Make: Arduino Giveaway (4/15/11)

Hollyann Wood on April 15th, 2011 at 9:43 pm said:

I’ve never built anything with an Arduino, but I really would like to. I have a little boy and I’m a single mom. I think it would be awesome for us to build something together and let his creativity be our guide. :) He loves music and things that light up, soooooo, this might be the perfect gift for us. :)

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 9:47 pm said:

I’ve never worked on an arduino project, but I build guitars and I’ve seen plans on arduino effects pedals. It would be a fun project to build one.

Bryan Currey on April 15th, 2011 at 9:48 pm said:

How do you choose a single project when this kit gives you SO many possibilities ?!?!?!

Paul Tate on April 15th, 2011 at 9:48 pm said:

I have not built anything with arduino yet, but I would like to incorporate one into an RFI kit for the front door of my house. That way I can give out RFI keys to the people I want access and be able to control when then can get in.

Greg Swan on April 15th, 2011 at 9:51 pm said:

After reading this month’s WIRED all about arduino maker projects, I’m super psyched to build my first project. I’m thinking specifically about ways to leverage online behavior (e.g., tweets) to mechanical action (e.g., lights/sounds). Pick me!

John Michael Garcia on April 15th, 2011 at 9:52 pm said:

I have to be honest and say I’ve never built anything before but I’m very curious to start.

Greg Walsh on April 15th, 2011 at 9:52 pm said:

I really want to build a Laser Tag sensor/emitter/score keeper.

Eric Fialkowski on April 15th, 2011 at 9:55 pm said:

I built a little robot before. My next project is to build a gigapan mount for taking really large panoramas

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 9:57 pm said:

Robots! Welcome, Robot Overlords!!!!

Moustafa Elhadary on April 15th, 2011 at 9:58 pm said:

me and my friend are working on building a kinect controlled plane with a camera shield and Xbee PRO shield for better communications. we started all the planning but we didn’t get the aurdoino yet.

Moustafa Elhadary on April 15th, 2011 at 9:58 pm said:

me and my friend are working on building a kinect controlled plane with a camera shield and Xbee PRO shield for better communications. we started all the planning but we didn’t get the aurdoino yet.

Easton Janecek on April 15th, 2011 at 9:58 pm said:

i WANT TO BUILD A REVERSE GEOCACHE!!!

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 8:05 am said:

‘reverse geocache’ as in…
what, you hide and a little geocache comes and finds you?
- Ethan Dicks on April 18th, 2011 at 7:21 pm said:
  
  A reverse geocache is a locked box with an Arduino and a GPS that opens when you bring it to the correct location (i.e., you wander around with it and triangulate the opening spot based on what it is telling you on its LCD window).

Steve on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

I haven’t done anything with a microcontroller, but I think I would like to build something for the Cub Scout troop. They already have a device to measure the pine wood car derby, but they don’t have anything for the rocket derby. Currently they have dad’s stand around with stop watches to time from start to finish, if they don’t finish, they measure how far they went (they are rubber band powered and hang from a string). I think I can change the line to a wire and the hanger to a carbon pad and measure the distance by sending a signal down the wire and measure the time it takes to get a reflection back. Timing should be easy in that I just have to have a switch at the other end to stop the timer or I can still use my reflector and that way they can have the stopping point varied. I think the hard part would be figuring the freq to use for the pulse what to expect back. It will take some testing, but I have some scouts that would love it.

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

BEST THING BUILT: Automatic fading night light. An IR motion sensor and three white LEDs hooked up on an Arduino NG. I built it when my son was born so we could see to do baby maintenance at night without turning the room light on. It fades up fairly quickly when it sees movement and fades down over about 3 minutes when there’s no movement – leaving everyone to sleep in a nice dark room. That was almost 4 years ago and it’s still going strong! Wouldn’t be without it.

DREAM BUILD: Arduino video motion-control rig. I’ve actually been working on it (on and off) for a few years but I really want to push it forward to being a solid piece of useable kit.

Jason Trotter on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

Last little robotic thingy I made was in school, a little robot that would follow a white line, record it’s speed and distance traveled. I think I want to somehow use this to record how long it’ll take my hedgehog, Prickles, to get to the moon on his little wheel.

Delfim Machado on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

i’ll build a car alarm and a keyless car key with yubikey using 2G network and GPS to remote access the car

Tom Warin on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

I want to build something to entertain my kitties.

Jeff Murry on April 15th, 2011 at 9:59 pm said:

The cooles microcontroller project I’ve ever built is my Mouse trap Alert. I have had an ongoing issue with mice in my crawlspace. Trapping them got a little easier when I found a battery powered electricution type trap, but it was still a pain to constantly check into the crawlspace all year long. I developer a combination of wireless radios with microcontrollers and LCD displays to send a signal from the trap when it traps a mouse (or runs out of battery) to a receiver that sits on my desktop. Then I only check the trap when there is an actual catch or low battery.

T'Saavik on April 15th, 2011 at 10:01 pm said:

Coolest micro-controller project so far? Hmm, Either my remote controlled power-wheel a WIP or one of my many small robots.

Chad Lovelace on April 15th, 2011 at 10:02 pm said:

I have been wanting to build some type hamradio morse decoder or digital mode converter for psk rtty or other digi modes — been wanting to work this up for some time!!!

Norman DeValliere on April 15th, 2011 at 10:02 pm said:

I want to use microcontrollers and a variety of sensors to monitor the houseplants in my home and my office.

douglas weiss on April 15th, 2011 at 10:04 pm said:

Monitor and automate my aquaponic setup.

Peter Young on April 15th, 2011 at 10:04 pm said:

The coolest microcontroller project I want to build is an RF remote control for Lego trains that has a hand held controller run from an Arduino, LCD, buttons and an XBee which communicates with a Xbee and arduino in the trains to control them but also communicates with track side accessories like signals and switching points so that they work together to simulate a real train operation. So far I have some basic plans and circuit diagrams for it all but an lacking anything to prototype it with.

John Thomas on April 15th, 2011 at 10:05 pm said:

I haven’t built anything yet, I am just getting into Arduino. I want to build a Moog style synthesizer. That would be the dream, actually, I want to build an army of different synths that can play together. I also want to start teaching my children about electronics so they can build cool things.

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 10:06 pm said:

I always leave the garage door open so I recently built a garage door sensor with an arduino and ethernet shield. It uses a reed switch to determine if the garage door is open and it sends my wife and I a text message if it is open after 8PM. I also hooked it into the garage door opener so I can reply via text message to actually close the garage door. I can also query the current status (open or closed) via text message. It’s been working great and saved my butt a few times.

Billy Stevens on April 15th, 2011 at 10:07 pm said:

Google Reader connected lamp that will change colors from green to red depending on the number of unread items and has a LCD screen that shows the most recent headline

gaijintendo on April 15th, 2011 at 10:09 pm said:

The coolest thing I have ever made was the humble “metrognome” but on a breadboard. It was two weeks ago and my first project. I wanted to play around with the source code and see what I could learn.
It raised question about clock speeds (the arduino seemed to run about 50 times faster than the atmega on the metrognome for example).
I had to learn a bit about crystals and how they even work (though I didn’t have to use them).
In playing with the confused speeds I got to understand the what the seven segment displays work (I didn’t realise it was to do with strobing or whatever the term is.
I learnt to read the product description and datasheets/comments on the product page, because I was convinced there was a way to use what turned out to be an unwired led.
I learnt breadboards run out of space really quickly (and recently found out about Fritzing, which is just rude sounding).
Basically it was a cool project because it was my first hardware programming experience, and I learnt an insane amount in a short time.

Daryll Strauss on April 15th, 2011 at 10:11 pm said:

I’ve got a data logger with a GPS and several sensors. Battery operated and runs for hours.

Nathan Koch on April 15th, 2011 at 10:12 pm said:

Complete my submersible ROV

evan cordes on April 15th, 2011 at 10:15 pm said:

I’ve used Arduinos to connect pedals to software instruments alread. I’m looking for new ways to integrate microcontrollers into musical instruments, including putting them inside kalimbas and other homemade instruments along with photosensors and acellerometers to control audio parameters.

Jess Hires on April 15th, 2011 at 10:23 pm said:

The coolest microcontroller project I’ve built was an NES controller interface. It was really neat to learn about the builtin shift register in the NES controller, and how to read 2 controllers at the same time. I plan on porting it to AVR from the Arduino, and have it read as a USB gamepad HID. I would feel amazing if I could somehow get it to work with the zapper, too! :)

Colin on April 15th, 2011 at 10:25 pm said:

I am working on a single-arm barn door tracker for astrophotography, driving the tangent arm with a stepper motor and adjusting the drive rate to compensate for tangent error. The whole idea is to track the stars across the sky for long exposures.

However, in the middle of building that, my company had an RC car race… One of the prizes was for best obstacle. What I love about the arduino platform is that I was able to use it to make a moving-ramp trap based on the work I had done to drive the stepper motor in an afternoon – won the prize! I think the best part was when I watched one driver waiting on the ramp for it to move into position got rear-ended and dropped off the end of the ramp by the next driver, who in turn was able to get past the obstacle first.

Louis Davidson on April 15th, 2011 at 10:27 pm said:

I would like to develop a unit that is handheld and can read UPC codes so I can keep track of my purchases in the grocery store.

Quiglag on April 15th, 2011 at 10:28 pm said:

If I had an Arduino I would build a photogate that I could use for macro photography. But my real dream would be to build a quadcopter.

Steve Strong on April 15th, 2011 at 10:29 pm said:

I’d really like to build a microcontroller controlled sensor array to check the environment variables of my office fish tank… The coolest thing I’ve built, I guess, was a panoramic camera mount for point and shoot cameras. It was amazing seeing something I built actually work. :)

Ronn Brashear on April 15th, 2011 at 10:32 pm said:

Want to build a seed germination cabinet for my father in law so he can retire and grow plants for the entire neighborhood. Have already started making my own moisture sensors, physical cabinet, light grid, and watering system. Just need thermal monitoring and some arduino magic to control it all…

Jason Miller on April 15th, 2011 at 10:35 pm said:

I’ve not built anything yet but I always go hard which is why I’ve started on a reprap and a desktop cnc

Will Austin on April 15th, 2011 at 10:36 pm said:

I’ve only just gotten started with Arduino. I picked up a handful of projection displays (used in instrumentation before VFDs and LEDs became popular) and had most of it built and working using TTL ICs. Each display has 12 possible digits to project, so it’s almost like a nixie clock circuit. I’m trying to convert the project to Arduino and dip my toes in programming.

JR Lewis on April 15th, 2011 at 10:36 pm said:

Created a light-up Bustier for a community theater show. The actress could use pressure sensitive sensors inside the tips of her glove thumbs to control which sets of LED’s lit up and how bright. Press both down really hard to set off an animated pattern of heart shaped groups of colored LED’s. Built for the song ‘Gotta Have a Gimmick’ for the review ‘And the World Goes Round’. Arduino, flexiforce sensors, Lots of LED’s, and some lingerie.

Addidis on April 15th, 2011 at 10:37 pm said:

Ive been building an electronic control unit for my RC truck. The engines in RC cars have fuel adjustment needles. So you need to trim the fuel (which contains the lubricant) depending on the weather, humidity , and performance you desire. Less fuel = more power = less lube and engine life. By logging the temperature of the engine head and connecting the fuel screw to a servo I am going to try to make a PID controller to automate the tuning. So far im building it from what I have laying around. It would speed up development to use the arduino libs. This project , and source code for the datalogger portion nearly done is posted at jeselectronics dot com currently using PIC. Its titled RCecu there are a few posts on it.

Simon Thomas on April 15th, 2011 at 10:41 pm said:

For a university project, I built a Jukebox that played polyphonic “songs” through a small 8 ohm speaker (through a SPI interfaced DAC). It was powered by an Atmel ARM7 AT91SAM and responded to inputs from an alphanumeric keypad. It also drove a small display to inform the user of the track number and current play time.

