After an accident, Ethan Kadish was paralyzed. His friend, 14-year-old Jacob Smilg, came up with a simple device to help him communicate.

Several years ago, Kadish was struck by lightning, and lost control over his body. Communication with the world took the form of eye blinks for “yes” and “no,” which gave Smilg an idea for a revolutionary, Arduino Uno-based gadget that could help him communicate with people not familiar with this method.

It uses two pads, which Kadish can press with his head. When pressed, the device displays “yes” or “no” on a small LED screen. This allows him to have conversations in a more natural way, which, as seen in the video below around 4:00 it appears to make him very happy!

You can read more about the project on Make:, and keep up with Kadish’s story and progress on the Team Ethan blog. More pictures and videos can be found on Smilg’s Facebook page.

After recently meeting each another in Cologne, Simone Giertz and Laura Kampf decided to put their creative minds together to build a cartoon-inspired robot for Kampf’s dog, Smudo. The idea is fairly straightforward: a device that “makes a dog walk itself” by dangling a piece of sausage in front of their head.

The contraption consists of a lightweight, ergonomic aluminum harness that bends over Smudo, along with an Arduino Uno and a servo motor tasked with wiggling the hot dog around.

You can see how it works and hear more from the creators themselves the video below!

Starting a new project is always an effective way to hone your skills while exploring circuitry and programming. To help improve his engineering chops, Joop Brokking recently bought an inexpensive oscilloscope (a device for visualizing voltage over time in an x-y graph) and connected it to an Arduino Uno. He then shared his findings in a detailed tutorial on YouTube.

In the video below, Brokking is using a Hantek 6022BE 20MHz dual-channel oscilloscope and provides three examples to better understand what can go wrong when building a simple Arduino setup.

Les Boites Mécaniques are a set of four automated boxes that produce music out of wood and metal. These experimental instruments enable anyone to explore the magic of making sound by pressing buttons on a remote, which activate each respective device to vibrate, knock, and rub materials.

The boxes were developed by Kogumi‘s Anatole Buttin and Yan Godat for educational electronic music workshops, and can be played either solo or in unison. There’s even a mode that allows users to control it all via MIDI notes on a computer.

In terms of hardware, each box is equipped with an Arduino Uno, a TLC59711 LED driver, step motors with AccelStepper library and a 3D-printed microstep driver.

You can watch how it all comes together to create a unique sound below!

With All Hallow’s Eve looming close, makers have the potential to create some amazing costumes we’ll remember for the rest of the year. If you’re a fan of the hugely addict-*cough* popular game Minecraft, perhaps you’ve considered cosplaying as your favorite character skin, but lacked the appropriate props. [Graham Kitteridge] and his friends have decided to pay homage to the game by making their own light-up Minecraft swords.

These swords use 3D-printed and laser-cut parts, designed so as to hide the electronics for the lights and range finder in the hilt. Range finder? Oh, yes, the sword uses an Arduino Uno-based board to support NewPixels LEDs and a 433Mhz radio transmitter and receiver for ranged detection of other nearby swords that — when they are detected — will trigger the sword to glow. Kind of like the sword Sting, but for friendlies.

All of the files for the parts are available on the project’s Thingverse page and the board setup can be purchased here. If you want to have some fun controlling the real world from inside Minecraft, check out how this fan uses it to turn on lamps in their home.

Last year, we featured an awesome audiovisual project from ANGLE that applied videomapping techniques to their livesets. Now, the Florence-based duo is back with their latest A/V system, “Shining Back,” which was designed in collaboration with JoinT Studio’s Stefano Bonifazi.

Essentially, it’s a grid structure consisting of LED lights that pulse in a geometric matrix to the duo’s live rhythms. The installation runs on an Arduino Uno and uses Mad Mapper and Modul8 software.

The immersive atmosphere created by the music is emphasized by a new research in the visual realm. Taking an architectural form of a kaleidoscope the lighting visually weaves and refracts the music into a surreal yet symbiotic form.

Last year, we featured an awesome audiovisual project from ANGLE that applied videomapping techniques to their livesets. Now, the Florence-based duo is back with their latest A/V system, “Shining Back,” which was designed in collaboration with JoinT Studio’s Stefano Bonifazi.

Essentially, it’s a grid structure consisting of LED lights that pulse in a geometric matrix to the duo’s live rhythms. The installation runs on an Arduino Uno and uses Mad Mapper and Modul8 software.

The immersive atmosphere created by the music is emphasized by a new research in the visual realm. Taking an architectural form of a kaleidoscope the lighting visually weaves and refracts the music into a surreal yet symbiotic form.

For his latest project, Dmitry Morozov (aka ::vtol::) has created a robotic machine that uses a microphone to record sounds from its surrounding environment, selecting only the loudest ones. Then, the aptly named “Collector” pieces these noises together in the order they were recorded to form an algorithmic  composition.

First, the Collector records the sounds until it has gathered 100 samples. From there, it plays the result as a loop through a pair of speakers for one minute, so they can be heard by those nearby. While this mode, the recording stops. After that, it erases everything and begins a new search.

The Collector is also equipped with an Arduino Uno for a brain, a servo motor for rotating the mic, and a flashlight to show detected sounds or indicate the sounds during playback mode.

It is a kind of reality re-mixer–by simply removing the silence and pauses between loud sounds and words, it creates the sense of very rhythmical and organized aural experience, which sounds very musical to me.

Intrigued? You can read more and see other photos of the project on its page here.

Using an Arduino and 1Sheeld, Integreight embedded engineer Eslam Ali set his office clock up to preview the traffic going home.

If you work in a traffic-prone area, there’s always a debate at to whether you should go home at the normal time or wait a few minutes to leave and avoid the traffic. To help make that decision, Ali likes to check the traffic before heading out. This might be fairly simply using a computer or smartphone, but doing so autonomously would be even better.

In a clever feat of automation, he embedded 12 RGB LEDs in a simple IKEA clock. These were then controlled by an Arduino Uno, using a 1Sheeld device to access the Internet through his smartphone. If traffic is bad, it displays as red, then blinks green when it’s time to go! A clever application in itself, something like this could be expanded for numerous uses, perhaps even involving animated lights.

Whenever it’s time to get off the office, I always check the traffic status to choose the best time to go home. But I couldn’t find a way to do that autonomously. So then…I was up to make a system that shows me the current traffic status with the help of a simple tool that is used probably in all the offices, a wall clock

In addition to the video below, you can see how to make one on 1Sheeld’s site or check out the discussion about this build on Reddit.

As any cat owner can tell you, our feline friends love chasing the uncatchable dot of a laser pointer. Unfortunately, though, there is only so much time in the day that you can spend playing with them and catering to their natural instincts… so why not automate the process?

This is exactly what La Fabrique DIY decided to do using an Arduino Uno, two servos, a pan/tilt camera mount, and an Altoids tin to house the electronics. With some programming, the tower moves the laser “pseudo-randomly” to mimic the behavior of an insect.

So if you, like La Fabrique DIY, have a cat in a small apartment with not much room to hunt, head over to the project’s Imgur page to start building a distraction device for yourself!