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For many budding digital artists, there are considerable barriers between their hobby and a potential career or business. It can be hard to know where to start, how to get advice and guidance, to find somewhere suitable for building larger projects, and that's before even considering the financial barriers to working on projects full-time. For those within easy commuting distance to Manchester, though, there's a new programme that should be of considerable interest: Arts+Tech. An accelerator run by the excellent MadLab and sponsored by the Arts Council England and Innovate UK, Arts+Tech does exactly what the name suggests: offers support...

We've seen numerous tools built on the Arduino platform or the Atmel ATmega microcontrollers that power the most popular models over the years, from SMT soldering paste dispensers, reflow ovens, and oscilloscopes to more specialist tools like a photographic flash tester, ham radio antenna analyser, and Arachnid Labs excellent Tsunami. A project launched late last week on Kickstarter looks to add another to the growing list: a tool for measuring the capacitance and leakage current of any type of capacitor. Capacitors are a commonly-used component in electronics: put simply, they act as a kind of buffer for electricity. Larger capacitors...

There's an undeniable intersection between makers and artists, and nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of circuit-bending. An electronic artistic movement, circuit-bending involves taking existing electronic equipment designed to produce sound, movement or visuals, and deliberately corrupting it to produce something new. There are offshoots of this movement all around, ranging from glitch-art produced from corrupted JPEG images to demonic-sounding Furbies - but console-bending is possibly the most interesting of them all. Multimedia artist Nathan Shaw, also known as BiTDEPH, has spent the last couple of years working on a project which interfaces an Arduino microcontroller with...

We've spoken before about our love of projects that take the Arduino concept and tailor it for a particular task, and during our regular browse of popular crowd-funding sites we came across another great example: the Goldilocks Analogue. The creation of Phillip Stevens, the Goldilocks Analogue appears at first glance to be another Arduino Uno clone: it's the same form-factor, and features the same full-size headers with that iconic 'Arduino gap.' A closer look, though, reveals some extra parts not normally featured on an Arduino Uno or compatible: there's a four-pole 3.4mm jack at the top-left of the board and...

When it comes to tools, you'll rarely find any group as innovative as the maker community. With many makers operating on a tight budget, industrial-grade equipment is often inaccessible - but that doesn't stop those with an experimental bent. A great example was published this morning by Thingiverse user Zapta: an Arduino-compatible motorised solder paste dispenser. For the hobbyist, the jump from through-hole technology (THT) to surface-mount technology (SMT) components can seem insurmountable: no sooner have you got the hang of soldering sticking-out pins and suddenly components require you to solder them directly onto a flat surface. While entirely possible...