James on April 15th, 2011 at 10:41 pm said:

I think it would be cool to use it to dev sensors to track chemical runoff from big agriculture

David Sparky Truax on April 15th, 2011 at 10:41 pm said:

Hope to MAKE something that will make my Kids want to learn how to Make also. up until then just trying to learn and relearn what I used to know building Ski Lifts

Dunyas on April 15th, 2011 at 10:42 pm said:

Keso’s ‘Jar of Fireflies’ over on Instructables. http://www.instructables.com/id/Jar-of-Fireflies/

After seeing this, I got interested in micro-controllers. Have yet to actually do anything because of personal budget restraints…

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 10:43 pm said:

A coworker had to retire from networking due to sensitivity to EMF, so of course I built an EMF detector, mostly from Collin’s design, but I did manage to fit it into a Trader Joe’s chocolate tin, with the bargraph in the clear plastic center window. I even used a circular perfboard. He was blown away at the retirement party that it actually worked. I was blown away how much EMF our Motorola radios emit while transmitting, good thing we don’t use them much…

Michael Buksas on April 15th, 2011 at 10:43 pm said:

It’s time to put my greenhouse to work, and not as a storage shed. My goal is to get temperature humidity, illumination and soil moisture sensors hooked up to the Arduino, then communicate this to my PC inside. Then, I’ll look into controls for automatic watering, supplemental lighting and maybe a cooler or fan.

Sean Farquharson on April 15th, 2011 at 10:44 pm said:

I am using a hydraulic motorcycle scissor lift I picked up on ebay to lift my video projector out of a piece of furniture when I want to watch a movie, the only annoying part is that my Harmony remote will set everything up for “movie time” with the touch of a button, but then I still have to get up and physically step on the lifts foot peddle to lift the projector up and put it away. I want to use the ardunio (along with a shield to isolate the 120V current ) to detect when the projector turns on an off (either using the 5V switch output on the projector, or by use of a SmartStrip power strip) and raise and lower the projector (by the correct amounts) as needed. There will also be senors to stop the lift at the right hieght and when the cabinet is fully closed.

Nathanael Phillips on April 15th, 2011 at 10:44 pm said:

I’m currently sketching out plans to automate our clothes dryer — set time, start and stop via SMS. Plus load finish notifications. Arduino + XBee

Jared Betteridge on April 15th, 2011 at 10:46 pm said:

I want to build something with my sons. Some kind of robot probably.

Matthew Jachimstal on April 15th, 2011 at 10:47 pm said:

I would love to build a hard drive clock. I’ve seen it done before and have been thinking about it for a while now.

Shazron Abdullah on April 15th, 2011 at 10:48 pm said:

Can’t think of anything right now but it would involve my cat, an Android phone and an Arduino. She gets really bored sometimes.

Travis Armstrong on April 15th, 2011 at 10:50 pm said:

I have a friend who’s done a GPS hack on an old prepaid cell phone so his position is always reported to a web server. I want to make a tracker to report direction and approximate distance to the GPS target.

Kelly Cooke on April 15th, 2011 at 10:51 pm said:

I’ve been wanting to start working with Arduino. I’d really like to figure out an automatic system for watering and/or feeding my cat on. I’d also like to use it to figure out a way to keep said cat off of my countertops.

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 10:51 pm said:

I’ve designed a Calorie Tracker Module that counts the number of calories I have burned over the course of a day. It constantly measures my heart rate, body temperature, movements, gait, and other physical variables to estimate the number of calories spent. It can tweet my body state and predict what exercises and activities are best for burning calories.

MarkS on April 15th, 2011 at 10:52 pm said:

A garage exhaust system. Two Picaxes: one measures inputs, including indoor and outdoor temperature and presense of Carbon Monoxide. Servos are used to control fan direction. The other Picaxe is a User Interface connected to a 2 line LCD display which shows the temperatures and fan and CO status.

Gregg on April 15th, 2011 at 10:55 pm said:

Coolest?! I’ve gotten an example from the Arduino site to work for showing numbers on a serially enabled LCD display to work at least twice. And surprised the person I was showing it to.

Dream project?! On the Pachube site, it describes one connected via Ethernet, and doing “something”. Does the kit contain a basic Ethernet shield? That’s what I need. People have also gotten exciting response from a tethered one, and it needs the parts described. Okay that may not be a winner one, but that’s my dream.

Tristan John Cannon on April 15th, 2011 at 10:58 pm said:

I have made a usb microcontroller interface which has 8 digital inputs and outputs and 1 analogue input and output. Unfortunatly it uses C++ to program it. Ive seen other kits available in America, such as Basic stamp, but alas, in England we dont have an innovation culture and these products are unavailable here.
My original project was an automated vacuum cleaner, which would work if the microcontroller used a language that I understood. I managed to download the software for basic stamp and PCB design software which includes a BS module, i used this to play around and see my project working vertually, but since the actual BS is unavailable here, never got to finish it. I have a prototype built, its just waiting to recieve a microcontroller.
My ultimate project would be to wire EVERY electrical appliance (including clocks) in my home to a microcontroller and with the use of my pda or a computer connected to the internet, be able to control everything in my home, from anywhere in the world. Ive designed a lighting system which uses different coloured LEDs, which would be part of this intergrated system. The purpose of it is to give blue light in the morning and red light at night. i got this idea after reading that when blue light contacts the retina, the brain produces seritonin and red light produces melatonin. The morning light would help me wake up, and the night light wont wake me fully when i go toilet at night. Also, with the system linked with fire/smoke detectors, the lights would come on blue at night, they could also be programmed to show safe routes out of a building.I even dont see much of a challange in making things to help with chores around the house and linking it all in together. Electric water valves could mean even my bath can be controlled. i could have a freshly run bath waiting for me when i wake up in the morning.
With additional software like dragon naturally speaking, i could have this entire system voice controlled.
“computer, I would like a cup of coffee while I watch stargate and this floor could do with a hoover. oh and i wish to have a bath ready for 2100h.”

I dont see why everyone cant have a house of the future, it doesnt have to cost millions.

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 7:37 am said:

don’t go the basic stamp – I got one here in australia and had to go through getting a USB-serial adapter (I use mac) and BASIC is a terrible language – and then after uploading the first program, it works, but, alas, no program afterwards has ever uploaded. and believe me, i’ve tried. i guess it’ll have to stay with a !@#$%^& blinking LED for the rest of time…
- Tristan John Cannon on April 17th, 2011 at 9:13 pm said:
  
  It may be terrible language but its one I know, unless theres one that uses pascal. I havent really programmed anything since my c64.

Tim Rafferty on April 15th, 2011 at 10:59 pm said:

I want to build a time machine so that I may travel back to my college years and explain to my future self how much I will be interested in programable circuits because this company from Italy will spur an electromechanical revolution by creating an open source, affordable, feature packed dev kit and a community that backs it.

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 11:06 pm said:

A while back I created a fortune teller using an old cigar box with an Arduino for the brains.
I also used a LCD screen and some LED’s.
The user gets a fortune after turning it on.
To get a new fortune you push a button on the side. My nieces love it when they come to visit.
I posted how I made it on Instructables.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Fortune-Teller/

I’m currently working on a weather station and would use the new Arduino for it.
Arduino rocks!

Scott Nielsen on April 15th, 2011 at 11:07 pm said:

Dream Arduino project: Touch screen interface to a DSP to control effects as the signal leaves the guitar. This device could be attached to the guitar behind the bridge and provide a cool visual effect while being useful to the musician.

David Rodriguez on April 15th, 2011 at 11:11 pm said:

I want to integrate an RFID reader into my dog’s door to permit my dogs (RFID attached to collar) to automatically gain entry into the house based on their ID and/or time of day. I’ve already built the web service and iPhone app to monitor my backyard. One important feature would to be to set an exception (remotely) for a rainy day and sound an alarm to let them know they’re able to enter the house. The web service and mobile app have already been developed, I just need to get my hands on an Arduino.

Eleftherios Kosmas on April 15th, 2011 at 11:22 pm said:

Well I always wanted to make an open source network enabled analog to digital conveter to transmit biosignals for polysomnography sensors. (Electroengephalography (EEG) with 34 electrodes, ElectroOcculoGraphy (EOG), ElectroCardioGraphy (ECG), ElectroMyoGraphy (EMG legs and chin), Oximetry, Air Flow (propably using a piezoelectric tranducer), Respiratory Inductive Plethysmograph (RIP) for both abdominal and thoracic muscle groups and the ability to expand the device using modular components and add or even control over devices using it(ex. a Continous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) device). Data could be storred localy or via network to a computer using the European Data Format.

Danny Sterne on April 15th, 2011 at 11:28 pm said:

I want to make a programmable IR intervalometer with IR codes for multiple cameras.

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 11:41 pm said:

I think the coolest project I want to build is an improved thermostat for my house. I always thought it was silly that you can set it to cool or heat, but not both. I want a range. If it is less than that, I want it to heat up, if it is more than that, cool it down. Ideally, being able to eventually hook it up to a wireless network so I can open/close vents would be also useful, that way I could get a more even temperature or handle the fact my living room is always a few degrees colder than the bedroom. I’d want to build it so it can be a bit more intelligent about the weather, so if it knows it is going to be cold, it can start heating up a little earlier.

Yoshito Juarez on April 15th, 2011 at 11:41 pm said:

I’m working on a cigar-box GPS unit that will hold way points. An LCD screen will point you in the direction of the current waypoint!

Chris Bush on April 15th, 2011 at 11:44 pm said:

I really want to try out building a hydroponic system controlled by the arduino, or something to automatically open the garage door (or close it) based on proximity or something. Something cool like that. Work some Xbee stuff into it too. Car leaving the driveway, close the door without pressing a button. Maybe turn lights on when I arrive. something like that.

Cory Lueninghoener on April 15th, 2011 at 11:48 pm said:

My best project so far has been my carputer that records GPS traces and displays trip information on a display on my dashboard. Read all about it here: http://www.wirelesscouch.net/~cluening/projects/arduino/carputer/

mattjackets on April 15th, 2011 at 11:48 pm said:

My arduino is my prototyping platform before things get moved onto (usually) smaller AVR chips. In the past, the coolest thing I’ve made is an RFID authorization system (scan a tag, and it’ll enable an output or not, depending on if your tag is in the authorized list). Right now, it’s being used as a logic analyzer to reverse-engineer a motorized tripod’s serial communications. Soon (I hope) this tripod will be controlled by the arduino!

Anonymous on April 15th, 2011 at 11:52 pm said:

I would love to make a Wootoff controller for my USB woot lights. I know I would need a Ethernet shield, but this kit would get me close enough to buy the Shield. I think it would be cool if they started to spin when there was a Wootoff in progress.
I am also getting things together for a c-n-c router.

Bjarni Freyr Þórðarson on April 15th, 2011 at 11:53 pm said:

As an 15-year old maker I’ve always wanted an arduino to play with, I recently got my first Breadboard from RadioShack along with the 555-timer chip. Breadboards are awesome, and that someone thought of combining the arduino microcontroller with a breadboard and fit it in such a small design as the protoshield is even more awsome. I’ve always wanted to make a homemade alarm system, with maybe 2 sensors, for my room or my candy drawer, i already have the magnetic switches ready here on my project desk, people are always stealing stuff from poor makers like me, hehe. Having an arduino, and even better the starter pack, will finally get me going on building my basic alarm system.

-Bjarni

Jonathan Stowe on April 15th, 2011 at 11:57 pm said:

To make my duct tape boat autonomous. http://www.instructables.com/id/Rc-Duct-Tape-Swamp-Boat/

Joe Ratulowski on April 15th, 2011 at 11:57 pm said:

I’ve been dreaming of making a grandfather clock that looks like a giant nixie tube. A glass tube that large is the real sticking point. I figure an arduino and EL wire would handle the rest nicely.

Marco Andrade on April 15th, 2011 at 11:58 pm said:

I’d love to build a tracked robot able to sense fallen ping pong balls, retrieve them, and launch one by one straight up on command when I clap or say a specific command, when the ball is needed. I know it can be done! Need the brains!!

