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DIY Doorbell Will Send Pictures Of Your Guests To Your iPhone

# 2012-05-18 08:12:49, TechCrunch
Say you’re a misanthrope and you’re afraid of humans. What to do? Well, you could cower in the dark when people ring your doorbell or you could laugh derisively at their smug faces in the screen of your iPhone. I’m going for the derisive laughter. This DIY Arduino project involves a simple cir...

MaKey, MaKey turns the whole world into a keyboard

# 2012-05-17 19:14:00, Engadget
The litany of exciting Maker Faire products continues with MaKey MaKey, a device that turns anything capable of conducting electricity into a controller. Developed by MIT Media Lab students Jay Silver and Eric Rosenbaum, you simply run an alligator clip from the board to an object and hold a conne...

Building sensors for the Scratch programming language

# 2012-05-17 13:01:15, Hack a Day
[Kevin Osborn] is making it a bit easier for young programmers to write programs that interact with the physical world. The device he’s holding in the picture is an Arduino based accelerometer and distance sensor meant for the Scratch language. Scratch is a programming language developed at MIT. ...

Time and date clock does it with RGB LED strips

# 2012-05-17 06:01:02, Hack a Day
[Craig's] color clock really came together quite nicely. The majority of the body is acrylic, with two large clear squares and a pair of colored discs. All are held in place by a ring of hardware with spacers in them, and the RGB LED strip that is used to display time and date wraps around [...]

Visualized: Arduino gets super-sized ahead of Maker Faire

# 2012-05-16 23:25:00, Engadget
This is Make's John Edgar Park, manfully clutching his Arduino Grande. The oversized device isn't just for show though, it's a fully working unit for those projects where a standard sized PCB just won't do. He'll be taking excited modders though the process of building it at Maker Faire on Saturda...

Club Jameco borrows from Etsy and Kickstarter, lets DIYers design, sell and buy project kits

# 2012-05-16 21:41:00, Engadget
Though electronics hobbyists may not have the same resources that the Maker Sheds of the world have to design, package and sell do-it-yourself kits, electronics component distributor Jameco plans to change that. With Club Jameco, enthusiasts can pitch their kit ideas to the electronic component wi...

Motion sensitive RGB lamp can standby for 3 years

# 2012-05-16 12:01:25, Hack a Day
Ooooh, nice enclosure! This is a little motion sensing lamp which [Krazatchu] built a few years back as a Mother’s Day gift. The PIR sensor is easy enough to see as the white dome on the front of the case. But look closely below that and you’ll see the LDR which it uses to keep [...]

Prototyping a solar charger for your truck

# 2012-05-16 09:01:08, Hack a Day
[Bryan] got his hands on a solar panel and decided to take it on the road rather than throwing it on the roof of the house. On sunny days it will top off the car battery, letting him use his stereo in the middle of nowhere without needing to keep the engine running. Instead of [...]

Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 hands-on (video)

# 2012-05-15 14:21:00, Engadget
The Etch-a-Sketch. A standard bearer for childhood, and one that most of us never really mastered. While Yelizaveta Lokshina can't help you create awe-inspiring portraits from aluminum powder, she has managed to update the toy for the digital age. Using an Arduino, a few buttons and a pressure sen...

Your mug on an Etch a Sketch — automatically

# 2012-05-14 13:01:17, Hack a Day
[Jim's] pretty serious about his Etch a Sketch. He’s gone to the trouble of building a rig that will automatically render a photograph as Etch a Sketch art. Do you recognize the US political figure being plotted in this image? He actually cracks these open and removes all of the internals to prese...

Arduino compatible home automation for smart phone or voice control

# 2012-05-14 10:01:11, Hack a Day
[Joseph] wrote in to share this home automation system he’s working on as a college project. He calls it the Room Engine and the house-side of the hardware is built on top of the circuit you see here. This is the most basic part of the REBoard, which is meant to connect to a computer [...]

More pins and more power with a DIY Sanguino

# 2012-05-13 09:00:57, Hack a Day
Not long after [CulinarilySpeaking] got into the Arduino game, he began to want more IO pins and a larger program space for more ambitious projects. This, of course, led him down the path towards the Sanguino, the ATMega644-based dev board with many more IO pins than Arduino boards based on the AT...

Arduino mechs learn RobotC, plot assimilation with Lego Mindstorms

# 2012-05-12 22:41:00, Engadget
Arduino boards have smoothed the creation of lots of eccentric thingamajigs, but robotics and controllers are still not for the faint of heart. Luckily, RoboMatter is coming to the rescue of would-be roboticists with a public beta version of its C-based RobotC language for Arduino. Joining Lego Mi...

Pebble ties itself up in Twine: sounds so rustic, couldn't be any less (video)

# 2012-05-11 10:41:00, Engadget
Take an e-ink e-paper smartwatch that's got plenty of willing customers, throw in a WiFi-connected sensor box and well, imagine the possibilities. The founders behind Pebble and Twine hope you are, because they have announced that the pair will be connectable through the latter's web-based interfa...

A much easier take on an Android garage door opener

# 2012-05-10 11:01:33, Hack a Day
[Andy] is taking the complexity of a smartphone-controlled garage door down a notch with this project. He’s not interested in checking on the state of the door (open or closed) using a video feed, or in controlling the thing from anywhere in the world. He just wants to use his Android as the remo...

