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The Arduino platform is famous for many reasons, from its open source nature to its approachability and flexibility. It's also famous for another, less appealing, reason: an early design flaw which is often the cause of wailing and gnashing of teeth. For anyone who has worked with integrating Arduino hardware into PCB-based projects, two simple words are enough to trigger this reaction: offset header. It's immediately visible on inspection of the Arduino Uno, or any Arduino based on the same layout: while the majority of the headers are aligned to a 2.54mm (0.1") spacing, one header is offset on a...

For makers with an interest in robotics and mechanical engineering, there was always a way to fix them in their seats: put Robot Wars on the TV. Launched in 1998 on BBC Two, the show saw remote control robots constructed with one purpose in mind: destroying their opposition in a battle arena on the grounds of the former RAF Newton air base, using techniques ranging from flipping the rival robot over to slicing it into pieces with circular saws, axes, and pincers. Not for the faint of heart, but good clean robot-smashing fun all the same. Sadly, Robot Wars ceased...

The Arduino platform has found its way to powering projects ranging from flood monitoring systems, toys for toddlers, safety equipment, and advent calendars to taxi-calling buttons, capacitance meters, solder paste dispensers and reflow ovens, and even signal generators and analysers. Where it can really excel, though, is in offering the functionality of full scale industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems in a format accessible to the hobbyist - which is great news for model enthusiasts. The YouTube channel Arduino Lego Trains completed a ten-part video series on the use of an Arduino Mega to control a model train...

For many makers, the Arduino IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is the only way they interact with their Arduino boards. Sketches are written, compiled in, and uploaded from the Arduino IDE to the board, and no other tool is required or wanted. For others, though, there's a need for a less-manual approach than clicking on buttons, a requirement that led to the creation of the command-line arduino-builder tool first bundled with Arduino IDE 1.6.6. For developer Suz Hinton, though, there was a need for something else: a tool, written within the NodeJS framework with which she is most familiar, which would...

The maker movement is full of stories of makers turning their hobby into a commercial enterprise. In almost all cases, though, we're building on the shoulders of giants - and one of the earliest true 'open hardware' concerns had a very different beginning, coming as it did from the opposite direction: Olimex. Based in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Olimex was founded in 1991 as a business-to-business manufacturer of control boards for white goods. Rather than folding when local companies began outsourcing production to China, the company pivoted in a clever way and turned its existing manufacturing capacity to designing and building development...