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:00 am said:

Okay, here’s the project I’ve been dreaming of making. A biofeedback machine. One that incorporates a hacked Mindflex EEG device (re: Mindflex game) and a Binaural Beat Generator. I would also love to tie in pulsating LEDs that adjust in color, in accordance to your registered brainwave state.

And, I just thought of this: a modified, body-length, back massager that pulsates in sequence with the pulsating LEDs and Binaural Beat Generator.

David Mezera on April 16th, 2011 at 12:11 am said:

I’m dreaming of an Arduino-controlled “brewbot” to regulate my mash temperature, pump the wort to a boil kettle for the time required, and then run it all through a wort chiller. Consistent homebrew results, every time!

A.Mac on April 16th, 2011 at 12:11 am said:

Espresso machine technology keeps moving along, but nobody seems interested in advancing grinder technology. As a long time barista, I’d like to change that and build a revolutionary espresso grinder.

Michael Harris on April 16th, 2011 at 12:12 am said:

A combination Color-Button Door lock with Net-connectivity. We will be building a net-zero home and I would love to make a door lock that the code is a 4 color sequence. The keypad would have 4 buttons that change each time you press a button. So the COLOR sequence would be the same but the location of the button would changer each time.
Also it could be web enabled to be able to text server or click a button on a url to remotely open the door. This would be instead of giving someone the color combination or a key. “Just call me when you get there. I’ll let you in.” 8p

Lorinc Del Motte on April 16th, 2011 at 12:13 am said:

I dream of building a MIDI keyboard controller with a ribbon controller as wide as the keyboard (in tribute to the CS-80) and four ribbon controllers to the left of the keyboard for controlling various parameters. The ribbon controllers will have rows of LEDs behind them that will light up so the performer can keep track of what value the parameters controlled are at. The keyboard will use piezoelectric sensors for velocity and pressure sensitivity. It will be semi-weighted, since I find fully weighted keyboards to be overweighted.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:18 am said:

I have created a 7 segment display clock with arduino- but the great thing is that I know how it works- so I know how to hack it! I want to keep it going- update it with an RTC, and possibly even make it LOL shield compatible.
Or add some numitrons/nixies to the mix for that good ol’ retro look :)

Roberto Leibman on April 16th, 2011 at 12:20 am said:

My bachelor’s thesis (back in 1993) was a Motorola 68332 based system for assisted controlled gait in paraplegics (in a lab setting). After many years programming business software I’d love to get back into hardware.

weirdal yanksyou on April 16th, 2011 at 12:21 am said:

last month i built one of hypnocubes 4*4 rgb led cubes one of the most complex and time consuming projects i have done soldering the components to the board was easy but making the led grid was the most difficult part

trajov on April 16th, 2011 at 12:26 am said:

All the time we see the medical bills get to be straining on a family, that’s why one of my projects is to build a ECG (EKG) machine, I bet there would be a really good use to this, since medical equipment can get very expensive.

Justin Rossetti on April 16th, 2011 at 12:26 am said:

I’m working on a ‘perimeter chime’, basically it’s a wireless tripwire that uses the unique properties of vinyl fencing (meaning, that it’s rather flimsy) to detect when cats or small animals jump on or over it. The vibrations created by normal wind are different, so I’m able to filter those out. The tripwire increments a counter (I’m hoping to timestamp it in the future) so I can see which time of day the vagrant cats are more active in my property probably scoping out my chickens or pooping in my corn patch.

Fox Slawnych on April 16th, 2011 at 12:27 am said:

Last year, when I was in grade six, for a geography project we had to design and make a product and find out about what raw materials that we would need. I decided to make a vacuum-bot, with two cds cells and a spring coiled around some bare wire for sensors, an Arduino for a brain, two motors, and a dust buster. I couldn’t find any code for any projects like this one, so I made some from scratch. While the other kids where making products such as night lights and necklaces, I felt really smart making a robot that actually worked. Thanks to Arduino, I got a robot that vacuums, and an A+!

Mike Preston on April 16th, 2011 at 12:30 am said:

I’m aiming to use several microcontrollers in my new boat…
to interface many sensors (inc accellerometers, electronic compasses and environmental monitoring), to control several solar trackers, to control appliances through an onboard computer and to control some slave panels to allow basic functions to be accessed without needing a full computer…

I hopefully will be starting construction in the next month or so… for the boat I think I will have by the autumn….

Matt Chester on April 16th, 2011 at 12:32 am said:

I have built a dog tracking device for our my new rescue dog, it uses an RFID reader mounted in the door ways, connected to a x-bee module. It logs when the dog is walking around the house, and eating(one RFID reader mounted near the bowl). We also put a chip inside one of the toys to see when she picks it up. She has an RFID chip on her collar to track her. This allows us to make sure she is eating and exploring her new home.

Milen Paskov on April 16th, 2011 at 12:32 am said:

Have been of getting the arduino for some time but have not gotten around to do it yet. It may not very sophisticated but i wanted to build a robot with stereo vision to detect object and move around them. Eventually add log shield to map the area which the robot has already visited. Just something I have been think about.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:35 am said:

A friend of mine and I are building a fully automated Golf Ball Gun. It runs on oxy acetylene and oxygen. We are using the arduino to run the entire thing. What happens is first the arduino triggers a linear actuator to load a golf ball. Next it triggers servos which open valves to let in the oxy acetylene and oxygen into the measuring chamber which, as you guessed, measures the amount of gas. The measuring chamber is also powered by arduino. It then dumps the gas from the measuring chamber to the guns chamber, then activates a servo to press the button on a stun gun to ignite the gas. I know what your thinking, “how are they going to power all this with an arduino?” So we designed a shield to up convert the power from the arduino without any compromise. In a nutshell, with the push of one button, the arduino will measure the gas, dump it into the chamber, load the golf ball, then fire it. I figured all of this out, and I am 14 years old, so as you can imagine moneys tight. I can’t exactly build any of the circuit without the kit, surprisingly it has everything I need. I can build the gun out of scrap parts but I cannot build the circuit with out this kit. As you can tell I am smart enough to handle the arduino but can’t if I don’t have it. I have been wanting it for quite some time but sadly cannot get it because I don’t have the money. I know how to program the arduino but I never actually seen one in person so having this would be absolutely wonderful. My dad just got me my first ever Make Magazine, the arduino revolution and I am learning as much as I can, but again cannot use these skills without it. So please, PLEASE send me this kit. Words cannot express how grateful I would be.

Gabriel Gonzalez

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 1:19 pm said:

You know you’re gonna put your eye out with that thing…;)
- Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 5:03 pm said:
  
  Thats why I am making it remote controlled, don’t worry I’m in advanced math and I ran the numbers and it couldn’t be MORE safe! I figured out how far away to be, how much of a gas mixture is safe and plus theres the low power option! I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t safe! :)
  
  Chris Gowen on April 16th, 2011 at 8:53 pm said:
  
  “don’t worry I’m in advanced math…”
  
  famous last words, or Epic Maker Battlecry?
  
  Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:07 pm said:
  
  Haha!! No, not a battle cry and although that would be some funny last words, I know they won’t be!

Zak Dutton on April 16th, 2011 at 12:37 am said:

I want to build a system that will allow my washing machine to tweet. I am always forgetting about it, and sometimes my cloths smell because of it. With the kit I could create a way to let my washing machine remind me to put the cloths in the dryer via text.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:37 am said:

The Minimalist Oscilloscope 08M Project
http://Blog.MakeZine.com/archive/2008/11/the-5-oscilloscope.html

One day while doing some research on something or another on the Web, I came across a link explaining how to connect a MicroChip PIC to a Nokia Cell Phone LCD Screen. Sounded cool; I had been playing with PIC’s and PicAxe’s anyway and thought it was knowledge that would be useful someday. Then I found a Nokia 5165 Cell Phone at an Electronics Flea Market (http://www.FrostFest.com) for $1.00, and at that price, I couldn’t pass it up! I knew I could hook the LCD up, but wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do with it, when one day it struck me… PIC’s have an Analog Input (ADC) – I could make a very simple, little Oscilloscope! A “Minimalist Oscilloscope” – and thus The Minimalist Oscilloscope 08M Project was born.

Doing more research on the particular model of Nokia Phone I had (5165); I found this page (http://www.selbing.com/_jakob/electronics/nokia.htm) with a very similar model showing how to connect it up. I knew that soldering 0.05 inch pads and components (Surface Mount size) is very difficult from previous bad experiences, so I decide to use individual strands from 22 gauge stranded wire running from the circuit board pads to a 0.1 inch socket I had cut in half and epoxyed in place. Soldering was very frustrating; several times, while soldering one pad, I’d mess up the one next to it and have to redo it (one-step forward, one-step back.) Finally got everything soldered in place. That was with out a doubt the hardest part of the entire project!

After the most difficult part was over (soldering surface mount wires), the rest was fairly easy. I built a simple circuit on an experimenter’s breadboard, and made a simple program to test that I was interfacing to the LCD properly (amazingly, it worked first time!)

I built up the code until I had a system that would…
1. Wait for a Trigger at half the peak to peak of the signal on the rising-edge (Yes; it is a TRIGGERED Scope!), with a time out for when there is no signal
2. Take 42 measurements of the signal as fast as it can and store them in an array.
3. Display the measurements on the LCD Screen.

Yes; it really does work!
Check out these impressive specifications rivaling scopes costing twice the price (about $9 MSRP)…

* Vertical fixed at 5V full screen (or 0.5V per division, if it had divisions.)
* Horizontal Sweep fixed at (approximately) 43mS full screen when over-clocked at 8MHz (or 4.3mS per imaginary division.)
* Trigger fixed at 1/2 the peak-to-peak signal (with a time-out when there is no signal.)
* Non-portable (unless you want to carry my entire workbench some place.)
* Very Affordable (about $4.50; $3.50 for the PicAxe, $1.00 for the phone, everything else I had on hand.)
* Visible in Day Light (the LCD Backlight is not connected.)
* All Solid-State (using ultra-reliable E-Z Clip Technology.)

The Minimalist Oscilloscope 08M Project © Ken_S. 2007

Also listed at…
http://www.Electronics-Lab.com/blog/?p=2548
http://www.CircuitLake.com/pic-minimalist-oscilloscope-08m-project.html
http://www.StuartWoodward.com/items/view/768

Syd Carter on April 16th, 2011 at 12:37 am said:

The coolest micro-controller project I ever built is where I’ve interfaced with my home heating system, decoded the proprietary communication protocol, and now publish feeds on outside temp, inside temp, inside temp setting, indoor humidity, fan speed, etc to pachube. I now can check my feeds from my Android tablet, google homepage, or anywhere an internet connection can be found. I would love to migrate this into a compact Arduino project.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:37 am said:

I would also like to learn more about the arduino and make the secret knock gumball machine. My aunt is getting married and she basically xollects gumball machines so for a wedding gift I would love to make it for her, but again, don’t have an arduino or parts. So please give it to me. You would not only make me happy, but you would make my friend and my aunt happy. Thanks again, Gabe Gonzalez

Tim Mcknew on April 16th, 2011 at 12:38 am said:

So far the coolest (Arduino) thing I’ve put together has been a data logging (to SD card) charge process monitor for a portable LiPo battery. Inlcudes buffering and measurement of Vin, Vbatt, Icharge (through a protoboarded low-side current monitor amp) and charge controller status bits. Hoping to add variable load-matching (power point tracking) for use with solar panel as the power source…

iheartbiscuits on April 16th, 2011 at 12:50 am said:

My plan for the Arduino is to build a fully automated meat smoker… complete with multiple temp sensors (one for the fire, one for the meat), a water level sensor linked to a sump to add when low, and finally a servo powered hopper to add smoking chips. Once the meat hits the right temp, the entire kit-and-caboodle will send me an SMS!!

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 12:51 am said:

Currently I have a simple, 2x one-wire temperately monitor that displays on a 20×4 LCD. I want to turn it into a full, semi-automated brewing system.

