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We've touched upon computer numeric control (CNC) projects in the past, looking at Eberhard Rensch's impressive Pleasant Flasher small-volume manufacturing and the low-cost Piccalo robot, but sometimes you're not looking for even the hint of practicality that comes from drawing doodles on a sticky note. Thankfully, Arvid Jense and Marie Caye have the answer: an Instructable guide for an Arduino-powered CNC Spirograph which draws edible patterns on biscuits. For those who have wanted to experiment with CNC but baulked at the cost: aside from an already-owned Arduino microcontroller and a broken hi-fi stereo which could be salvaged for parts, the...

While it's most common to see the Arduino used whole in people's projects, as an off-the-shelf means of driving or sensing something, the open-source nature of the project means that it can also be used to build something entirely new yet compatible. Nick Johnson, whose circuit pattern trading cards we've highlighted in the past, has done exactly that with the Tsunami: a signal generator, analyser, and experimentation kit designed with Arduino compatibility in mind. Based on the same processor as the Arduino Leonardo, the Tsunami boasts a Direct Digital Synthesis chip capable of generating analogue signals in a simple and...

The Arduino family is well-known for being flexible and welcoming to programming and electronics beginners, but there's one particular area where it gets sadly overlooked: audio. There's a belief that the eight-bit 16MHz nature of the microcontrollers that power mainstream Arduinos means that they simply aren't up to the task of doing anything complicated or clever with sound - a belief that Sam Brown has proved entirely wrong. Sam has published details of a guitar effects pedal he built using a bare ATmega328 microcontroller loaded with the Arduino bootloader - the equivalent of our Breadboard Arduino Compatible Kit - and...

It's now late enough in the year that we have finalised our event schedule, and that means it's time to issue an open invitation for you all to join us! As always, we're booked in to attend a fistful of Maker Faire and Mini Maker Faire events throughout the world and we'd absolutely love to see you there - so much so, in fact, that we're willing to bribe you. If you're a newcomer to Make Magazine's Maker Faires, and their community-organised Mini Maker Faire offshoots, you're in for a treat. For exhibitors, a Maker Faire is a chance to...

Here at oomlout we've long supported the idea that being a maker, in whatever field, is a great thing for adults and children alike. We've previously seen how soldering can be a form of therapy for children with emotional and behavioural difficulties, while Chris Leach's TinkerShed project shows how more forward-thinking schools are looking to bring electronics back into the curriculum. Now, charity Nesta - formerly the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts - is chiming in with a report that claims 82 per cent of young people surveyed are interested in 'digital making.' Those children are claimed...