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The Snap4Arduino project, which aims to make the Arduino platform more accessible to programming novices - including primary-school children - has released a new build, dubbed Snap4Arduino 1.1-beta, this week, and it brings with it considerable improvements including enhanced cross-platform support. Based on Snap, which is itself based on the popular Scratch, Snap4Arduino aims to make it as simple as possible for anyone to write Arduino sketches, even without any previous programming experience. Like Scratch, Snap allows you to simply drag-and-drop blocks which fit together like jigsaw pieces into a functioning program; where Snap improves on its predecessor is the...

The massive mainstream interest in 3D printing technology - a market flooded with companies ranging from multi-billion-pound industrial giants to hobbyist concerns like the RepRap project, and with Mattel's recent announcement even toy companies - there's a fair amount of confusion in the air. Chiefly, this concerns the ability to create 3D objects: many believe that a 3D printer is a requirement for this, but that's simply not true: while it operates on flat materials, the humble laser cutter is more than capable of producing some impressively three-dimensional structures. We've previously covered Aaron Porterfield's experiments with lattice hinges, a way...

If pushed to choose two things we particularly love out of all the world's possibilities, we'd probably go with laser cutters and home-made tools. When we can combine that into home-made laser-cut tools we're happy indeed, which is why Jack Davies' most recent project has us grinning from ear to ear: a homebrew spot welder encased in laser-cut wooden chassis. Created to weld tabs onto 18650 power cells, Jack's welder is designed to be as cheap as possible. The bulk of its innards come courtesy an old microwave, from which the transformer, limit switches, cables and power switch were salvaged....

The Arduino platform is well suited to building sensor networks, being low-power, low-cost, and beginner-friendly. For home or office use, there are plenty of connectivity options: Ethernet or Wi-Fi is easily added to an Arduino, as is Bluetooth; alternatively, short-range radio networks can be quickly assembled using unlicensed networks. What do you do when your sensors are out in the field, though? A common solution is to use GSM connectivity - the data side of a mobile phone network, basically - but this comes with ongoing costs. Our friend Andrew Back is currently working on an alternative for his corner...

There are plenty of shields and other add-ons which give an Arduino the ability to produce music, but all too often its built-in capabilities are ignored. Anyone who has written a sketch using the built-in tone() function will be all-too aware of its limitations and quite likely rapidly lost patience at transcribing songs by hand into its notation. The solution? Miduino. Built by Connor Nishijima as a user-friendly web-based transcriber for Len Shustek's Playtune library, Miduino makes adding music playback to an Arduino sketch as simple as possible. Just choose an ATmega-based Arduino model from the drop-down list, upload any...