Brandon Bigelow on April 16th, 2011 at 12:58 am said:

I’d like to find a way to add push notifications from just about every physical object in my life. From dishwashers and snail mail delivery, to doors opening and ovens being turned on. I’d like to incorporate all notifications into one interface for tablets and smartphones.

The snail mail push notifications really got my gears goin on this subject!

David Kavanagh on April 16th, 2011 at 12:59 am said:

I’m in the process of building a robot using a netbook and ATmega168 where the higher level functions are handled by the netbook and the lower level functions including simple navigation are handled by the ATmega. (Subsumption architecture). The whole robot will be used for telepresence since I work remotely.

Taylor on April 16th, 2011 at 1:10 am said:

I would love to make this stunning Arduino project composed of an LED probe that measures the wireless signal strength:

http://yourban.no/2011/02/22/immaterials-light-painting-wifi/

Max Baraclough on April 16th, 2011 at 1:11 am said:

My dream project is a plush parrot to sit on my son’s shoulder at Halloween. Noisy, interactive and glowing eyes – perfect company for the young pirate.

Adam Fisher on April 16th, 2011 at 1:12 am said:

I’m a home brewer and want to build a temperature control system to keep track of my brews while they are fermenting. The device will monitor the temperature of the fermenting beer and adjust the temperature to a predetermined set value. At the same time I want to give this device the ability to access a network so I can remotely change temperature set points, monitor current temperature and review temperature logs from the past several days.

Drew Aufhammer on April 16th, 2011 at 1:13 am said:

The coolest project i ever made with a microcontroller was my 3 axis cartesian robot made from a pile of broken old printers, some wood scraps, and an Arduino! Im building it into a Reprap, but also have plans to expand it to do CNC milling!

Eric Miller on April 16th, 2011 at 1:20 am said:

I’d like to help my son make whatever he wants. Probably a robotic trebuchet or something equally crazy.

jeffproe on April 16th, 2011 at 1:24 am said:

I have several micro-controller based projects in mind. But, my favorite is a high altitude balloon. There is just something cool about getting pictures and video from 100000+ feet! The Arduino can assist with tracking, control cameras, and log sensor data. Help me take pictures from an obscene altitude!

Austin Morgan on April 16th, 2011 at 1:30 am said:

I am currently building and automatic cat feeder that pushes the food up from the bottom of the bowl instead of dropping food from the top. This prevents stale food from accumulating. I was going to use a MSP430, but an Arduino would work also.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 1:43 am said:

@Eric Miller
I really hope you get it, of course I want it because it would be my first arduino, I could learn a lot, and I cannot afford it but I hope you win it because I am 14 and I know that if my Dad got me something like this and did a project like this with me, that would be awesome. I don’t you to think that my Dad doesn’t do anything with me, he does a lot actually, I am just saying from a kids point of view, that would be really cool to do that with him. Hey you should try out my project, an automatic tennis ball shooter! Its easy to make and the sketch is easy to! Its fully automatic, tons of fun, you can use a hobby box or a N64 controller like me, and the amount of power you put into it is adjustable as well!

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 1:45 am said:

My coolest so far was a GPS speedometer and data collector that collected data in a kml format for use with google earth. My dream project is replacing my motorcycle dashboard with a micro project. Tachometer from the ECU, Error messages from the ECU, Speed from the wheel and GPS, coolant oil and air temps. and configurable multifunction LCDs as the displays.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 1:46 am said:

i have ideas for the arduino like making the yobot for making yogurt with some simple parts and time i would love to have one to try making one

Todd Harrison on April 16th, 2011 at 1:49 am said:

I have a custom Arduino board project I shared including bonus steps at the end on how to program a blank ATmega168 or ATmega328 with your Arduino sketch directly from the Arduino IDE environment using an USBTinyISP programmer.
http://www.toddfun.com/2011/01/01/making-a-custom-arduino-board-to-hack-a-christmas-photo-frame/

Jason Bishop on April 16th, 2011 at 1:53 am said:

I have issues with water in my crawlspace and the sump pump is unreliable. I want to make a wireless sump pump controller with water level sensing, remote turn on/off and tracking number of gallons of water pumped out.

James Celichowski on April 16th, 2011 at 1:53 am said:

Have been looking at building a cnc router, plus looking into robotic projects with the kids.

James Celichowski on April 16th, 2011 at 1:53 am said:

Have been looking at building a cnc router, plus looking into robotic projects with the kids.

Christopher Maurice on April 16th, 2011 at 1:58 am said:

Considering the end date of the contest…

I could put together a “Grow-duino” to turn grow lights on and off, rotate/massage the plants, water the plants (perhaps based on the weight of the pot, or based on the conductivity of the soil), monitor energy usage, etc.

Jeri Lynn on April 16th, 2011 at 2:01 am said:

I’ve just started playing with arduino. My current goal started as a idea for an automatic fish feeder for when we go on vacation. Now my husband and I are talking about a training tool for the goldfish. Something along the lines of ‘turn on an LED, sense when the goldfish comes close to investigate, reward with food.’

Bill Fisher on April 16th, 2011 at 2:08 am said:

My clever plan involves a motor shield, an ethernet shield, and some buttons. The main purpose is to manage my login time at the office. The timeclock for my company is a fairly simple webapp. I would use the Arduino to log into the web server, scrape the data from the web app, then use the motor control shield to raise and lower flags that indicate to coworkers whether I’m clocked in or out. The buttons would be for me to actually clock in and out, using presets. I also would use an LCD to tell me how many hours I’ve worked this for the current day and current week.

DG C on April 16th, 2011 at 2:09 am said:

I am in the middle of planning an Arduino+Bluetooth project. The Arduino+bluetooth will detect the presence of my cellphone within a few feet of my front door. A touch-capacitance sensor will be connected to the Arduino through the door knob. When I touch the door knob the Arduino will activate a motor to unlock the bolt. Double-tapping the door knob will lock it. Keyless entry!

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 7:33 am said:

hmmm… if i’m not mistaken, that means that anybody who steals your phone, or even changes their bluetooth name to the same as yours, they could get in.
- Martin Hebrank on April 18th, 2011 at 8:59 pm said:
  
  How would that be different than someone stealing your house keys to get in? And, I imagine it would be a pairing setup so spoofing gets much harder. Breaking windows would be easier.

Russell Yarnell on April 16th, 2011 at 2:15 am said:

I want to automate my kid’s power wheels jeep.

Jeff Grundman on April 16th, 2011 at 2:23 am said:

My one and only microcontroller project so far is an automatic watering system for my hydroponic garden. Arduino Uno controls a 24V automatic sprinkler system valve through a relay circuit. Valve opening is based upon time since last watering and water level monitor. System includes controls to open and close valve manually as well. I just screwed it to the basement wall this evening.

Stephen F. Heil on April 16th, 2011 at 2:24 am said:

I want to add a MIDI interface to a 1950’s Chime-A-Tron.

JeepMcMuddy on April 16th, 2011 at 2:25 am said:

I am a new Arduino user, and would love to use one to control the lights and sounds for my scratch built aluminum Ghostbusters Proton pack-computer case I am building.

ian on April 16th, 2011 at 2:26 am said:

I’d like to make a wall next to the patio that you could play tetris on during warm summer nights.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 2:27 am said:

The coolest thing I’ve built so far was the Dotklok. Next on my list is building my own version of those 70s-type Aurora clocks (with the polarizing filters that makes the hands change colors with only white light).

Sean on April 16th, 2011 at 2:36 am said:

Why plan in advance when you can wait until the last second and then madly construct whatever exciting last-minute project idea just jumped to the top of the mental stack?

Shaun C. Butts on April 16th, 2011 at 2:41 am said:

I’d like to use the Arduino platform to teach my son about building, engineering and programming. The first project we’d build would be up to him, and his crazy little imagination. (It’s a safe bet, it’ll have something to do with Legos)

KarlF on April 16th, 2011 at 2:42 am said:

Would love to work with my sons school to build an Arduino High Altitude Balloon project to take some amazing edge of space pictures and measure altitude, temp, etc. Similar to Robert Harrison’s http://www.robertharrison.org/icarus/wordpress/ Icarus project. This would be a great start to that project, but designed for junior and senior high students.

Matt Crooks on April 16th, 2011 at 2:42 am said:

I would like to create a microcontroller based all grain brewing system that would control all steps of the process from starch conversion to pitching the yeast. I would use PID to control temperatures for the mash, sparge, boil and cooling of the wort. I would like to also create a mechanical system that would add hops to the boil at the appropriate times and transfer the beer through all the stages. All of this would be topped off with a web interface that would allow it to be monitored and adjusted remotely. I’ll trade you a future case of beer for this kit, thanks for the opportunity.

Matt Crooks

Christopher Favreau on April 16th, 2011 at 2:43 am said:

I would really like to complete a laser light show shield for the Arduino platform. It would be really cool to have a inexpensive simple open source way to control laser light show projectors.

Chris Gowen on April 16th, 2011 at 2:43 am said:

I’ve always wanted to build an underwater rover. I’m an arduino newbie, so I’d probably cycle through lots of useless robots to chase my dog first.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 2:46 am said:

I have built, and am in the process of improving, a time-lapse camera stand, using microcontrollers to both operate a camera motion system, and monitor and maintain soil moisture levels.

The first version of the motor controller used an old microcontroller module that I had in the junkbox, but its functionality is somewhat limited. It worked for a “proof of concept” sort of build, and I’m happy with the first-run time-lapse shots, but it needs to be improved for the next version. The controller monitors the camera’s activity, and advances a motor a set amount, in order to move the camera carriage incrementally between shots. I hope to use an Arduino board for the new version, as it has far more program capacity and I/O capabilities than the micro that the first prototype was based on.

The automatic watering system is based on an Arduino Diecimila unit. After some early difficulties with the soil moisture probe – the copper was completely eroded away due to electro-chemical reactions – I have a new version that seems to be working fine. It reads the soil moisture levels periodically, and when necessary activates a home-made metering pump that I constructed from junkbox parts, fish tank fittings, and an animal nursing syringe, to maintain the soil at just the right moisture level and keep the plants happy.

So far, everything’s been working well, and most importantly, I’m learning a lot and having a blast.

KarlF on April 16th, 2011 at 2:46 am said:

Would love to use one of these to teach an embedded after school class at my sons school. Even use it to experiment with some high altitude balloon experiments. Similar to Robert Harrisons Icarus project (http://www.robertharrison.org/icarus/wordpress/) or Project Space Planes (http://projectspaceplanes.com/page/2). Now that would be fun Maker stuff.

Tim on April 16th, 2011 at 2:50 am said:

I want to build a 5×5 rgb LED board to use to randomize color placement for Looney Pyramid games.

Brian Ng on April 16th, 2011 at 3:04 am said:

I’m a senior in college who is graduating in May with a BS in Economics that might be discovering a little too late where he’s SUPPOSED to be. After going through a DIY kick about a year ago when I was in a bit of a rut, I become addicted, so much so that I might have found my calling. While I have no experience with Arduino or even the language that’s used to program it, it seems like the next logical step from my own projects would be to move into Arduino use. What I would eventually like to be able to is buy and put together my own Thing-O-Matic and get to printing out trinkets I’ve drawn up, but it would probably be a good idea to know what I’m doing first. An Arduino Project Pack would be an EPIC kick-start in learning how far I can take doing-it-myself.

PS on April 16th, 2011 at 3:10 am said:

I’d like to create a sound and light juggling routine activated via bounce juggling.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 3:25 am said:

I have long been researching everything on Arduino and seen the documentary
Arduino story is surprising, as it started it all, I love the final draft
Free hardward. I am interested in a project with Arduino, on the game and Simon Says
One would like to do with Arduino Maker Shed With their Projects pack for Arduino
can realize my plans.
My name is Jorge Aranda Gonzales de Lima-Peru, facebook.com / JAGPIC

Victor Hugo Elizondo on April 16th, 2011 at 3:25 am said:

I love to make an Arduino based word clock as my first Arduino proyect. :3

Roland on April 16th, 2011 at 3:28 am said:

I used a Motorola 68HC11 in university for a design project to prototype an automatic buoyancy compensator for scuba diving.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 3:30 am said:

I perform ecological research focusing on species losses in bees. Our lab needs to track individual bees as they forage on artificial flowers. I think pairing arduino with rfid technology could help make this a reality.

