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A major benefit of microcontrollers like the ATmega328 featured in the Arduino Uno when compared with microprocessors is that they are capable of operating under some very low-power conditions. Just how low-power is up for debate, but Nikolaos-Sotirios Koumaris has put considerable effort in to working out just how far you can go. As brought to our attention by Hackaday, Nick has produced an Arduino circuit which uses a temperature sensor and Nokia 5110 liquid-crystal display to show the current temperature of its surroundings. Unlike most similar projects Nick has worked to draw the power usage down to a bare...

A lathe, one of the most common workshop machines, is traditionally a means of removing material from a rotating cylinder to create a new object. A team of students at Imperial College London recently turned that concept on its head, however, building a lathe which added material to a rotating cylinder - creating what they describe as an Ardino Mega-powered "lathe-type 3D printer." While a traditional 3D printer operates in Cartesian, rectangular space, the lathe-type printer created by Alexandros Kenich, Matthieu Burnand-Galpin, Erwan Rolland and Youssef Ibrahim operates cylindrically. The result, the team found, was a device which for cylindrical...

When you're getting started with electronics, it's easy to buy a kit like our ARDX and put together a few circuits; it's somewhat harder to get a really low-level understanding of exactly what's happening within that circuit. If your aim is to truly understand electronics, rather than simply to build something, the shopping list grows: multimeter, oscilloscope, logic probe, and more. There is, thankfully for those with limited budgets and even more limited workspaces, an alternative: circuit simulation. Our friend Iain Sharp of Lush Projects, a fellow UK Maker Belt Association member, has been working on just such a simulator...

MAVIS may seem like an odd name for an electronics project, but the backronym works: it's the Musically Articulated Visual Illustration System, a project created by Fieldwork for the Science of Play at the Design Manchester event. As the name suggests, MAVIS is a blend of audible and visual feedback, housed inside neat-looking device which is part plotter and part organ. Powered by an Arduino - which is secured to the ARDX acrylic plate we designed in conjunction with MadLab, as found in our Arduino Prototyping Bundle - and a small computer, MAVIS is designed to encourage teamwork: one player...

We're always thrilled when people love the things we make, and doubly so when it's our open-source Arduino starter kit: the Arduino Experimentation Kit (ARDX). When we published the kit under an open-source licence, we hoped that its novel use of beginner-friendly breadboard layout sheets would see it spread throughout the world - and we've been pleased to see exactly that happen. Recently, James Lewis - the chap behind the Baldengineer Blog and AddOhms video tutorials - had a look at our kit, comparing it to three alternatives: the Maker Shed Arduino Kit, littleBits Arduino Coding Kit, and the Arduino.cc...