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Apple's infamous "there's an app for that" marketing campaign for the iPhone may have been something of an exaggeration in its claims to solve all the world's ills, but with the popularity of smartphones showing no real decline it's fair to say they're an interesting target for development. A fully-functional PC in your pocket featuring a high-resolution full-colour display and internet connectivity, smartphones are often underutilised in embedded projects - something Pasha Baiborodin's Blynk aims to solve. Currently half-way through a Kickstarter crowd-funding process with more than double its $10,000 goal, Blynk looks to add drag-and-drop Arduino sketch development to...

Even among makers, there's a surprising belief in the gulf between hobbyist manufacturing and a professional product. While it's true that there is a jump to be made between a breadboarded one-off and a shiny printed circuit board, it's not as big a leap as some would have you believe. Our friend Sandy Noble proves that admirably in his write-up of the manufacture of his PolargraphSD. While the PCB is professionally printed at low cost, the assembly is done completely in-house using readily-available and very cheap parts and accessories. Everything from spreading the solder paste to placing the surface-mount components...

Membrane keypads aren't the most comfortable to type on for extended periods, as any fan of the classic Sinclair ZX80 or ZX81 microcomputers will admit, but they have the advantages of being cheap and relatively robust. They're also surprisingly simple to build, as demonstrated by Paul Bleisch who is currently working on repairing his son's toy but required some means of input. As an off-the-shelf membrane keypad lacked the markings he wanted and a custom-printed keypad would be prohibitively expensive, Paul built his own using nothing more than card, adhesive copper tape, and a printer. Jumper wires are used to...

While we focus a lot on the benefits Arduino and other open hardware projects bring to the hobbyist, there's a market which can benefit even more from the ethos: education. Joshua Pearce, the lettered director of the Open Sustainability Technology Research Group at Michigan Tech University, has written over on our friends SparkFun's blog about how the Arduino project is benefiting school science labs operating under ever-smaller budgets. Aside from the obvious low cost and inherent educational flexibility of Arduino-based lab kits like our own ARDX Starter Kit for Arduino, Joshua argues - correctly, in our view - that the...

Although buying a pre-built LED matrix is quick and easy, you can learn a lot by building your own - as Alex Bowen knows, having completed exactly such a project for a microcomputer circuits class he is taking. His LED matrix project, brought to our attention via Hackaday, uses an 8x16 grid for a total of 128 LEDs, all inserted into a sheet of perfboard. The driving logic is, naturally, running on an Arduino Uno, expanded using a pair of 74193 counter integrated circuits (ICs). This means only three pins on the Arduino are tied up, leaving the rest free...