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When making the move from prototype to production, there can be an awkward valley to overcome: making ten of something is easily done by hand while making 100,000 of something justifies the expense of a commercial-grade machine or service, but what is a maker to do when he or she only needs 500 or so? The obvious choice is to trawl the marketplaces for fifth- or sixth-hand outdated machinery, but Brian Dorey opted for something a little trickier: hand-building a custom soldering robot to help produce his through-hole technology (THT) circuit boards. Brought to our attention via Hackaday, the machine...

Massimo Banzi, co-founder of the Arduino project, has made a surprise announcement at the Microsoft Build conference: Windows 10 is to be become the world's first Arduino-certified operating system. While the Arduino platform itself is open-source and platform-agnostic, Banzi's company Arduino LLC has been entering into a number of partnerships for everything from third-party Arduino-compatible microcontrollers (the Intel Edison and Galileo boards, as an example) to 3D printers. Its latest deal with software giant Microsoft will find the company's next-generation Windows 10 operating system, due to launch this summer, receive formal Arduino certification, including some handy integration with the company's...

The Arduino works great as a standalone microcontroller, using its ATmega chip to do everything from complex calculations to simple sensor reads, but its capabilities can be considerably extended by connecting it up to a computer. The problem then lies in how to program the computer, naturally considerably more complex than the Arduino, to do what you need - and that's a problem Paul McWhorter aims to solve with a great selection of free lessons designed to walk you through using an Arduino with a computer running the free Python programming language, brought to our attention by our friends at...

Books - proper physical books made out of processed dead tree and adorned with ink - are wonderful things which should never go away, regardless of how clever eBook readers become in the future. Unfortunately, they're also relatively inaccessible - as anyone who has searched for a particular passage in a book without an index will agree - and have a limited lifespan, particularly at the cheaper end of the market with its acid-heavy paper and poor bindings. Google, as part of its mission to become the world's biggest advertising-funded repository of information, released plans for a linear book scanner...

We may have mentioned our love for laser cutters here at oomlout once or twice: we use them to build both our products and the tools for making said products. With the growth of hackspaces throughout the world and the launch of manufacturing-on-demand services access to laser cutters has never been easier, and for the truly dedicated there are even DIY designs and tiny desktop versions. Having access to a laser cutter and knowing how to get the best out of it aren't the same thing, however - but cut-on-demand provider Ponoko has stepped forward with a list of tips...