Nixie tubes have a lot of fans because of their retro style. They are neon valve tubes, where 10 cathodes shaped like numbers from 0 to 9 are switched on by plasma when high voltage flows through them. Patented in the 1930s by H.P. Boswau, they were wildly popular in the ‘60s and remained so until LEDs became cheaper to manufacture in the ‘70s. Many Makers today are creating vintage-look clocks using, now rare, Nixies bought on eBay with the help of an Arduino or Genuino Uno to control them.

In the video below, Jozsef Kovecses built a Nixie clock with NTP time syncronization using a Genuino Uno, a Geeetech IduinoShield, DS1307 RTC, DC-to-DC converter, and Nixie tube modules to drive the tubes directly.

The Arduino Project Hub (powered by Hackster.io) is a community dedicated to discovering how fun and rewarding tinkering with electronics and software can be, so any project made with Arduino and Genuino boards is welcome! Each day, the Arduino Team will select some of the best tutorials and highlight them on our social channels.

The Arduino Project Hub is also a great place to keep your latest projects and easily share them with your friends, students and the rest of the community!

If you have tutorials and articles on other platforms, we’ve got some good news! There is a cool import function so you can just paste the link and we’ll take care of the transfer. When you click on ‘New Project’ you will be presented with two options, create a tutorial from scratch or import one via URL.

Read this tutorial to learn more.

Most of the music we listen to comes from convenient streaming services distributing music of thousands of artists from all over the world.  But only a small amount of money actually reaches the artists you like. A team of student (Nicolas Armand, Inês Araújo, Mette Mørch, Monika Seyfried)  used a MKR1000  to implement a donation service during the Interaction Design Programme at CIID with the support of Massimo Banzi and Dario Buzzini:

We wanted to bring some awareness to this issue with our project. So, with this in mind we envisioned Fair Speaker, a speaker that allows you to donate money to artists while you listen to music.

Just plug in your device, and start listening. You then set how much you want to donate the artist, compared to how much the usual streaming services pay them. For instance, Spotify pays around 0.0003$/min to the artist. This means that for them to get 1$, you’d have to listen to their music for 55,5 hours. If you don’t think that’s fair, you can set your own rate.

The speaker keeps track of how long you’ve been listening and how much money you’re donating. The system is powered by a Genuino MKR-1000, which is also used to connect wirelessly to the PayPal API, used to send your donation.

When you’re done, just press Pay and the money is sent to the Fair Speaker service, that then distributes it to the artists you selected when signing up.

Enjoy your music. Be fair to the ones who made it.

Watch the Fair Speaker in action:

Sound Blocks is a tool to teach children and adults what sound is made of. The project was shortlisted in the Expression category of the IXDA Interaction Awards and it was developed by John Ferreira, Alejandra Molina, Andreas Refsgaard at the CIID using Arduino.

The device allows people to learn how, with a few parameters, it’s possible to create new sounds and, also, imitate real world sounds. Users can control waveform, sound decay or wave length and volume of three channels, all mixed together:

Sound blocks first and foremost was created as a tool to experiment with sound, it is playful and engaging.

Watch the video interview to discover more about the project and hear some noise:

Thinkers and makers at Handsome created an automated Foosball Scoreboard using an Android tablet and Arduino Mega 2560:

the Arduino is responsible only for detecting a) a goal scored and b) the gate in which it was scored. After a goal is detected the Arduino sends this data to Android tablet.

You can explore the details of the project on this blog, the sketch on Github, and watch the video below:

RuntimeProject made a tutorial to create a little cellular automata on a small 126×64 OLED using Arduino Nano.

He worked on one type of cellular automata, the Game of Life by John Conway, which has a grid of cells each having 2 states True or False/on or off/alive or dead. These cells are governed by 2 simple rules:

Rule 1: A cell which is dead and is surrounded by exactly 3 alive cells, will be born

Rule 2: A cell which is alive and has either 3 or 2 alive cells will remain alive, else it dies

The Arduino-based Cellular Automata works using 2 libraries the,  Adafruit GFX library  to handle all graphics and text displayed on the OLED;
Adafruit SSD1306 library which is the driver for the OLED.

You can read more info on how to make it on his blog and download the sketch on Github.

“Bees in the Backyard” is a citizen science technology project to investigate the nesting behavior of Mason bees, created by Mike Teachman, amateur bee enthusiast and Paul Perrault senior field applications engineer.

Mason bees are somewhat unique because, unlike honeybees, they are solitary, every female is fertile, there are no worker bees, they carry pollen on their bellies, they nest in holes and are vital to pollination of many fruit trees.

The idea behind the project was to turn each bee’s entire nest into a capacitive sensor with the use of off-the-shelf open source hardware like Arduino Uno:

Following the innovative work of the UPEI in using non-invasive capacitance sensors to detect bees entering and exiting a hive, we decided to extend this study to determine if we could measure not just a bee moving past an opening in a hive, but actually measure bee activity, along with a sense of their deliveries. This involved the invention of a new type of non-invasive sensor, along with the development of a measurement system that would be used to gather large amounts of data.

The plan for the team for 2016 is to improve the project deploying an improved monitoring system at the same site and in particular:
• Develop a new capacitance sensor tube with increased accuracy
• Improve the visual appeal of nesting block and associated electronics
• Develop algorithms to mine the measurement dataset for bee activity patterns

Watch other videos on this youtube channel and read more about the project on Spectrum IEEE.

