News

Poet John Godfrey Saxe was once quoted as saying that "laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made." While tubular meat products and the legal system may be off-limits for those who like to sleep at night the same can't be said of alcoholic beverages. There should be little surprise to find that the exacting science of brewing beer attracts many makers, and for those who are interested in the topic there's a rare treat on offer: Ryan Pierce is running a series walking through the creation of a computer-controlled brewing system...

The Arduino platform is probably not the first to come to mind for projects involving 3D animation, thanks to its focus on real-time control and sensing. While that leaves many looking for alternatives, for others it proves a challenge: is it really possible to squeeze a functional 3D engine into the Arduino Uno, with its 2KB of RAM and 16MHz clock speed? Michael Rule is one of those who took up the challenge, and a hundred hours after beginning his project he has an answer: yes. Having found existing projects designed to use a low-cost colour liquid-crystal display (LCD) shield...

It's been a little wet here in the UK Maker Belt of late, and the news that another storm is on the way is hardly welcomed - but does make for a fantastic opportunity to shine a light on some projects which aim to offer early warning of impending floods, preventing home and business owners from being caught on the hop and offering more time for evacuation or the construction of temporary defences. One of the biggest citizen-scientist flood warning projects in the UK is that of our friends at Flood Network, who use Arduino-compatible hardware with an ultrasonic distance...

Since the launch of Windows 10, the first operating system to receive Arduino certification, there's been a surprising lack of devices built to target the maker market. That, however, looks set to change thanks to the staggering success of a new crowd-funded single-board computer: the LattePanda. Designed as a fully-functional Windows 10 PC, the LattePanda is of particular interest to makers and tinkerers thanks to an embedded Atmel ATmega32u4 microprocessor loaded with an Arduino-compatible bootloader. Running alongside the device's main Intel Atom processor, which boasts four 64-bit x86 processing cores, this chip allows the LattePanda to run Arduino sketches without...

Here's wishing all our friends, customers, and readers a very makery Christmas and a hacky New Year, from all of us at oomlout! Whatever your plans are, have fun - and if you build something exciting, be sure to let us know!