Suicide prevention charity R U OK? has partnered with digital innovation agency Fusion to create a fully-connected device in the form of a question mark with hopes of sparking a million conversations throughout Australia. Similar to the Olympic Torch, Quentin will be passed from person to person as it makes its way from town to town starting on Thursday, September 8th.

But unlike the Olympic Torch, the route is not planned. Instead, the journey is determined by the challenge it issues to each new keeper motivating them to reconnect face-to-face with people in their lives.

Quentin consists of a translucent 3D-printed shell, and is equipped with an Arduino/Genuino, some sensors, GPS, a display, and an array of LEDs that illuminate, animate and communicate. Users can interact with the device either by SMS or shaking it to receive their R U OK? challenge. Quentin also publishes its activity to the charity’s website, including distance travelled, challenges issued, and the number of keepers.

(Photos: Fusion / Campaign Asia)

Increasing accuracy in the collection of data coming from sensors is a need that, sooner or later, Makers need to face. Paul Martinsen from MegunoLink created a tutorial to eliminate noise from sensor readings on Arduino with three simple filtering techniques.

The Averaging and Running Average techniques are easy to implement as they work by adding a number of measurements together, then dividing the total by the number of measurements. In both cases, the downside is that it can use a lot of memory.

The Exponential filter is a better solution for several reasons: it doesn’t require much memory, you can control how much filtering is applied with a single parameter, and it saves battery power because you don’t need to make many measurements at once. For this solution, they developed an Arduino filter library so you don’t need to go mad with math!

Interested? You can find the tutorial and explore the code on MegunoLing’s blog post here.

VVVV is an open-source software toolkit supporting interaction designers and artists handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.

The cool thing is that you can control Arduino and Genuino boards with VVVV by uploading a Firmata sketch and then start playing with the input and output pins.

What’s more, the team recently released a brand new set of nodes able to talk to your Arduinos. With this implementation you can:

• Just plug a DigitalWrite (Firmata), AnalogWrite (Firmata) or ServoWrite (Firmata) node to the Arduino node (or concatenate them together) to set the pins of the Board.
• Connect DigitalRead (Firmata) and AnalogRead (Firmata) nodes to get the values from the Board’s pins.
• Use the Sysex Messages output to receive different ‘Sysex Messages’ sent back by the Arduino Board. Some Sysex decoders are already there (see StringDecoder (Firmata), CapabilityDecoder (Firmata)). Sending custom ‘Sysex Messages’ is easy as well.
• Your board is not listed in the NodeBrowser? The Arduino nodes are easily adaptable for other controllers running Firmata. Hello teensy…

Easier than ever before:

• no need to supply a spread for all 20 pins and then SetSlice some of them to particular values.
• no need to define the ‘PinMode’ for each pin.
• no need to define which pins should report their values back.

Intrigued? Take a look at the details and discussion on VVVV blog!

Our friends at 330ohms–who also happen to be Genuino resellers in Mexico–recently published a video a review of the MKR1000 [in Spanish]!

Check it out:

Do you or your significant other have trouble sticking to a budget? Well, say goodbye to overspending with the iBag2: a high-tech wearable device that helps curb your impulse buys.

The iBag2 is equipped with a Genuino Uno, a 10,000mAh power bank, and several other interesting components. There’s a timer connected to electromagnets that lock the bag according to your most vulnerable spending moments during the course of a day, an RFID system hooked up to LEDs and vibration motors that illuminate in blue and vibrate each time your wallet is taken out, as well as a built-in GPS unit that warns you when you’re near a pre-preogrammed “vulnerable spending zone.”

Aside from curtailing your expensive bad habit, the iBag2 will also reminds you every two hours via yellow lights and small vibrations when it’s time to reapply sunscreen (you know, in case you’re shopping outdoors), and a Bluetooth tracker that pings your phone if the bag is a certain distance away from you.

The wearable prototype was created by Finder.com in collaboration with New York-based fashion designer Geova Rodrigues. Need a handbag that  knows when and where you’re likely to overspend? You can check out the iBag2 here.

The brainchild of Tomás de Camino Beck, Polymath Boxes are experimental sound boxes. Using a Genuino Uno and 101 along with some 3D printing, these units enable young Makers and adults to experiment with programming and math to produce noises and tunes, from square and triangular waves to sample players and interactive sound generators.

The boxes were originally conceived by Camino Beck as part of an open-source experimental art project with the goal of stimulating STEAM in education, from high school to college, and to allow artists, engineers and computer scientists, or pretty much anyone interested, to explore programming and digital fabrication. They were developed and fabricated in “Inventoria”–Costa Rica’s own idea of a Makerspace.

More than just a finished project, these boxes are designed to be hacked and to help move away from more conventional ways of thinking when it comes to sound.

