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If you've never been to a Maker Faire, we'd recommend making it a new year's resolution. The events, which bring together everyone from hardcore hackers to making neophytes in celebration of the hobby we all love, are a great way to broaden your horizons, meet new people and - for companies like us as well as individuals - show off your latest creations. Next year's Maker Faire UK is taking place at the Life Science Centre in Newcastle on Saturday the 25th and Sunday the 26th of April, and while that might sound like you've got plenty of time the...

The flexibility of the Arduino platform means that it's a great tool to reach for in a pinch, as Martin Raynsford proved recently. Having left his son's Gro Clock - a visual alarm clock for children which uses colours to indicate when it's time to wake up - at a relative's and having found his son struggling to sleep without it, Martin knocked together an open hardware alternative based around an Arduino, an Adafruit NeoPixel ring and a real-time clock module. Like its commercial equivalent, the 'Sunshine Alarm Clock' acts as a dim blue night-light before triggering a 'sunrise' animation...

We've spent a lot of time of late focusing on builds that have a definite use-case: an altitude tracker for climbers; robots for gigapixel photography; build-it-yourself laser cutters; even injection moulding machines. Sometimes, though, a build should be undertaken for its own sake - as perfectly demonstrated by Ben Light's latest work-in-progress: The Slinky Machine. The perfect tool for those who enjoy oversized loose springs but who don't have easy access to stairs, the device does nothing but push the Slinky one way and then the other. In other words, it's a twist on the classic useless machine - and...

  Here at oomlout we always like to see what our customers do with the components they buy, and we're frequently rewarded with some very clever creations indeed. One such customer, Seppo Syrjänen, has been showing off his Arduino-based altitude data logger AsTra. Short for AScent TRAcker and built for Seppo's hobby of indoor climbing, AsTra's progress can be followed from its original bulky breadboard prototype based around an Arduino Uno and a barometric pressure sensor through to a polished final build using an Arduino Pro Mini in a customised case. As well as his build log, Seppo has kindly...

Crowd-funding has undeniably changed the nature of product development, allowing increasing numbers of would-be hardware makers to realise their visions and bring their designs out of the shed and into the market. It's not perfect, though, and the majority of existing sites cater exclusively to the consumer crowd who, naturally, expect a finished product for their money. Jason Kridner has written of his experiences with CircuitHub's latest feature: a tool which looks to better support the maker community by offering group-buy campaigns for assembled circuit boards. Jason's example is certainly convincing: an add-on board he has been working on and...