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  If you're around the Halifax area this weekend, or within reasonable travel distance, you owe it to yourself to head to the Halifax Mini Maker Faire - one of the four events we're exhibiting at this year. Last year's event was a blast, and there's no reason to assume that the hosts - Eureka, the national children's museum - will do any less of a job this time around. We'll be there showing off everything from our ARDX Starter Kits for Arduino to the OOpen Building Block System, as well as giving out our exclusive bespoke laser-cut keyrings. We'll...

When we released the ARDX Starter Kit for Arduino, known at the time as the Arduino Experimenters' Kit, back in 2009 under a permissive, open-source licence - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike - we did so hoping that it would help to improve electronics education, both self-directed and structured, throughout the world. By removing the usual barriers to widespread dissemination - the requirement to buy a physical product from an approved retailer and copyright restrictions on sharing or modifying the documentation and projects - and allowing users to modify, tweak and tailor the kit to their own requirements, we were sure we'd...

The Arduino project has inspired uncountable makers throughout the world, powering everything from robots to games machines. To highlight some of the projects that have been born of Arduino technology we've asked roving reporter Gareth Halfacree to seek out some of these creations and talk to the people behind the build to get their stories. If you have a story to tell, contact Gareth and he'd be thrilled to chat to you too. Sheffield-based developer Matt Brailsford is no stranger to the maker scene. "Having started a maker space in Barnsley just over a year ago - Barnsley.IO - I've...

The Arduino's ability to communicate with other devices over various serial protocols makes it easy to add various networking facilities to your projects, but these often don't come cheap - in particular when you're talking about GSM mobile connectivity, although prices have dropped considerably in recent years. Charles Pax of Pax Instruments has an eco-friendly solution: building an extremely low-cost Arduino Shield which will allow an old Nokia 3100 feature-phone - a common sight in second-hand markets and recycling centres - to be connected directly to an Arduino using its standard 'pop-port' and stock USB cable. Using existing documentation on...

Our good friends at fellow UK Maker Belt company Ground Electronics have partnered up with our other good friends at bespoke circuit design house Boldport to run a competition, and you've got until Friday to get your hands on some rather special prizes. For those unfamiliar with Boldport's work, the company is best known for its stunningly attractive circuit designs which are created using a clever piece of open-source software called PCBmodE. Not content with simple flowing lines and graphical solder points, Boldport's Saar Drimer recently completed work on multicolour PCBs to up the aesthetic factor still further. Ground Electronics' competition...