[Yuhin Wu] wrote in to let us know about the Automated Recycling Sorter that was built with a group of classmates at the University of Toronto. They entered it the school’s student design contest and we’re happy to report that it took first place. The angled sled has been designed to separate glass, plastic, and [...]

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The sales team in [Chuck’s] office is a pretty competitive bunch as you might expect, and they decided that they wanted a system which would allow them to challenge one another during their weekly meetings. The competition involves answering questions posed by their manager, but hand raising only works for so long – they needed [...]

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[Andrew] and his brother had some time (and a lot of ping pong balls) on their hands, so they decided to have some fun and built a remote-controlled ping pong ball turret. Arduino aside, the turret is cheap and easy to build as [Andrew’s] writeup explains. The firing mechanism was constructed using a pair of [...]

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[Fall Deaf] built an Arduino based universal remote control system. It uses a shield which has both an IR receiver and transmitter. This gives it the tools to learn codes from your existing remotes and play them back in order to control the devices. This functionality is really nothing new, but we think the user [...]

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Simulators might have lost their cool for a lot of gamers, but [Fergo] is trying for a comeback. He built an electronic dashboard for a car racing simulator. [Fergo] spends most of his track time on iRacing, an MMO racing simulator. Possibly due to a little bit of influence from Formula 1 steering wheels, he wanted [...]

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[Martijn] is showing off his new clock which he calls a Light Spectrum Clock. We like to look of it, using RGB LEDs in five squares that remind us of some of those LED coffee table builds. From left to right this shows the week, day, hour, minute, and second. Simple, right? We had to [...]

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When [Paul Rea] started work with his current employer, he was intrigued by a traffic light that sat unused near the entrance of the “Engineering Loft” where he was stationed. He promised himself that he would get it working one day, but several years passed before he had the chance to take a closer look [...]

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It’s no secret that seven-segment displays are an easy and useful way to relay data, so [Kelvyn Panici] decided to put together a minimalst, self-contained display for use around the house. The display itself is a 16-digit model he picked up from DealExtreme for under $10. He wanted to find a microcontroller small enough to fit [...]

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Even though everyone with a smart phone has a small, powerful computer in their pocket, we haven’t seen many applications of this portable processing power that use the built-in camera. [Michael] decided to change this and built an LED matrix that displays the data coming from the phone’s camera. For the build, [Michael] used two [...]

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[Ladyada] has been working on FLORA, her wearable electronics platform, for a few months now. Even though it has just been announced the specs look much better than the previous queen of the hill, the Arduino LilyPad. Going down the spec sheet for both the FLORA and the LilyPad, we see that FLORA has twice as much [...]

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Here’s one way to really keep the component count low. [David] developed an NES controller that doesn’t use any buttons. The copper clad has been milled to provide a pad which registers a button push based on capacitance. The board has a SIL header at the top, making it easy to plug into the Arduino [...]

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[Ishan Karve] works in some bizarro world where the building management demands that all servers and Uninterruptible Power Supplies be shut down at the end of each evening. While inconceivable to most systems admins, he has no recourse but to comply. This means that his employees need to turn things off before they leave for [...]

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[Mark VandeWettering] was experimenting with a simple transmitting circuit and an Arduino. The circuit in the project was designed by [Steve Weber] to broadcast temperature and telemetry data using Morse Code. But [Mark] wanted to step beyond that protocol and set out to write a sketch that broadcasts using the Hellschreiber protocol. This protocol transmits [...]

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[Jeff] and his wife put together a firefighter themed birthday celebration for their son. As he’s not entirely handy in the kitchen, [Jeff] decided not to lend a hand with the baking or cake decorating. But he didn’t forego the opportunity to combine a couple of different projects to make a Matchbox car launcher that [...]

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[Shameel Arafin, Sean McIntyre, and Reid Bingham] really dig rainbows. Going by the moniker the “RainBroz”, the trio built a portable display that can be used to add cool light painting effects to pictures. The group brings their Rainbow Machine all over the place, including parties, gatherings, and random spots on the street. Anyone is [...]