Jeff Williams on April 16th, 2011 at 3:38 am said:

I’d like to design and build a wearable navigation system in a hat to provide a hands-off, heads-up method of finding one’s way without having to handle a GPS unit or look at a compass. Features would include a LED lightbar and possibly voice feedback, and in-the-brim buttons for input. A simple menu system would allow you to find cardinal compass directions via the lightbar, enter/select/go to waypoints, etc. and get distance/direction guidance from marked points.

All of this in an inconspicuous hat.

Arduino controlled, of course.

Jordan Burch on April 16th, 2011 at 3:39 am said:

I would like to build a news ticker fedora. The news would come from pairing with my android smart phone via bluetooth and display a scrolling feed on an array of discrete led’s embedded in the infamous hat.

Markus Laumann on April 16th, 2011 at 3:41 am said:

I’ve never built an Arduino project, but the coolest ones will be the ones I build with my young daughters.

Tyler Tufte on April 16th, 2011 at 3:58 am said:

Living here in Valley City North Dakota and dealing with a record flood along with a winter storm, my sump pumps have been running none stop. I have been dreaming of building something to monitor my pumps so I know how frequently they run and more importantly, if they fail. With a kid on the way, the cash is tight so winning this project would be so awesome!

Greg Scott on April 16th, 2011 at 4:27 am said:

I built an interface to control all my modifications I’ve done to my Commodore 128D. It uses a mega32, 40×2 char LCD, a couple of buttons, and couple of max 4066 switch chips. With the LCD and buttons I can cycle through the options and the built in nvram in the mega stores them. I put the outputs of the mega to the 4066 chips. Those chips are wired to the various mods. I can toggle the address lines on the multi-banked kernel eeproms to swap the kernels for 64 or 128 mode as well as the built in 1571. Like jiffydos, dolphindos, speeddos etc. I also have several custom autostarting function roms for 128 mode that are banked into a eeprom selectable from the LCD interface. There’s a few other odds and ends I added too like being able to toggle a couple of lines on the cartridge port, and the ability to reset the machine via the front panel.

I’m pretty sure there’s enough room left in the mega to add a track/sector/density display to the LCD for the built in 1571 drive as well as being able to control the write protect on the drive electronically instead of on the floppy itself. I’d use the arduino to do some more development on the ModCom128 as well as other projects. I’m planning on moving my 128 into a tower at some point too. My current dev setup is nothing more than a breadboard, a wallwart, and an old serial AVRISP heh

Jonathan Albert on April 16th, 2011 at 4:31 am said:

Being tone deaf, I want to build an autotuner for a guitar. Input will come from a disk piezo (that will pick up the vibration from the guitar) and the output will drive a servo motor to tune the guitar to the right pitch.

Justin Oliver on April 16th, 2011 at 4:36 am said:

I want to create an automated dog care system. Use the arduino to time feedings and keep fresh water available. Also control the dog door opened and closed times. All controlled via IP and viewed by a web cam.

Darryl Hover on April 16th, 2011 at 4:39 am said:

I used an Arduino to build a digital frequency interface for an old crystal controlled ham radio. The arduino controlled a DDS-60 digital oscillator, a tone generator for repeater control and a 16×2 display. I used an optical rotary encoder for changing frequencies and for navigating a menu system that allowed for 30 memory slots including an adjustable repeater offset and tones. I ran out of IO pins, so I had to make use of a bit shift IC. I obtained code from another radio operator as a starting point…mainly for controlling the DDS-60.

Angel Suarez on April 16th, 2011 at 4:55 am said:

My current project is to try and keep all my plants properly watered. It seems like I can’t keep plants alive very long. I either end up over watering, or under watering. I want to have a moisture sensor near my plants that will tell me exactly when they need water, and when they don’t. once I get that setup, I will be setting up a pump in my rainwater collection bucket to water the plants when they need it. I’ll be like a all you can drink plant buffet. They’ll just have to ask for the water, and they’ll get it. Hopefully by taking me out of the equation they will have a chance to stay alive longer.

Josh Halvorson on April 16th, 2011 at 5:08 am said:

I would like to explore building a quad-copter. It would be my first project :)

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 5:15 am said:

I’d like a kit to build a radiation detector and send it to my friends living outside the hot zone in Japan.
@genenoel

Matthew Sheets on April 16th, 2011 at 5:24 am said:

I would love to make a hot tub controller that is web controlled

Trevor Bugera on April 16th, 2011 at 5:27 am said:

In school, I used an HC11 kit to make a temperature control system for a shower. It controlled the water temperature and flow using stepper motors (all that I could recycle on my student budget.) My son keeps saying he wants to “make things, like robots” but my HC11 doesn’t work anymore.

Leigh Suggs on April 16th, 2011 at 5:28 am said:

I have always dreamed of integrating Arduino into my 1975 Honda CB550 four and then possibly using a RFID reader for automatic start, using a iPhone+Arduino for my tachometer and to drive my awesome hand made led turn signals.

Антон Т. on April 16th, 2011 at 5:56 am said:

my dream – is to build wireless “firefly swarm” of LED-light-cubes and one “master-cube” to switch the swarm on/off and to change the modes of the light-cubes. And the power of the “swarm” must also be wireless, TESLA-like ^_^

Now my best project – Arduino as a signal generator for Chladni plate (I build it for my design studies as a concept of a pattern clock)

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 6:03 am said:

Automated pH adjusor for spirulina tank.

Bhargav Gurlanka on April 16th, 2011 at 6:06 am said:

I’ve built a Wireless notice board in a week using the beautiful Arduino Environment. Also I’ve coded Digital Code Lock and Digital IC Tester. I dont want this to end here. I want to explore the UNO as well. Because of cost factor, I could not buy UNO. Hope I can get this giveaway….

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 6:12 am said:

I’d love to use an Arduino in an automated homebrewing device. There’s a variety of tasks that the device could greatly simplify, such as recording/tracking temperatures, and controlling the opening and closing of valves. Hopefully this would provide more time for the most important part: the drinking of the homebrew.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 6:13 am said:

I’d love to use an Arduino in an automated homebrewing device. There’s a variety of tasks that the device could greatly simplify, such as recording/tracking temperatures, and controlling the opening and closing of valves. Hopefully this would provide more time for the most important part: the drinking of the homebrew.

CVBruce on April 16th, 2011 at 6:13 am said:

Arduino controlled observatory.

Daniel on April 16th, 2011 at 6:31 am said:

I have created a arduino controlled device for use in healthcare simulation at a college that I work. The device runs over bluetooth and is controlled from my Android based phone. The phone sends serial data over a bluetooth connection to an enclosure that houses an Arduino/Bluetooth module/and 16×2 character display. The serial data is recieved by the bluetooth module and displayed to the lcd display for the students to see. My 7 year old son has now become interested in this hobby and we have started collecting parts to create an arduino based robot.

Larry James on April 16th, 2011 at 6:59 am said:

Built a Makerbot cupcake 3d Printer using Arduino based microcontroller. in the process of building a Prusa Mendel running Arduino/RAMPS. and would love to create/run and Ethernet/wifi connected atmospheric sensor network for co2/o2 (and other atmospheric conditions). that could be used in a DIY open source space suit (or re-breather) or enclosed habitation.

Kishore Kumar on April 16th, 2011 at 7:18 am said:

I want to build a image processor which works for sensing objects and track them.It is something similar to Microsoft Kinect minus the prebuilt algorithm which is hackable.The project which i intended to do is very unique and will be using an algorithm called Predator which is an Open Source and would like to enhance it by putting in a projector and make it a live project by connecting to the internet and would like to make it an augmented reality camera sort of stuff!i think i should deserve to win this Arduino because i never had a chance to do something big despite of having all kind of ideas.I wish i could win this.
Thank you.

R Hendery on April 16th, 2011 at 7:42 am said:

I built a little arduino project once that read my email inbox and lit an LED coded to correspond to the appropriate “danger” level of my unread mails. E.g. if they were mainly work-related and from people I disliked, the LED blinked red, while emails from people I love or with good keywords made it shade towards green. It led to epic procrastination whenever the light shone amber through to red, though…

isaac bristow on April 16th, 2011 at 7:54 am said:

I recently got access to all the material I could ever want for free and now I really want to build a small blimp. I want an arduino and a gps to do my steering on it though.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 8:17 am said:

Back in college I built an NTSC video generator and had 36 hours to do it. We had walked out on the first test in the class when the professor was an hour late, and he was stubborn, so we had to make up for it in a final weekend project. Bonus points for something tricky. Come to find out, analog video is pretty tricky to generate from scratch – figuring out output voltages, working out the timings, pseudocoding (for the first time ever in a project :) building out the board and… 36 hours later when I flashed my Arduino it worked right off the bat and I sat staring at the alphabet being displayed by this little protoboard on the TV for an hour. Felt great. Still got stuck with an A- from that guy… lots of others did egg timers, he did animated NTSC as “his” project (it was pretty slick). 5 years later and I’ve been recommending Arduinos to friends ever since who are all doing really neat projects (they’ll be along to comment shortly).

Eddie Groshev on April 16th, 2011 at 8:41 am said:

I dream of building a salt water reef heaven, for many kinds of corals and fish. It will include pumps controlled by a microcontroller to simulate waves. Not only that but it will have an array of leds lighting the tank. The microcontroller will control each individual led to simulate day, night, dawn, and dusk lighting patterns. It will also control a moonlight which will follow the real time moon cycle. I would like to program to controller to simulate cloudy days and clouds passing by, and full blown simulated thunderstorms with intensified wave patterns produced by the power heads. This is only the beginning!! There will be an automated feeding system, along with automated water changes, automated dosing of trace elements. Also temperature, ph, and salinity control through various probes attached to the microcontroller. The list goes on, the possibilities are endless!! Making this dream into a reality would be priceless!! =D

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 1:50 pm said:

I know just enough about reef tanks that I could murder a lot of very expensive animals.

You have your work cut out for you in a long term project and I wish you well. I hope you make a Web page for this project, I’d love to follow it.

Oh, and check out http://www.garf.org/index.shtml for parasite free, farm grown corals and reef janitors.

Malcolm Faed on April 16th, 2011 at 9:28 am said:

The coolest project I have made would have to be my self balancing scooter (ala Segway). Its always a hit an electric vehicle shows and at scout JOTA events. See http://members.optusnet.com.au/a4x4kiwi/scooter/ for construction details. The one I dream of is a self balancing unicycle. I have started gathering the necessary components already.

Balazs Simonyi on April 16th, 2011 at 9:57 am said:

I want to build a drift controller for my 1:10 4WD Subaru RC car. The steering will be controlled by the arduino depending of the two inputs: RC steering and side way acceleration.

Julian Myers on April 16th, 2011 at 10:14 am said:

I want to make an RFID dummy switch for my car. Something subtle hidden inside the dashboard. Maybe even tie the RFID into a home made key less entry.

Kurtis Foote on April 16th, 2011 at 11:17 am said:

The

Kurtis Foote on April 16th, 2011 at 11:18 am said:

The coolest microcontroller project I have ever built is a “Simon Says” game. As far as what I would like to build, my list is infinite.

Trent Fisher on April 16th, 2011 at 11:31 am said:

I’ve long had two ideas in mind: both of them small robotic/remote controlled vehicles with camera (preferably real-time) to explore places hard for me to get to. A boat to explore small streams which criss-cross this area, or a dirigible to do similar exploration.

I’ve never built anything of this sort, though I’ve always dreamed of it. Getting something like this might kick start the process. And perhaps my daughter will be interested in helping when she’s a bit older.