These boxes use coding as a way to “write music,” and to take advantage of the diversity of physical low cost sensors to trigger sound. Some of the boxes play with basic waves, just creating basic  PWM, and others go from there to create arpeggiator and interactive. They will be used in several workshops and experimental music concerts in Costa Rica.

Today, we’re excited to announce the availability of the Genuino Starter Kits in both German and Spanish–now on our online store (outside of the US)! What’s more, you can take advantage of our ongoing promotion and save 10% on your kit throughout the entire month of July using the code below!

Each box consists of an Uno board, 150 components, and a Projects Book which provides step-by-step instructions for 15 different creations. Most of these projects also come with cardboard cutouts to make your projects even more fun.

The kit will help you control the physical world with sensor and actuators, as you make your way from the basics of electronics to more complex gadgets. Projects include musical instruments, a temperature-sensing Love-O-Meter, a spaceship interface panel, a motorized pinwheel, and a magic crystal ball that answers all your questions.

Get your Starter Kit in German >>
Get your Starter Kit in Spanish >>

For the first month, the German version of the Starter Kit is also exclusively on Watterott store, our board manufacturer!

As part of an electrical and electronic engineering course at Singapore Polytechnic, a group of students were challenged to build an aquatic vehicle that could collect samples from one and two meters underwater. After three months of hard work, the Imp Bot was brought to life!

Imp Bot is controlled by a mobile application made using the MIT App Inventor. Communication is achieved via a Bluetooth module hooked up to an Arduino Mega, while an onboard GPS sensor is used to log sampling locations in the app. Power is provided by a LiPo battery, which supplies high current to the two DC motors responsible for moving the 11-pound vessel around.

The sampler is actually a simplified Van Dorn Water Sampler, an ingenious method of water collection based upon elasticity and a quick-release mechanism. The main body of the vessel was initially made using laser-cut acrylic pieces assembled with PVC pipes, but the structure was too weak so they decided to use aluminium L-brackets instead.

Want to learn more? Check out the team’s video below, as well as read the story on one of the student’s blogs here. The code is also available on GitHub.

A few weeks ago, an announcement was posted on the Arduino Forum mentioning new improvements on the software side of the Arduino/Genuino 101. With this release, the board–which was developed in collaboration with Intel–is reaching its full potential, with not only better code generation but unlocking useful features to make your sketches even more interactive as well.

You can easily upgrade the core using the Arduino IDE’s Board Manager (pictured below), while Arduino Create users will be automatically updated, so no action is required–the cool thing about the cloud!

In more detail:

• The GCC compiler has been updated to support hardware extensions to the ARC EM core in the Intel® Curie™ module. This provides significant improvements in floating point operations, bit shifting, and other operations to enhance Sketch performance.

• The Arduino/Genuino 101 platform offers 2MB Flash storage onboard, which is now enabled for user sketches.

• An experimental driver has been implemented to enable the I2S interface via the CurieI2S library. Connecting the I2S bus to an external DAC (digital to analog converter) allows users to play high-quality music (HiFi).

Other improvements and bug fixes:

• Motion Sensor: Several sample sketches, like MotionDetection, have been implemented to demonstrate the application of the IMU data
• Bluetooth LE: Several new examples for BLE peripheral library added
• IMU: Correct motion detection setting implemented
• Library CurieTimerOne APIs are now compatible with the TimerOne library

For comprehensive release notes refer to the Intel Open Source Technology Center on GitHub.

Earlier today, Arduino co-founder David Cuartielles participated in DSI4EU’s policy workshop entitled “Shaping the Future of Digital Social Innovation in Europe,” which gathered digital social innovators and policy makers to inspire and connect with different networks. During the workshop, Cuartielles and other leaders demonstrated clear examples of digital social innovation throughout Europe, along with some best practices and hands-on tips.

How is Digital Social Innovation (DSI) connected with Maker Culture, you ask? DSI is a type of collaborative innovation in which users and communities collaborate with digital technologies to co-create knowledge and solutions for a wide range of social needs at a scale that was unimaginable before the rise of the Internet. The organizations and projects identified and mapped by DSI4EU can be grouped within six broad domains and projects like Arduino are empowering people to develop New Ways of Making thanks to open hardware and educational programs!

DSI4EU is a support action in the H2020 Collective Awareness Platforms program. The initiative will grow and scale the current Digital Social Innovation network of projects, organizations, and individuals bringing together social entrepreneurs, hackers, communities, and academics working on key DSI fields such as the Maker Movement, the collaborative economy, open democracy and digital rights. It’s fostering digital innovations for social good, helping communities share data, collaborate to solve societal problems, and scale their initiatives focusing on open and distributed technologies and new sustainable business models. Finally, it’s representing the building blocks for a new participatory innovation model for Europe, a more decentralised web and an inclusive and sustainable society, including a radical approach to scaling, extending and connecting the DSI network in Europe.