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[Alex] was digging through his closet and came upon an old PS2 game pad for Dance Dance Revolution. He hated the idea of throwing it out just slightly more than the idea of playing DDR again, so he decided to find a way to reuse it. He was a big fan of the game Simon [...]

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[George] just finished his first project: an 8×8 matrix “Board of Many Ping-Pong Balls” with 64 RGB LEDs. He started this project when he was 14 years old and finished the build over this last Christmas break. We won’t make any presumptions about [George]‘s age, but we couldn’t think of a better project to start [...]

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[Asher Glick] wrote in to share a project he has been working on with his friend [Kevin Baker], a 4x4x4 RGB LED cube. The pair are students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and also members of the newly-formed Embedded Hardware Club on campus. As their first collaborative project, they decided to take on the ubiquitous LED [...]

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If you’re looking to remotely control things around the house, but can’t do it over the Internet or via WiFi, the TiDiGino just might have what you’re looking for. [Boris Landoni] from Open Electronics sent some information on the TiDiGino our way, and it certainly looks like a useful device if you’re in need of [...]

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Need PID control in your next project? Perhaps this little beauty can help. It’s an Open Source PID controller that also follows the Open Hardware guidelines. [Brett Beauregard] based the project on the newly minted Arduino PID library which he wrote. In the video after the break [Brett] takes apart the device, walking through some of [...]

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Need PID control in your next project? Perhaps this little beauty can help. It’s an Open Source PID controller that also follows the Open Hardware guidelines. [Brett Beauregard] based the project on the newly minted Arduino PID library which he wrote. In the video after the break [Brett] takes apart the device, walking through some of [...]

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[Andrew Robinson] and his co-workers are lucky enough to have a Keurig coffee maker in their office, though they have a hard time keeping track of who owes what to the community coffee fund. Since K-Cups are more expensive than bulk coffee, [Andrew] decided that they needed a better way to log everyone’s drinking habits [...]

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[Marc Cryan] built this little bugger which he calls Wendell the Robot. But what good is an animatronic piece like this unless you do something fun with it? That’s why you can catch the movements matching [Michael Jackson's] choreography from the music video Thriller in the clip after the break. This is a ground-up build [...]

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[Dino] wanted to make this New Year’s celebration a bit more interesting, but he can’t make it to New York for the ball drop. Instead, he decided to make his own mini display in his workshop. Obviously he’s working with a slightly smaller budget than the folks at Times Square, but we think his display [...]

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[Andrew] shows us one way to reuse all those strands of Christmas lights you used for decoration this year. He had a friend that was helping with stage props for a local musical and ended up using his skills to build a lighted sign with some animation capabilities. The original plan was to cut out [...]

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Apparently a Braille computer display can cost several thousand dollars. That’s why [David Pankhurst] is working on a low-cost alternative. His offering is an open source version he calls the Audrey Braille Display. The concept is quite good. This prototype has one line of six Braille characters. Each character is made of two sliding strips [...]

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Chiptunes are great, and we can’t imagine a world without the Mega Man 2 soundtrack, but sometimes we all like a more 70′s style synth. This is where the Roninsynth steps in. It’s an Arduino shield that puts the basic components of a wall of synth into your pocket. Unlike the analog oscillators of yore, the Roninsynth [...]

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[Erv] was putting his holiday shopping list together and decided that instead of buying his friends something from the store, he would give them something a bit more useful. A former Electrical Engineer by trade, [Erv] typically prefers PIC microcontrollers, but he says that Arduinos are just so convenient to use for prototyping that he [...]

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[Axel] wanted to participate in the CheerLights project this holiday season, but not one to always follow the rules he decided to make his display a bit different than most others out there. While the lights at his house are synchronized with the CheerLights project, he programmed his Cheeriobot with a little added personality. Normally, [...]

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Most holiday light displays we see this time of year are stationary, or at least confined to somebody’s home. [Marco Guardigli] wanted to take his lights on the go, and thought that a light up winter hat would be perfect for showing off his holiday spirit. In the winter he sports a sturdy wool felt [...]

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