David Plassmann on April 16th, 2011 at 11:40 am said:

A friend and i want to create a “automated home” regulating the light and using as much sun light for that as posible.
We want to regulate it via the home network. Then we’ll be able to use eg a smartphone or a “smart tv” to make it dark when watching a movie or to turn on the light when one get’s home.

Scott House on April 16th, 2011 at 11:46 am said:

I would like to build a robotic lawn mower that could be adapted into a robotic snow plow for the winter.
It would get LOTS of use here.

Sky King on April 16th, 2011 at 11:53 am said:

I want to hook up the drink shield to the ignition to my car…Safety first!

Priit Heinsaar on April 16th, 2011 at 12:03 pm said:

I dont undertand, why my comment was removed????

Tavan Hendrick on April 16th, 2011 at 12:19 pm said:

I’m a still-wet-behind-the-ears newbie, so I’d mostly be happy to just get the friggen’ LED’s to blink. But I dream of making my own garage door opener security keypad, getting my 10 year old interested in electronics by making his own alarm system for his room (to keep his 7 year old sister out), and fun stuff like that.

Tomer Cohen on April 16th, 2011 at 12:29 pm said:

i’d like to create a controller that monitors the dumpiness of my plants and waters them when it reaches the right dumpiness.
it should be easy if i get my hands on a humidity censor, but i bet i’ll have to write my own driver for it… any way it sounds cool enough to try and it will be practical too.
hope to win :) later.

billy tobon on April 16th, 2011 at 12:37 pm said:

I want to build a little scouter that checks in in foursquare when finds a specific location!!!!

Greg Williams on April 16th, 2011 at 12:39 pm said:

I want to use an Arduino nano to make a homing beakon and locator for Easter. The beakon will go inside a plastic egg that I can hide in a super secret place. The kids will use the audio signal from the locator to find it!

Gord Christmas on April 16th, 2011 at 1:14 pm said:

I am coding an Ardweeny from Solarbotics.com to act as a Host serial device for my Makerbot Cupcake called Bubbles. I have debugged and written the code that sends commands to set the temperature on the extruder and heated build platform. As well as commands to Stop, Zero the temps, and also to print out numbered filenames from the SD card, all without a computer. The current version is running without any display and working great, an LCD is in the works to display all manner of information.

This is currently done using an 3 pin IR receiver that decodes the specific buttons that I press on an TV remote. I am working towards building several of these for testing purposes. I hang out on the #makerbot IRC as codeXmas, drop me a line if you are interested in trying it out.

PS, just added musical code so that there is audio feedback for almost everything, so you won’t even need to have an LCD.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 1:15 pm said:

I’m currently teaching my sons (and, to be honest, myself) a little electronics and I’ve been hoping to get into micro-controllers soon. This would be perfect for us to “get our feet wet”

Matthias Finding on April 16th, 2011 at 1:33 pm said:

I´d modify an RC car that it would be able to avoid obstacles.

John on April 16th, 2011 at 1:49 pm said:

The coolest microcontroller project I’ve worked used a BasicStamp microcontroller, a 2 axis accelerometer, and a bluetooth module integrated into a football helmet to determine the maximum head impact the player received during each play. A constant stream of accelerometer telemetry was sent via the bluetooth module to a laptop on the sidelines. The laptop, running a LabView program, would receive this data and graph the impact the player sustained, highlighting the maximum impact. This system would inform the coaches of the players status in order to flag the likelihood of serious concussions and injury.

Robert P on April 16th, 2011 at 1:53 pm said:

I want to automate the venting the fumes from my cat’s litterbox.

Derryl Cocks on April 16th, 2011 at 1:57 pm said:

A few years ago I saw a video of a guy that was able to control the flight controller in Google Earth with his bicycle using Sun Microsystem SunSPOT Java-programmable wireless sensors. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3QK1eu3q3E. The SunSPOT sensors are expensive! There’s also an app for android now. http://icruzn.com. I thought it would be cool to make an affordable version for the Arduino and in winter I’d be able to exercise inside on my bike with a trainer.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 2:00 pm said:

The coolest thing I’ve built with a microcontroller is a digital speedometer for my bike. It was built on a basic stamp 2 homework board that I stuck in an enclosure. The system counted the spokes as they passed in between an IRled and sensor taken from an old multidisc cd player, then did the math to give mph. The speed was displayed on a 2 digit 7 segment display that came from something else I’ve taken apart (an old stove I think). I would love to get into the Arduino world and pass my basic stamp to my kids to let them learn.

Daniel Gonzales on April 16th, 2011 at 2:00 pm said:

well after scrolling threw all above posts it would be usefull to build a “lame rehearsed comment filter ‘toggle” ho hum….

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 5:33 pm said:

know what you mean. wish I had one for douchey passive aggressive troll commenters.
- Daniel Gonzales on April 19th, 2011 at 5:43 pm said:
  
  sounds like you need a resentment filter

Colin Mitchell on April 16th, 2011 at 2:04 pm said:

I want to make a version of the old Intellivision Triple Action Biplanes game on Arduino. RAWR

Sayan Chakraborty on April 16th, 2011 at 2:24 pm said:

I have built a Parallax Propeller based electronic learning system that also moonlights as a karaoke system. More details here http://sayanc.net/portfolio/projects.html#intelelearn

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 2:41 pm said:

My son and I just started building Arduino projects, after the great tutorials in Make Magazine. We built a Ping Pong Ball Cannon which we demonstrated at his school yesterday. It uses the Make Compressed Air Rocket system to launch a ping pong ball from a tube. The angle of launch is automatically set by an Arduino, which measures the target distance (a plastic bin) with a PING sensor. It then solves the parabolic trajectory equation, sets the launch angle with a servo, and fires the cannon with a reed relay circuit. We had a great time – the 5th grade kids learned about a simple physics equation, and discovered that math is cool and fun. Now my son and I are both competing for our Arduino kit! We want to build more educational projects, and could use another. Thanks Make for introducing us (and a class of 5th graders) to the capabilities of Arduino. You’ve opened up a fun new world.

Benjamin Lowe on April 16th, 2011 at 2:43 pm said:

I really like all the new sound synthesis stuff going on in the digital and analog world, and how the two are used together. I’d like to explore the software and hardware side of synthesizers, and see how well the Arduino can handle different synthesis models. I’d start with and build on some other people’s work, like the Auduino, Piano Squealer Synth, Healer Synth (from MidiVox), etc. I’ll also look at other cool DIY synths on the market like the Meeblip and Shruthi-1.

The most exciting part of it for me would be to create new and different input methods besides just a typical keyboard or MIDI port. I think the project pack would be a fantastic start and primer to learning the basics and moving me further with this idea.

Ahmet Yıldırım on April 16th, 2011 at 2:57 pm said:

i want to make a segway with two drills controlled with arduino and a gyro.

Nick Eide on April 16th, 2011 at 3:08 pm said:

I’m not sure what we would build, too many options, but my son wants to autonomize (is that a word?) his three wheeled scooter.

Matthew McNamara on April 16th, 2011 at 3:12 pm said:

I’ve been wanting to put together a modular sensor logger for some time. Hopefully I can get to that soon.

Vinícius Nery Cordeiro on April 16th, 2011 at 3:20 pm said:

I’m working on a poker clock, where you can see all relevant information on displays, saving round structure in EEPROM and/or micro SD card, along others features.

Jessie Cahill on April 16th, 2011 at 3:29 pm said:

I would like to use it to build a motorcycle turn signal cancel for a vintage motorcycle. The original unit is discontinued and doesn’t work with LED turn signals. The original worked with a combination of a timer and distance. The arduino would work well for this. I might also use it to control a keezer conversion I am starting to house my homebrew. thanks, jc

Dave Keifer on April 16th, 2011 at 3:31 pm said:

I have a cool solar powered desk lamp I got from IKEA. But my desk doesn’t get enough sun. I want to use an arduino to point the solar panel at the sun and track it through the day so I can use my desk lamp.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 3:57 pm said:

A project I’ve wanted to do is to combine an infrared thermometer with a mechanical television setup to build an improved thermal imaging camera. The way the mechanical television works is that a motor spins a disk with a pattern of holes in it so that the sensor array is exposed one pixel at a time to the the subject.
The array in a mechanical tv is just a bunch of photo-resistors that measure the intensity of the light and record it for playback. I want to replace the photo-resistor with the sensor from a hand-held infrared thermometer.
For playback i would either have the arduino store the images or stream them directly to the pc where a processing sketch could be used to display the video.

Some challenges for this project would be controlling a large spinning disk to keep it at a constant velocity so the image remains stable. That would require a simple PID algorithm which the arduino could handle easily. Storing the image might require an sd card shield to store more than a few frames at a time. Another option for this would be external eeprom. The slow refresh rates of the IR sensor may require the frame rate to be dropped from a standard mechanical television or to lower the resolution. Mech TV was usually maximum 320×240 but I could lower that by 2 maybe and still get an image that is recognizable.

Ian Beringer on April 16th, 2011 at 3:59 pm said:

Recently I saw a cool project on instructables called “Garduino”, where a Arduino controlls the water and light supply to your plants based on sensor data. When I saw this post it suddently came back to my mind. I wanted to build this because I have some plants but I forget sometimes to water them :)
I never had an Arduino, so it would be my first project.

Ken Garlock on April 16th, 2011 at 4:00 pm said:

using my experience teaching disney bus drivers, helping them get the dot and experience 2 drive disney orlando,, and years at westinghouse, honeywell, smiths aerospace, etc, i dream of building a prototype similar to an odd refrence in star trek on a blind woman with a beaded sensor dress: with modern proximity sensors, i worked with someone from caltech, who first developed the first prox sensor for weapons during wwII, said he couldnt patent his second use on a car hooked to his brakes, making it impossible to hit anything, his invention would have by now saved more lives than WWII cost. i wish to do this in his memeory for use on bicycles, as belt for blind, on wheelchairs, cars, boats ,, planes,, anything that moves, including as a memorial 2 a fellow disney monorail driver and personal ffriend this would have saved. thank you.

Ken Garlock on April 16th, 2011 at 4:00 pm said:

using my experience teaching disney bus drivers, helping them get the dot and experience 2 drive disney orlando,, and years at westinghouse, honeywell, smiths aerospace, etc, i dream of building a prototype similar to an odd refrence in star trek on a blind woman with a beaded sensor dress: with modern proximity sensors, i worked with someone from caltech, who first developed the first prox sensor for weapons during wwII, said he couldnt patent his second use on a car hooked to his brakes, making it impossible to hit anything, his invention would have by now saved more lives than WWII cost. i wish to do this in his memeory for use on bicycles, as belt for blind, on wheelchairs, cars, boats ,, planes,, anything that moves, including as a memorial 2 a fellow disney monorail driver and personal ffriend this would have saved. thank you.

Eric on April 16th, 2011 at 4:16 pm said:

How can anything I suggest compete with an Arduino-controlled light-up bustier? Alas, my project is to expand the instrumentation at my house for creating an open-source/open-hardware energy and comfort monitoring system. I know there are others doing it elsewhere, but some of the instrumentation I’ve already installed is different than what I’ve seen.

Ben Phipps on April 16th, 2011 at 4:16 pm said:

I would like to use the arduino as the controller for an entry in the MAKE Volume 27 Robot Contest!

Jeffrey LaCaze on April 16th, 2011 at 4:17 pm said:

I would like to build a self watering system for my avocado tree. I planted my tree about a year ago when I started college and between work and school I forget to water it some times. I want to build a monitoring system that will check soil moisture level. Whenever the moisture level gets low it will also water the tree with no help from me.

Jake Tarren on April 16th, 2011 at 4:34 pm said:

I’v always wanted to build an ROV, but never had the money.
Hopefully this would help get me started

Jake Tarren on April 16th, 2011 at 4:35 pm said:

I’v always wanted to build an ROV, but never had the money.
Hopefully this would get me started.

