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Accessibility is often at the forefront of game designers' minds, but James Medd's latest project looks at accessibility from a different angle. Its name? Awkward Arcade. Developed over the past four months by James and an array of games designers, Awkward Arcade is to launch in Manchester's Northern Quarter on the 2nd of June. As the name suggests, the games aren't designed to be quite as accessible as mainstream titles. Perhaps the most interesting is Line Wobbler by Robin Baumgarten, an Arduino-powered one-dimensional dungeon crawler title played on a string of programmable LEDs and controlled by wobbling a door-stopper spring backwards...

Non-contact gesture recognition - the ability to work out what a hand is doing without ever physically touching anything - isn't a new concept, but it's one which is dropping in price all the time. Where implementations like Sony's Eye Toy and Microsoft's Kinect rely on clever image processing on camera inputs, capacitive systems offer similar capabilities for close-range interaction - but Nicolas Britos' latest build blows them out of the water in terms of value for money. Seeing capacitive non-contact gesture recognition hardware as too expensive, Nicolas has built a 3D gesture sensor using little more than an Arduino,...

The Genuino 101, known as the Arduino 101 in the US and designed to give makers easy access to Intel's latest Curie system-on-chip, is an impressive beast - but one which has also turned out to shy away from the bright lights of publicity, or any bright lights at all. The problem: a wafer-level chip included on the board for power management. Typically, integrated circuits are packaged in a hard-wearing and protective layer. Depending on the chip, this may be anything from ceramic or metal to simple plastic. Some chips, though, are built in such a way that the silicon...

The Arduino Nano is an incredibly useful board variant: it's breadboard-friendly, comes with extra analogue pins compared with the traditional Uno design, and compatibles are available at an incredibly low cost. There are times, though, when you need the good old Uno layout - oddly-spaced pin headers and all - and that's something Milen Penev aims to address with his latest creation: an Arduino Uno to Nano adapter board. Acting as a motherboard of sorts, Milen's open-source printed circuit design is simple: a row of pins in the rough centre of the board accepts the Arduino Nano, while the PCB...

We may have only just waved goodbye to Maker Faire UK 2016, but the preparations are already in full swing for Maker Faire Shenzhen 2016. For those who have never been, Shenzhen is the must-see destination for anyone with an interest in electronics, and the annual Maker Faire is the perfect time to see it. We're not alone in our love for the region: our Hua Qiang Bei System (HQBS) guide is a popular destination for anyone looking to prepare for a visit, while our friends at Seeed Studio have expressed their love for the area in a way that...