News

We're big believers in the open source ethos here at oomlout, and as a result little makes us happier than when we see someone using something we've designed. You can imagine our delight, then, when the resistor cutting robot (RECO) we designed back in 2010 appeared on the Cooking Hacks blog. Created based on our open source design by Pablo Murillo, the robot is designed to easily cut set lengths of resistors from their packing tape strips without needing to sit with a pair of scissors and manually count how many should be in each bundle. The brain of the...

The flexibility of the Arduino platform makes it an ideal drop-in replacement for any number of out-of-production control and sensing systems, which in turn makes an Arduino or two a must-have in the toolbox of any engineer. A great example of this can be found in a project write-up from Jan Cumps on the business-to-business component supplier Element14's design challenge blog: using an Arduino Uno to replace the motor control and speed-monitoring circuitry of a vinyl turntable from 1958 - decades before the Arduino project was even a glimmer in its creators' collective eye. While Jan focuses heavily on the...

The Arduino is a powerful microcontroller, and one for which there is plenty of room for expansion to support more complicated projects. Add-on boards, known as Shields, are available for everything from logging data to SD cards to connecting to a network, but sometimes it's possible to dramatically expand the capabilities of a standard Arduino board with a minimum of components. In possibly the best example of this, maker Damian Peckett has posted instructions on harnessing the power of the ATmega16u2 secondary processor found on the Arduino Uno Rev 3 to generate a video signal for connection to any monitor...

While the Arduino microcontroller is most commonly thought of as a tool for hobbyists and students, its flexibility lends itself well to more commercial projects as well. We use several Arduino-based devices to make our shop run more smoothly, and we're not alone: Malaysian Arduino enthusiast Ching Siew Meng has built an electronic queuing system for a local clinic at a fraction of the cost of an off-the-shelf equivalent. As shown in the Instructable tutorial, the system uses two breadboard Arduino compatibles, similar to our own BBAC: one acts as a sender, taking the number of the required patient from...

For the electronics enthusiast, an oscilloscope - which turns readings over time into a handy waveform graph, allowing you to see exactly what's happening with a given circuit or component in ways that a multimeter cannot - is a great tool, but one very few can justify. Even the cheapest modern bench-top digital oscilloscope can cost three figures, putting them out of reach of many hobbyists. One solution is to join your local hackspace, where an oscilloscope is bound to be present; another option is to build your own, as Martin Vaupell has demonstrated over on business-to-business electronics supplier Element...