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It's easy to get jaded by the sheer number of 'me-too' Arduino variant designs out there, but once in a while something comes along that is entirely novel - like these Arduino Uno compatible 'boards' built from glass by Ammy Olofsson. While it's not unusual to see glass fibre being used as the basis for a circuit board, Ammy's creations - created as part of her Masters Degree graduate project, "Growing Computers, Connecting Bodies, Cutting the Cord," for the Kinstfack College of Arts, Crafts, and Design - are something else entirely. The 'board' is a three-dimensional structure built from glass,...

The growth of small order, affordable PCB production houses has led a to a definite drop in people building their own printed circuit boards from scratch - but for those determined to build something entirely homebrew, nothing beats the bubble of the etchant and first successful solder joint on an entirely hand-made board. If you're curious as to how to make your own circuit boards without relying on an external production house, Chris Holden is currently running a series of interesting step-by-step posts on the Nerd Club blog. Starting from design and working through transfer to a blank board, chemical...

There's a frequently-seen misconception in electronics: that eight-bit microcontrollers, like the majority of the Arduino family, can't be used to drive higher-resolution, full-colour displays. For projects where anything other than a simple, low-resolution display is required, the recommendation is often to use a 32-bit microprocessor instead - but, as Educa8s' Nick Koumaris demonstrates that's not always necessary. Nick, who we last wrote about following his experiments into long-life battery power for Arduino projects, has published a video demonstrating the use of the ST7735 colour LCD display with a low-cost Arduino Nano, using it to build a digital photo frame -...

The microcontroller market is flooded with Arduino variants these days, ranging from direct clones to devices for specific purposes such as writing and playing games or controlling a drone. The Uniti Arc, though, is the firs Arduino compatible we've come across designed to drive three-phase electric motors in full-size vehicles. Built to resemble and include the basic feature set of the popular Arduino Uno, the Uniti Arc is powered by an Atmel ATmega64M1 microcontroller and is claimed to be entirely compatible with and programmable from the Arduino IDE. Where it differs from its inspiration is in its vehicle-specific features: a...

A number of Arduino fans are currently experimenting with an interesting quirk of the platform: the ability to detect motion with nothing more than a twisted length of wire inserted into an analogue pin and a ground pin. Motion detection is handy in a variety of projects, and there are a number of ways to do it: you can use passive infra-red sensors, webcams linked to computer vision tools, or even affordable thermal sensors. Few, however, are as cheap as a length of wire - but this particular phenomenon, brought to our attention by Hackaday, is notable for more than...