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The road from prototype knocked together in a shed or bedroom to a fully-functional commercial product is a long one, and one that rarely gets properly documented. While we've seen plenty of makers transition from breadboards to printed circuit boards, the final hurdles - preparing a design for mass production and dealing with regulatory requirements for commercial sale - are all-too-rarely seen by others. At least, until Matt Kachur came along. Matt has posted a detailed Imgur image album and matching reddit thread detailing the creation of the ViVi. First put together as a proof-of-concept design for having lights react...

When you think of computer numeric control (CNC) - if, indeed, you do at all - you likely think of entirely practical applications: mills, routers, laser cutters, 3D printers, and even homebrew projects like plastic injection moulding machines, pick-and-place machines, and even PCB manufacturing. Sometimes, though, CNC is used for fun: we've previously covered the Piccalo drawing robot and Arvid Jense's spirograph machine, and now there's a new one for the list in the form of Ioan Ghip's CNC Etch-A-Sketch. Built using a classic Arduino Duemilanove connected to a pair of stepper motors, Ioan's creation provides an interface between a...

One of the biggest barriers to the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the difficulty in building a wireless network of devices. In the consumer space Wi-Fi is the dominant standard, but its high power draw makes it unsuitable for long-running battery-powered remote sensor nodes. Alternatives like Bluetooth Low Energy and ZigBee draw less power, but bring their own problems to the table. Researchers at the University of Washington, though, believe they may have cracked the problem with a new Wi-Fi variant which draws as little as a ten-thousandth the power of today's equivalent. Dubbed Passive Wi-Fi, the...

We've previously seen how Arduinos can be used to breathe new life into otherwise outdated or damaged devices, such as Peter Edwards' Commodore 64 tape emulator or Jan Cumps' vintage turntable repair project, but Instructables user Brett Oliver's latest project is something very special indeed: a long-case Grandfather clock brought bang-up-to-date to micro-second accuracy. The latest in a string of projects from Brett, the base of the build is an empty long-case clock to which off-the-shelf movements were added with isolated stepper motors for Arduino control. A self-built Arduino Uno compatible provides the driving logic, though Brett indicates that a standard...

Designing your own circuit boards can be daunting for a new maker, but your effort is quickly rewarded. Whether you're etching your own circuit boards or printing them on a plotter, the ability to create even simple single- and double-sided circuits lets you condense an unwieldy collection of breadboards and wires into something neat and pocketable - like Francisco Zamora-Martinez' AlarDuino. The components in Francisco's AlarDuino, which is designed as a low-cost and customisable vehicle alarm, are simple: an accelerometer is used to detect sudden movement, which when triggered activates an external siren. Additional inputs in the form of a...