News

The traditional Arduino board design, as found on the Uno and variants, lends itself well to experimentation - especially when coupled with our Arduino Prototyping Bundle (ARDP), which combines an adhesive solderless breadboard with a custom-cut acrylic backing plate to keep everything neat and tidy - but it can sometimes be awkward to mount in a finished device. Thanks to Thingiverse user stkoenig, things are now easier for those building certain classes of devices via a clever V-Slot mount adapter. OpenBuilds' V-Slot is a clever modular aluminium rail system which is commonly used when building devices with moving parts such...

Toys for toddlers haven't changed a great deal over the years. Activity boards, like those produced by Fisher-Price, continue to prove popular - but few commercially-made variants are as impressive as this Arduino-powered project from Kevin Jordan, built as a gift for his young niece. Like the mechanical activity boards of old, Kevin's board is designed to encourage experimentation and reward hand-eye coordination. Unlike mechanical activity boards, it's powered by an Arduino microcontroller and built from spare parts he had lying around: a set of interlocking gears, some arcade-style buttons, a kick-switch, break-beam sensor, distance sensor, fan, and even an...

With a low power draw and beginner-friendly libraries, it's never a surprise to see the Arduino microcontrollers used in wearable electronics projects. What is sometimes a surprise is to see an Arduino used in potentially life-saving applications, and Robert Thomas' excellent Arduino-controlled firefighter's helmet has new competition in the form of Antonis Damigos and Marianna Miliori's Smart Working Helmet. Based around a Lilypad, a wearable-centric Arduino board, Antonis and Marianna's creation concentrates on detecting three different risk factors to which the wearer may be exposed: excessive noise, excessive temperatures, and excessive levels of flammable gas. Designed primarily with miners in...

If you've got a bit of spare time on your hands this Christmas, you may be interested to know that how-to site Instructables is running an Arduino-themed contest with some great prizes - including Arduino boards, touch-screen displays, tablets, and a 3D printer. Running alongside Hackster.io's Arduino Maker Challenge, the Instructables Arduino All The Things contest is extremely open in its brief: build something interesting, whether it's a useful tool or a ridiculous toy, using any microcontroller - not just Arduinos - and you stand a chance of winning one of the great prizes on offer. Like Instructables' other competitions,...

If you're going to be around the Milton Keynes and Bletchley area this Christmas, you may want to take advantage of a pair of Arduino workshops being run by our friends from The National Museum of Computing (TNMOC) at historic Bletchley Park, home of the war-time codebreakers. Scheduled for the 21st of December and again on the 28th of December, the workshops are based around our popular open-source Starter Kit for Arduino (ARDX) which include the components and documentation needed to build eleven different circuits ranging from a simple flashing LED to controlling a motor. These kits normally cost £62,...