Hey look, an Arduino without its clothes on. This one’s just started its journey to becoming the ubiquitous prototyping tool. The image is from [Bunnie's] recent tour of the fab house where Arduino boards are made.

As it says on every true Arduino board, they’re made in Italy. [Bunnie's] trip to the factory happened in Scarmagno, on the outskirts of Torino. The process starts with large sheets of FR4 copper clad material, usually about 1 by 1.5 meters in size. The first task is to send the sheets through a CNC drill. With all of the holes done it’s time for some etch resist; the image above is just after the resist has been applied. A robotic system takes over from here, running the panels through the chemicals which first etch away the copper, then remove the resist and plate the remaining traces. From there it’s off to another machine for solder mask and silk screen.

There are videos of each step available. But our favorite piece is the image at the end that shows a pallet with stacks of completed PCB panels which are headed off to be populated with components.

[via Reddit]

If you connect led in the opposit way he can act as light sensor:

positive leg to analog pin

negative leg to 5V

You can use that for some things, but he not sensetive as LDR,

ןf you use a for example a green led he not "see" well red light

If you use charlieplexing method you can control one led to light and as a light sensor.

The idea is like this:

Two wires connect the led to two analog pins.

To light the led you set the two analog pins as digital output and one high one low. 

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Hi

I tried to build a photovore using and arduino and tested it via usb cable,so far so good the system worked as intended as soon as i plug my battery via the dc connector the servo worked but extremly slow why?

Toy vehicles from plastic bottles are pretty cool. Add an Arduino, solar panel, batteries, ultrasonic range finding, a few servos, some beefier tires, and you’ll have something like Fijibot, an autonomous, self-charging robot built by Mike Soniat.

Bunnie Huang recently toured the Arduino production facilities and wrote a great post about what he saw (with lots of photos!):

Arduinos are made in Scarmagno, Italy, a small town near the Olivetti factories on the outskirts of Torino. All of the circuit board fabrication, board stuffing and distribution is handled out of that small town. I was really excited to see the factories, and I’d like to share some photos of them with you.

Planning another Arduino build? If you’re just doing something simple like switching a relay or powering a LED, you might want to think about the Digispark. It’s a very small ATtiny-based Arduino compatible board developed and Kickstarted by [Erik].

The Digispark is based on the very popular Atmel ATtiny85, an 8 pin microcontroller that provides a quarter of the Flash storage and RAM as the ‘official Arduino’ ATMega328p. The lower storage space and RAM doesn’t mean the ’85 is a slouch, though; it can run Arduino code without a hitch, providing six pins for whatever small project you have in mind.

Right now, [Erik]‘s Kickstarter is offering three Digisparks for the price of a single Arduino. At that price, it’s cheap enough to leave in a project and not be repurposed after the build is over. [Erik] is also working on a few shields for the Digispark – only RGB LED shield for now, but hopefully he’ll get some more finished by the time the Kickstarter ends.

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Still lots to do, but I finally got this guy printed and assembled. He has 3DOF per leg using cheap 9g servos :( I'm using Inverse kinematics for his movement. I just started programming him and got the IK working for one leg. The ping((( is just stuck in the mega2560 for now. I'll be adding a tilt/pan head when I get more servos, and the wiring needs some cleaning up :p I just found out about LMR last week and so far it's awesome! Hopefully by the end of next weekend I'll have some walk sequence video to show off.

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Hey guys, its me again.
This is the third project I submit here.
Vacuuminator is a (obviously) vacuum cleaning robot. It is quite similar to a roomba. I have this problem about not buying robots if I can build one. As you would expect from a guy like me (and you) I don't clean much. I needed something to do that for me.

Therefore, I built vacuuminator (and made him clean the mess I've made while building it.)

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In addition to being a great replacement for that aging eye patch, these specs act as a light switch. By watching your eyelids, they are able to kill the lights whenever you blink.

The installation is a shared experience piece conceived by [Michal Kohút]. He wanted to illustrate the constant blinking we all do but rarely think about. The system uses an Arduino to capture events from the blink sensors and switch the lights accordingly. This way the wearer doesn’t experience a loss of illumination, but the observer does. Check out the video after the break for a quick demonstration.

One of the commenters from the source article shared a video link to another blink-based light project. That one uses electrodes attached to skin around your eye in order to detect eyelid motion.

[via Reddit]

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Hi there LMR, here is another one of our projects, as promised. :)
This is Xylomatron. It is a robot that you can play a game similar to "Simon Says" but with a xylophone interface. Basically, it does play a note and expect you to repeat it, if you succeed it adds another note to the previous sequence and expect you to do the same. Therefore the game gets harder at each level, depending on your memory.
When you fail, it gets quite angry thinking "The puny human couldn't memorize X notes" (it does really trace it in fact :D)

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