voltages to the other components of system, i.e. the heating element (12V), the fan (12V), the temperature sensors (5V) and finally the shutter’s servo motor (5V). The control unit was used to operate the shutter’s servo motor via Bluetooth, and also to control the temperature inside the incubator by adjusting the power supplied to the heating element.

In the future, this modular and affordable system, called ATLIS, could increase the accessibility of time-lapse microscopy for the wider research community. The total cost for all of its components (excluding the phone and microscope) was only $277, a mere fraction of the price for commercially available equipment.

You can read more about the project on Phys.org and find the team’s full study here.

(Photo: Linda Koffmar / Phys.org)