Trojan 77 is a gamified simulation of the Trojan virus running on Arduino Uno. The Trojan is a malware designed to provide unauthorised remote access to a user’s computer amongst other harmful possibilities and this prototype was designed to be exhibited at a technology museum to show the most important effects the virus. Inspired by the tilting labyrinth game, the prototype simulates a few key effects of the Trojan virus like passwords leaking out, files being deleted and culminating in a system crash.

Trojan 77  was created by a team of Physical Computing students (Dhrux Saxena, Gunes Kantaroglu, Liliana Lambriev, Karan Chaitanya Mudgal) at CIID:

The idea of designing something analog to explain a digital construct was an exciting challenge to undertake. The way that computer viruses operate can be very complicated and hard to explain without overloading people with detailed information. Making this information visual via animated projections helped to communicate the effects in a fun and memorable way.

The Trojan moved through several prototyping stages. Initially, the wooden structure was built, followed by the maze. The structure as a whole became functional with the addition of Arduino and Processing. Two servo motors controlled by a joystick enabled the tilt while the movement of the ball triggered distinct light sensors which in turn triggered events in a Processing sketch mapped onto the maze.

The students created also a great video documentary  to explain the project with a style inspired by the work  of Charles and Ray Eames:

Macchina Poetica is a digital prototype converting sounds into onomatopoeic words and images and it’s inspired by the art of the Futurism movement.

Futurism is a modernist, avant-garde artistic movement originated in Italy in the early 20th century. Thanks to sound representation, Futurism artists aimed to emphasize speed, technology, youth and violence, all concepts arising from industrial innovations and war.

In order to keep continuity with this particular artistic movement, the authors, Alessandra Angelucci, Aris Dotti, Rebecca Guzzo, students at Master of Advanced Studies in Interaction Design SUPSI, decided to design an object that looks like the musical instrument of Futurism movement (precisely a Celesta). The object plays a metallic sounds and the user is facilitated in understanding how to use the object due to a instrument-like interface.

The machine is built using 4 piezo sensors, a thermal printer, a board, electrical cables, 4 resistors (1K), a 6 volt power supply and a Genuino Uno board.

The instrument’s interface is designed with plywood, metal plates and sponge that serves as a shock absorber. Between the metal plates and the sponge there are the piezo sensors along with resistors communicating with the Genuino Uno board every time the user interacts with the metallic plates. Once the Genuino receives the signal, it sends a command to the thermal printer that will print a word or a Futurism poem.

The interaction takes place when the user with the help of a metal tool (for example a screwdriver or a wrench) strikes the metal plates with different pressures. At the end of the performance the user and the viewers can have a clear overview of the produced sounds reviewing the printed paper outputs.

The prototype is the result of two weeks physical computing class Creating Tangible Interfaces held by Ubi De Feo at Maind program SUPSI  in Lugano, the goal of the course is how to make tangible interfaces via learning fundamentals of electronics prototyping and interaction design.  (Applications are open for the next edition 2016/2017 starting in September 2016)

Stellar is an interactive installation by sound artist Francesco Fabris, which aims to create a sonic representation of stars and constellations through a dedicated interface.

The project has been developed using two Arduino Uno, LeapMotion and Max7 software managing data of more than 300 stars and 44 constellations, stored from the open-source software Stellarium, and coded to interact with the robotic arms.

One Arduino Uno board controls four servo motors and a second one controls the led stripes. The motors are controlled with two LeapMotion but since LeapMotion doesn’t support two devices on one computer, he used two miniMac  connected through an Ethernet network.

Since there’s no sound in space, Francesco wanted  to conceptualize a link between electromagnetic and sound waves  to create a minimalistic, interactive device which would allow visitors to learn about specific stars through sound information:

The base of the system is a cylindrical structure, on top of which are displayed the most important constellations of the northern sky. Above this representation are two robotic arms. When the tip of one of the arms aligns with a star, information on the selected star is transformed into simple sine waves, changing the colour the star emanates.

Two players can use the system at the same time, by moving their right hands over the two black, circular sensors. This allows them to move the robotic arm both horizontally and vertically.
The data analyzed for each star are: temperature (color index: red star = old and cold, blue star = hot and young), brightness (as seen from Earth), distance (from Earth) respectively transformed into: frequency (Hz), amplitude (dB), duration (ms).
The colder the star, the lower the pitch; the brighter it appears to us from Earth, the louder the sound; the further from Earth, the longer the duration.
For example, a bright, red star four thousands light years from the Earth would generate a low frequency, loud and long sound. A blue star which is closer to the Earth would generate a high frequency, weaker and shorter sound.

The background drone-sound is white noise (which is a combination of all frequencies, the opposite of space-silence). When a constellation is triggered, the number representing its area (squared degrees), becomes the cutoff frequency of a low-pass filter for the noise signal. In this way, larger constellations will gradually increase their frequency.

Don’t miss the “Making of” video:

Stellar has been produced with the support of the DE.MO./MOVIN’UP I Session 2015 project, and promoted by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage & Activities & Tourism, General Directorate for Contemporary Art, Architecture and Urban Suburbs and GAI – Association for the Circuit of the Young Italian Artists.