One wire reads the keypad from the APRS radio mic

# 2012-05-09 10:01:17, Hack a Day
[Shane Burrell] decided to spend some time learning how the keypad on the his Kenwood TM-710A APRS radio mic works. It uses a different technique than you might think. Normally a grid of buttons is scanned as a matrix to detect keypresses, but this hardware actually counts pulses on a serial wire to...

RC car controller and receiver replacement

# 2012-05-08 07:01:26, Hack a Day
This radio controlled car controller replacement is a great project to try some new things with that fancy hardware you’ve got sitting around. The hack comes in two parts, the receiver and the transmitter. They’re communicating via Bluetooth so if you only want to build one side of the hardwar...

Automatic cat feeder made with recycled laminator parts

# 2012-05-06 11:59:21, Hack a Day
When [Antoine] and his family leave home for a few days, they usually have to find a neighbor who is willing to care for their cats while they are away. Instead of bothering the people who live next door, he decided it would be best to build an automatic cat feeder (Translation) instead. [Antoine] ...

Using Arduino shields with the Raspberry Pi

# 2012-05-06 09:01:29, Hack a Day
Since the Arduino was launched years ago, many ‘shields’ or add-on boards providing additional functionality have been released. There are hundreds of different shields, from video capture shields to touch screen shields. Now that the Raspberry Pi is out in the wild, it was only a matter of time...

Converting a manual camera lens to use motorized zoom and focus

# 2012-05-06 03:01:15, Hack a Day
[Guy] wrote in to share this motorized camera lens project he recently finished. He really loved the zoom lens, but since both zoom and focus are manually controlled, he sometimes had trouble getting both set to the right place in time to take the shot. With modern DSLR cameras which allow video cap...

Automatic airplane tracking; what radar-systems engineers do for kicks

# 2012-05-04 08:01:12, Hack a Day
[G. Eric Rogers] is a radar-systems engineer who just happens to live within sight of the aircraft approach path for the local airport. We wonder if that was one of the criteria when looking for a home? Naturally, he wanted his own home-based system for tracking the airplanes. He ended up repurposin...

Surprisingly Simple Arduino Motion-Sensing Project Makes For Some Weekend Fun

# 2012-05-04 07:18:55, TechCrunch
If you've always wanted to try to build an Arduino project, this may be a great way to start. Matt Williamson built a tiny, Arduino-based motion sensor that will SMS you when something moves by your desk or into a room. It's completely open source and the notifications system runs on your PC thanks ...

Reaching out to a touch screen with a microcontroller

# 2012-05-04 06:01:10, Hack a Day
We love capacitive touch screens. They’re much more robust than resistive touch screens and if the UI is programmed well they produce a great user experience. But getting your electronics project to interact with one is a bit tough. [RobB] has been experimenting in that area, and managed to build...

Arduino PIC programmer writes to 18F family

# 2012-05-04 01:01:45, Hack a Day
[Kirill] wrote in to share his Arduino-based PIC programmer. It is capable of writing to the 18F family of chips, including 18F2XXX and 18F4XXX. We think that’s pretty exciting because this line of chips has USB functionality and there are bootloaders out there that let you program them via USB. ...

Turning a light off over the Internet

# 2012-05-03 03:01:55, Hack a Day
Because reaching over a few feet to turn off a switch is too much to bear for [Bruce], he connected his desk lamp to the Internet. It’s a pretty cool build that’s the perfect tutorial for connecting just about anything to the internet. For his build, [Bruce] used an Arduino with a relay attached...

Arduino can program PIC too!

# 2012-05-02 12:01:18, Hack a Day
This is a wiring diagram that [Soranne] put together when developing a method of programming PIC microcontrollers using an Arduino board. You can see that he takes care of the 12V issue by connecting the Master Clear (MCLR) pin to an external source. This comes with one warning that the Arduino should always be reset [...]

Sun-powered Stirling engine with automatic tracking

# 2012-05-02 10:01:47, Hack a Day
Check out this solar-powered Stirling engine (translated). The build is part of a high school class and they packed in some really nice features. The first is the parabolic mirror which focuses the sun’s rays on the chamber of the engine. The heat is what makes it go, and the video after the brea...

Surround Sound system controller replacement includes home automation

# 2012-05-02 09:01:14, Hack a Day
[Neoxy] always wanted surround sound for his computer, and one day he managed to get a hold of a dead 5.1 system. Why buy one when you can repair someone’s rubbish, right? That turned out to be easier said than done, but after several false-starts he managed to resurrect the audio system by repl...

LED matrix shield starts with a very loud snap

# 2012-05-02 06:01:51, Hack a Day
We see a lot of LED matrix projects. They’re fun, and you can learn a lot of basic lessons during the build. But this one is out of the ordinary. [Rtty21] built an oddly sized, and sound controlled matrix shield for his Arduino. That’s it right there, the shield is the large chunk of protoboard ...

Arduino BASIC interpreter using LCD, keyboard, and SD

# 2012-05-01 10:30:25, Hack a Day
This Arduino BASIC interpreter will make a really fun one-day project if you’ve already got the parts on hand. [Usmar A. Padow] put together an Arduino Uno, SD card, four line character LCD, and PS/2 keyboard. but he’s also included alternative options to go without an LCD screen by using a comp...