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Audio software giant Ableton is best known for its Ableton Live music sequencer software, but the recent inclusion of Max for Live into the workflow opened up numerous possibilities for easily wiring Ableton Live into homebrew hardware - and not just music-related hardware, either. The company is now looking to make this process easier with the launch of the Max for Live Connection Kit, which includes ready-to-run 'devices' for connecting Ableton Live to Arduino boards, Lego Mindstorms EV3 kits, and more. Using the new Connection Kit, Ableton explains, it's possible to connect external hardware powered by Arduino and Arduino compatible...

Having lots of tools readily to hand is a great feeling for a maker, but it brings with it a major problem: organisation. Having dozens of screwdrivers, tweezers, components and you trusty soldering iron makes for a cluttered desk, which is why we're pleased to see Wim Van Gool publishing a stream of handy laser-cuttable organisational tools on Thingiverse. Designed to help tidy up the Belgian maker's own workspace, Wim's three published projects thus far all make use of 3mm laser-cut MDF - our material of choice - to help tame the clutter. While the surface-mount device spool holder is...

Nothing gives us more pleasure than seeing the ARDX Starter Kit for Arduino we released as open-source back in 2009 spread across the globe. From its use in Ugandan schools to its adoption by the National Museum of Computing for educational courses, the ARDX has been a great success - but not everyone is using it unmodified. The release of the ARDX kit - everything from the booklet of projects that comes with it to the circuit layout sheets which make building a project as simple as pushing components through paper - under a permissive open-source licence means that people...

Makers come from all walks of life, and while they're united by a common interest - making, in case that wasn't clear - the sheer breadth of knowledge and hobbies can be impressive to the uninitiated. A great example of this comes courtesy Petrache Valentin, who is currently working on a project to add intelligence to beehives using the new Genuino MKR1000. Using the Wi-Fi enabled Genuino MKR1000 - known as the Arduino MKR1000 in the US - Petrache has begun the process of measuring some of the metrics important to successful bee-keeping. A DHT22 sensor measures the temperature and...

Thermal cameras, which capture infra-red emissions and allow you to view the surface temperature of an object without ever touching it, are incredibly useful devices. They can come in handy for everything from tracking people and animals to diagnosing problems with electronic hardware, but there's one issue that has kept the technology out of the hands of makers: the price. Traditional thermal cameras have been far from cheap: you can expect to spend upwards of £500 on an entry-level model, rising rapidly to several thousand for a high-end industrial-grade device. Lower-cost options have appeared more recently, typically taking the form...