Max Mackie on April 16th, 2011 at 4:43 pm said:

I’m looking for an arduino to use for my University final year project. I’m building a robot that will go through a maze to find a lit candle and blow it out. Thanks

Stijn Martens on April 16th, 2011 at 4:50 pm said:

My coolest project was a robot that tapped on my iPod to play a game (Coin Dozer) so I leveled up very fast :) I attached a servo to a little arm that moved up and down.

Gregg Higham on April 16th, 2011 at 5:17 pm said:

I’ve been thinking of making a Cylon Eyes display with 33 or more multicolor LEDs that not only follows people in a room but also changes color based upon weather data from a Wifi weather station or weather information from the web.

Scott Haley on April 16th, 2011 at 5:39 pm said:

My favorite microcontroller project was building a “flight” recorder for a tractor back in college.
It monitored RPM, and torque against time.
Scott
kd5njr@gmail.com

Helgi Magnusson on April 16th, 2011 at 5:40 pm said:

I used to live in Iceland. I’d like to use Arduino to control heating and windows in a house so that rooms that are not being used are not heated during the night or when no one is in the home. The windows should only be open for a short while during the day when the temperature is highest.
In hotter climates it could be turned around.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 5:40 pm said:

I started walking to work in the morning recently but I have to leave pretty early and it’s still pretty dark outside. Most of the walk is through commercial areas and drivers don’t really seem to be expecting pedestrians so early. I’d like to make something with LEDs that can’t be missed.

Jae Stutzman on April 16th, 2011 at 6:03 pm said:

I live in the south where our soil is constantly moving under our foundations. I’m currently working on an automated foundation watering system that takes into consideration soil moisture not just time. The goal is to keep the soil’s moisture content as consistent as possible throughout the year. It will log measurements and actions to an SD card for historical data and to help in fine-tuning run time.

Sharon Johnson on April 16th, 2011 at 6:16 pm said:

My family and I all want to work together to make an in-home planetarium.

Anonymous on April 16th, 2011 at 6:53 pm said:

My idea is to make a birdfeeder that snaps pictures of birds and other animals when they set off a sensor and forward the pics to my phone. Should also monitor the amount of feed still left and alert me when the feeder needs refilling.

Jimmy Crist on April 16th, 2011 at 7:05 pm said:

For my Intro to engineering course we each had to build an arduino project that “Did something interesting for 30-60 seconds, with no human involvement once started”. With such an open assignment, there were some really interesting projects.
For mine, I built a pinball machine that played itself. IR beams were used to detect the balls position and time the flipper mechanism to go just when the ball was in range. There was another sensor that detected if the ball went through the gate, which would trigger the plunger to launch the ball again for another round. ‘Twas a really fun project to build:)

malcolm stanley on April 16th, 2011 at 7:19 pm said:

My seven year old, autistic, daughter is fascinated/obsessed with butterflies.
for her grade 1 class robot project, we made an arduino butterfly:
http://soaringhorse.blogspot.com/2011/03/arduino-butterfly.html

she was really disappointed because, given the time constraints we had, we could not make the wings work. I’d love a second shot at that with her…

Katie Johnson on April 16th, 2011 at 7:33 pm said:

I would make a miniature Dalek from Doctor Who. It would shout “exterminate” and zap you.

Colleen Johnson on April 16th, 2011 at 7:36 pm said:

I’ve already made a LEGO robotic K9 from Doctor Who, and I want to give him a voice. “Affirmative, master!” “Maximum defense mode!”

Daniel on April 16th, 2011 at 7:43 pm said:

I am working on an automated bartender, because let’s be honest how many people actually want to mix their own drinks while at home? Very few. It will be utilizing multiple inline water pumps equipped with Tygon tubing and a system of of tubing similar to a multiplexer that allows for one liquid input (from a total of 32+) to flow at a time, all controlled by the microcontroller. Once the drink ingredients have been poured into the cup, a stirring mechanism will help in mixing the drink and then the drink is ready to be consumed!

Anthony Potts on April 16th, 2011 at 7:47 pm said:

I have 4 kids who are pretty bright and would like to teach them about robotics. I would personally like to make an arduino micro-brew so that I could relax after a day of work and trying to help raise previously mentioned brood.

Tom Jin on April 16th, 2011 at 7:49 pm said:

Control a laser diode.
*PEW PEW PEW*

Dileep Reddy on April 16th, 2011 at 8:08 pm said:

I’d design and implement a “Haunted Streetlamp” at my University. It’d be a proximity-detector Plus Giant-Inductor attachment to any streetlamp. It’d cause the Streetlamp to flicker specific uncanny patterns when ever someone is walking by. If the entire attachment comes out to be cost effective, I’d build several to haunt an entire street. I’d be awesome for a Halloween Hack.

Matt Robertson on April 16th, 2011 at 8:09 pm said:

I want to build an automated windowfarm project, and post the schematics and plans. I’ve draw up the wiring diagrams, but I need an Arduino to control it. It will have light, temperature, and moisture sensors to make sure all the environmental factors are adequate for the plants. Then it will use a series of relays to power lights and water pumps. I want to add an ethernet shield to tweet it’s progress, and let you know when you need to add water.

Additionally I would like to add pH monitors and other to control proper nutrient balance.

durgis on April 16th, 2011 at 8:45 pm said:

Had a college course on robotics, we did an obstacle avoidance light sensing robot. It would search for the nearest light source, and then avoid lines until it arrived at the source.

James Seymour on April 16th, 2011 at 9:09 pm said:

Well we built a simple setup that monitored temperature and light and actuated a (cocktail) umbrella and/or started a fan (sort of a self-preserving micro-controller) for a class I had… I would love to build a system to launch a ball over the back of the couch for my Yorkie, my arm gets tired.

nathan dotz on April 16th, 2011 at 9:09 pm said:

My co-worker put a fantastic arduino-based display in our front window which reproduces any color held to its photosensor in DMX lights. Naturally, I now have to show him up by making a rockin’ set of colored par-cans that sync to our office stereo system using 5 band-pass filters to trigger the lights, to further amuse our passerby.

Juan Cubillo on April 16th, 2011 at 9:18 pm said:

I’d LOVE to build the wifi jammer that Lady Ada made. IIRC the jammer would block everyones WiFi signal except your’s so u could steal all the bandwidth for urself. <3 that project.

Matt Rodriquez on April 16th, 2011 at 9:21 pm said:

My kids and I have been working on an automated, solar powered, wifi enabled chicken coop door. Most of our tinkering so far has been with motion sensors and basic programming of microcontrollers.

Jeremie Santos on April 16th, 2011 at 9:22 pm said:

I built a 12″ diameter x 6″ high 2 wheeled Line following robot that IR Sensors, wall detection using Ping ultrasonic sensors. another IR LED to trigger an external target as described in the Senior Project in my College course.

Next planned projects: Automated home lighting system (based in what room someone is in), Car under body RGB dancing lighting system, Custom DIY CNC, 3D RGB LED cube, RC vehicle

ps, sorry if this is a repeat post, as i have not seen the previous one posted

Joshua D. Johnson on April 16th, 2011 at 9:31 pm said:

I’d like the kit so I can prototype an invention I have been working on. Basically an Open Source Vehicle diagnostics and datalogging system for older vehicles ( Pre-OBD I ) I have a vintage Land Rover and I am never sure why certain things are going on. This would include tachs in several places, thermistors, etc. etc. this device would later evolve to where it would control certain aspects of the vehicle and make older machines more efficient. The design would also include criteria for retrofitting to other types of vehicles including motorcyles,, boats and aircraft as well as the specification and layout of wires.

JOSH ObjectsUnlimited (at) Gmail (dot) com

flemming jensen on April 16th, 2011 at 9:49 pm said:

I would like to build
– a controller for a 3D laser-scanner. (object rotation and laser sweeping)
– a controller for my electric coffeeroatser, making it possible to choose different roastingprofiles
– a wireless weatherstation where the power for the outdoor unit is coming from suncells

Chris Von Richard on April 16th, 2011 at 10:14 pm said:

I was doing a food battery experiment with my students and even though we were producing enough voltage (checked with a volt meter), we couldn’t light an LED. I started working on an arduino project that would allow me to measure voltage from a food battery and fire off a lighting sequence when a desired voltage was input. The lesson moved on, and now I have other experiments to do, but when the subject comes up again next year, i will continue my efforts.

this guy on April 16th, 2011 at 10:31 pm said:

My son and I built Scream Activated Lighting ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nQCCQMOdto ) for his Egg Baby’s condo, and accomplished it for considerably less than $12M per room. We gave it a few different modes, and included a Bitchen Disco for good measure. It was fun developing a goofy project for a change. Next is to replace the white LEDs with Triacs and wire up his room. He want’s to put it in his truck as well; I doubt the DOT will go for it.

Littleting Jarusriboonchai on April 16th, 2011 at 10:37 pm said:

I am an interaction design student. I am now working on my thesis about how technology can bring family members together, and I think that using tangible interaction along with embodied interaction can motivate and engage activities between family member rather than each members just stuck in their own little world of social mediated or self-entertainment. Arduino would be the technology would be one approach that I can use in implementing tangible and embodied interaction. I myself have never implemented anything with Arduino, but really would like to give it a shot. I would like to become interaction designer after I graduate, and Arduino is one of the technology that is widely used in within this field. Being able to have a real touch and work on it would benefit my future career a lot. :)

Joseph on April 16th, 2011 at 10:52 pm said:

My Arduino project idea is to build a device that turns on the kitchen faucet when my cat, Thomasina, wants a drink. Now when she wants water, she jumps up on the counter and alternately meows, looks at the faucet,then at me until I turn on the tap. The Arduino will use a sensor (touch, or motion) to actuate a solenoid that will turn on the flow of water. The Arduino will allow me to program in a delay to allow Thomasina to have a long drink before shutting off. The device will save water since I now sometimes forget to turn off the water. I can expand the project by calculating the flow of water and the time that the faucet is on so I can find out how much Thomasina is drinking, which is a good way to monitor her kidneys. The device can also be used to allow me to turn on the water when my hands are dirty. I’ve seen many interesting projects, so I’m sure that to decide who gets the kit will be a tough decision. Thanks for the opportunity.

Nathan Llewellyn on April 16th, 2011 at 11:11 pm said:

I dream of building a CNC lathe using an Arduino to control it all. I’m not quite sure how I’ll make it, but winning this will give me some extra motivation to learn how!

Garry Annibal on April 17th, 2011 at 12:32 am said:

I want to say “hello world” for the first time

Vance Rutherford on April 17th, 2011 at 1:02 am said:

I actually have not yet built a microcontroller project yet, but haven been wanting to get into the hobby, and have especially wanted to build a project with my son. I’ll be honest – I would probably take a look at the different projects we could build, and let him choose one!

Chad LaFarge on April 17th, 2011 at 1:12 am said:

I’d love to use an Arduino to log performance statistics of three different low-cost solar water heater designs. I could compare the results and rate the performance of each design.

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 1:38 am said:

I want to make an electronic cuckoo clock.

tinyenormous on April 17th, 2011 at 1:46 am said:

I happen to be enamored of the powder printing repraps lately. Those are looking really cool!

MakerBlock on April 17th, 2011 at 2:33 am said:

Dream Arduino Project: Lawn water sprinker that would squirt people whose dogs poop on my lawn. :)

Tom James on April 17th, 2011 at 3:07 am said:

I want to make an automated camera shuttle for making RTI and photogrammetric images for use in archaeological contexts.

Benjamin Daniel on April 17th, 2011 at 3:09 am said:

I dream of building a quadrotor. A flying project is pretty advanced and there are a lot of awesome things you can do with it. You can put a camera or other sensors on it, have it pick up or shoot things, move in complex ways. Plus, there are a lot of people who have made quadrotors, so it’s not out of reach. And being able to move something through space is a really cool idea.

Seth Gover on April 17th, 2011 at 3:54 am said:

Currently working on an arduino data logger for an art class :)

David Miya on April 17th, 2011 at 4:04 am said:

i want to make an animatronic dog kicking machine similar to the punch measuring machines you see in bars. i want to use multiple pressure sensors to give a reasonably detailed analysis of your dog-kicking prowess. it would also have audio feedback from light whimpers to gurgling and cracking noises. the readout would also give a humorous observation about your willingness to kick animals. it would cost ~$1 per use. you know you’d play it at least once.

