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The UK Maker Belt is always home to some of the very best events in the nation, and if you're local to the area or fancy travelling there's another entry to stick in your calendar: the Maker Assembly is coming to Sheffield this August. Following its launch in the V&A in London late last year and Maker Assembly Belfast in March, support for the event has been skyrocketing - and it's now coming to the UK Maker Belt for the first time. Scheduled for Wednesday the 31st of August at the Roco Creative Co-op, the event promises to bring together...

The openness of the Arduino platform is a major factor in its success. For dozen beginners' projects which simply wire a handful of components up to an Arduino Uno, there'll be someone who builds a board into the heart of something entirely new - or even builds an entirely novel Arduino-compatible, like Arachnid Labs' Tsunami. While the Tsunami fills a niche, the Evive is something different: an all-in-one experimentation and development platform, powered by an unmodified Arduino Mega microcontroller, designed to offer as much functionality as possible in the smallest form factor. Designed by student start-up company Agilo Technologies from...

The beauty of the Arduino platform is undeniably its accessibility: you don't have to have a background in electronics or circuit design to get started, and with many board models you can begin flashing an LED with absolutely zero additional components. After a certain point, though, knowing what's going on under the hood makes your life significantly easier - especially if you're moving on from pre-built Arduino boards and into the realm of self-built Arduino compatible circuits - and that's exactly why Yahya Tawil has written a comprehensive guide to the inner workings of the Arduino Uno. Yahya's write-up of...

Servos - highly-controllable motors which can be accurately positioned - are the backbone (or joints, at least) of both hobbyist and professional robotics. You'll find them in everything from useless machines and public art projects to CNC machines and laser-cut quadrupedal robots - not to mention the fantastic MeArm project. There's an undeniable gap, though, between the low-cost hobby servo we sell and the big, heavy, expensive metal things you're likely to find in industrial equipment. It's this gap Tropical Labs hopes to bridge with the Mechaduino, an open-source servo and controller board described as "an Arduino for mechatronics." Unlike...

Earlier this year we highlighted the Panasonic Grid-EYE thermal camera board, a low-cost - but admittedly extremely low-resolution - thermal imaging module compatible with the Arduino and other microcontroller platforms. While its £60 retail price is far below anything else on the market, for many projects it still represents the biggest bill of materials entry by far - and if you only need to measure the temperature of a single zone, it's overkill. Enter Konstantin Dimitrov, whose latest Instructable offers a single-zone alternative using the MLX90614 infrared contactless thermometer. Featuring instructions on using the bare sensor - a cheaper, thought...