David Busch on April 17th, 2011 at 4:16 am said:

A wearable ECG microcontroller that transmits its data via bluetooth/wifi to your smartphone and is then stored on the web.

Steve Robillard on April 17th, 2011 at 4:21 am said:

I spend a lot of time in bed watching tv, listening to my ipod and using my computer. As a result I am constantly swapping headphones and ear buds – which get tangled and twisted; so i am building a headphone mixer with vu meters and a headphone amp section. Should make live a little easier.

Daniel Peikes on April 17th, 2011 at 4:35 am said:

My friend and I are both Android fanatics. We would like to turn his basement into an Arduino/Android controlled man cave. It would include an RFID door lock, an electric bartender, a CNC machine, and a jukebox.

Jaime Lozano on April 17th, 2011 at 4:51 am said:

My dream project is to completely automate my farm with remote sensors for pH, soil moisture, rainfall, TDS nitrogen, etc to control several crops. Also be able to manage an energy distribution system using eolic, solar and hydro power sources. Furthermore, an Arduino controlled system for managing cattle and other species in extended pastures through the installation of RFID chips on every animal.

Best regards

Jaime Lozano
jaimelozan@gmail.com

Jaime Lozano on April 17th, 2011 at 4:52 am said:

My dream project is to completely automate my farm with remote sensors for pH, soil moisture, rainfall, TDS nitrogen, etc to control several crops. Also be able to manage an energy distribution system using eolic, solar and hydro power sources. Furthermore, an Arduino controlled system for managing cattle and other species in extended pastures through the installation of RFID chips on every animal.

Best regards

Jaime Lozano
jaimelozan@gmail.com

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 5:16 am said:

Looking to make a few project. A wireless drip watering timer with building web server. A bicycle computer for my bike. Non of the commercial cycle computer do everything I want. And finally, use the adrunio as a controller for a Mantis CNC mill to make circuit boards :-)

Andrew H on April 17th, 2011 at 5:22 am said:

Multi-Stage Coil Gun

Len Pelletier on April 17th, 2011 at 5:46 am said:

I’ve never built anything using a microcontroller, but i am a teacher and I’d love to have one of these to learn more about electronics and give it to my geniuses to experiment with.

Giulio Santini on April 17th, 2011 at 6:05 am said:

This is still a nascent idea, but being a car enthusiast / programmer, and a big fan of all things open source, I’d really like to build an open-source ecu around something resembling an arduino, a cheap, freely available microcontroller that could easily be modified to run on various engine types and to control different engine components. It would just be really excellent to offer something like this to the automotive community. Imagine being able to interface with your ecu in real time without really expensive software! Just grow your own ECU readout/command GUI and get it to interface with the arduino. Snap. GTRs for the rest of us :p

Nick Bontrager on April 17th, 2011 at 6:13 am said:

after reading all of these comments I feel like mine is way low on the technical side… but my most recent use of the arduino was to program speed/motor control on a brushless dc plane motor/propeller for an art installation. the tricky part was running 3 phase AC through a rotating connection, I used a stereo 1/4″ audio jack with amazing results. video of the first test here: http://vimeo.com/21542379

Dma on April 17th, 2011 at 6:33 am said:

I am 17 years old and did some projects with BS2 microcontroller and with PIC 16F877a. Some of the projects involve control of servo motors, BS2 Data logger, and constructing RF link for data communication. arduino seems to be more versatile than using BS2 or PIC chips to construct control systems.

Dan Walker on April 17th, 2011 at 6:40 am said:

I programmed an arduino to read commands from the serial interface that are translated into RGB intensities on RGB LEDs connected to the PWM outputs. I also wrote a simple python library to send appropriately formatted commands.

I have the controller connected to my fileserver/htpc in the living room and I plan on using the setup as an ambient information display to show information about the weather and the status of my home network.

Justin Metz on April 17th, 2011 at 7:03 am said:

new maker here… just want to get a head start on things so i can teach my 8 month old the ropes when he gets older.

Sudar on April 17th, 2011 at 7:20 am said:

I have created a project using Arduino called iAndroidRemote. It allows you to control the music playing in an Android phone using an Apple remote. More details at http://sudarmuthu.com/arduino/iandroidremote

chris lindsay on April 17th, 2011 at 7:50 am said:

If I win the Arduino kit l, I plan to use it as a control platform for submersibles outfitted with sample collecting & environmental sensors, to deploy in the Gulf of Mexico for monitoring the “cleanup” of the latest oil spill.

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 8:02 am said:

I would love to build an arduino powered RepRap (reprap.org), theremin, and home light, power and audio/visual centralised control system. then there’s an arduino powered hazard-detection robot that monitors gases like CO, CO2, methane, ozone, etc. with a smoke detector that logs these levels to an SD card while prowling the house and transmitting live video to a password-protected web interface. next an arduino powered ‘hive’ of cube-shaped robots that wrk together to make various shapes. and maybe an arduino project that uses bluetooth to automatically sync my phone with an SD card in case I lose it or break it. then an arduino powered remote for the computer to do functions like go to a website, start a slideshow, write an email… which reminds me, an arduino powered status monitor of something that emails me the results or an arduino powered stock exchange monitor that displays it on a charlieplexed LED display. these are ideas that have been stewing in my head for a while, it’s good to have a chance to let them out. oh, and one last one. an arduino mini-computer that interprets input from a usb keyboard then displays it on an LCD display, allowing you to save files to an SD card.

Mattia Cacciotti on April 17th, 2011 at 8:20 am said:

I haven’t got particular project in my dreams…i just would like to start with Arduino and join the Revolution! :)

Tom Cryer on April 17th, 2011 at 10:47 am said:

My cat has FIV, and hence isn’t allowed outside. For the sake of giving him some exercise and brighten up his day, I’ve always wanted to build a motorised feeding bowl, that I can hide in a corner somewhere, and will then try and run away from the cat once he finds it. The bowl is covered to begin with. Navigation can be ultrasonics – it doesn’t need to know where it’s going, just move quickly. Once the cat catched up with it and gives it a good smack on top with his paw, it’ll stop and open the cover.

Mycroft Milverton on April 17th, 2011 at 11:55 am said:

I have completed “Radio Arduino”. Ultimately it will house the Edge Hill Oral History Archive to be displayed at Metal, Edge Hill Station, the worlds oldest train station still in use today. Hopefully people will enjoy listening to the archive using traditional radio controls on a portable device!

Pictures and Video at http://mycroftmilverton.me.uk/memoirs/?p=1364

Brad Gardner on April 17th, 2011 at 12:23 pm said:

currently working on a arduino controlled cnc router.

Ori Lahav on April 17th, 2011 at 12:51 pm said:

A simple wireless computer controlled vehicle.

mike manlief on April 17th, 2011 at 12:59 pm said:

My girlfriends cats are always scratching at the bedroom door when we are in there sleeping. I plan on making a PIR sensor controlled water gun that will shoot them every time they come near our door.

Matt Henry on April 17th, 2011 at 1:01 pm said:

My project will be to work through the projects in Make: 25!

Laura Wickesberg on April 17th, 2011 at 1:28 pm said:

My upstairs neighbor is driving me crazy vacuuming 4 times a day, I want to set up a series of microphones and speakers to activate and record the noise he makes when he vacuums and play it all back at him.

Jon Johnston on April 17th, 2011 at 1:35 pm said:

I would like use an Arduino controller to make an internet-enabled cookie jar. When someone reaches in to take a cookie, it takes a picture and posts who got caught with their hand in the cookie jar. When all the cookies are gone, it posts sad lonely messages asking for someone to bake more cookies.

Samuel Penning on April 17th, 2011 at 2:26 pm said:

I am envisioning an inverted pendulum bot to chase the cats around the house. It could be equipped with a laser pointer mounted on servos to further increase the amusement factor during play.

Jason Trujillo on April 17th, 2011 at 2:45 pm said:

I will use Arduino to interface my recycled netbook, constructed dual manipulators and an analog image making device (details withheld intentionally) to create an interactive human/machine Artmakerbot. Human interaction with the electro-mechanical device (touch, proximity) will inform the Artmkerbot what the subject is and it will produce a temporal image that is an interpretation of that particular point in space time. Servo control, usb interface and requisit flashing LED (so you know its a robot) will be incorpated from the brilliant Arduino project pack.

Elizabeth Perry on April 17th, 2011 at 3:17 pm said:

The coolest thing I’ve built with a microcontroller was an art installation called “Shy Camera – Camera Shy,” which involved a web cam that used IR and servomotors to turn AWAY from anyone who approached it. It also used a Processing sketch to abstract the video feed, which was then projected.

I would love to use Arduino to control a board game where felted wool game pieces with embedded electronics would complete circuits and light LEDs, depending on a combination of player choices and random factors…

I’m a teacher, so I’d share what I learned with the middle school girls I teach. And of course I’d also share with everyone else, via Instructables and my blogs.

Alexandre B A Villares on April 17th, 2011 at 3:18 pm said:

I would like to create an Arduino controlled laser projector to “write on walls” POV style.

ShimmerGeek on April 17th, 2011 at 3:27 pm said:

I’m learning to play Roller Derby. You have to pass around fifty tests in order to be able to play (since it’s a dangerous sport, in addition to all the pads – you need to be able to trust that the other skaters are competent and safe – hence the tests!)

One of them is known as ’25 in 5′ – you need to skate 25 laps in 5 minutes. We practice this sometimes, and sometime ’10 in 2′ (I think you can guess!)

I’d love to use the Arduino for measuring my pace around the track, and checking how consistent it is – which points on the track am I slowest? Where am I fastest? Do I take a while to get going? Or do I really slow down near the end?

This would let me (and my teammates) figure out our weaknesses to get better faster! :)

Jason Rogachesky on April 17th, 2011 at 4:53 pm said:

I’d make a “little black box” for sky divers. Would record all their axis changes via 3-axis accellerometer, include a transmitter to aid locating them if they are blown off course, remote audio (voice) record.

Maybe this could save some future lives if it helps skydivers identify malfunctions accurately. Might also give a way for a sky diver to communicate any last thoughts. It has tremendous potential for feature inclusion. Auto chute deployment, intercom between divers, etc…

If nothing else divers would wear it because it would allow them to “replay” their dive in modeling software for posterity and skills improvement.

Ernesto Martinez on April 17th, 2011 at 5:12 pm said:

Looking at all the comments I feel stupid against all this engineering geniuses. I just want to learn how to use and program Arduinos, guess I will go and buy my kit.

Turbo the Mechanical Ape on April 17th, 2011 at 5:13 pm said:

I am going to start an environmental school club next semester in the philanthropic and tech-savvy spirit of N. Tesla. The plan is to host workshops that are free to the community. We will have pre-made bags of supplies to build the contraption-of-the-day, mostly for parents to bring their kids and get them interested in electronics at an early age, but open to everyone. The environmental part comes in by teaching the local community about how they can save power and be tech-savvy, such as helping white-wash roof tops, building heaters for during the winter out of recycled window frames, tin cans, and a dryer tubes. We wish to build cheap solar panels and use Arduino’s to regulate them, and give them back to the community. A college is right across the street, so there is no limit to the interested people (or free beer cans we can recycle!), but we could definitely use a free kit to use for demonstrations!

Matthew McCallum on April 17th, 2011 at 7:34 pm said:

I want to try make a wireless musical instrument!

Rock Afella on April 17th, 2011 at 7:51 pm said:

Because my dream is to make this* wifirobot, that the ever so clever John Bennett [JBprojects.net] created. It’s a dream for a tinkerer like me. :D

*http://www.jbprojects.net/projects/wifirobot/

edward on April 17th, 2011 at 8:22 pm said:

I want to make a Robotic Arm that responds to Light Emission. Basically i would program the arduino to get data from a video camera. The data in this case frames, would be analyzed by detecting the object change in the frames. The robotic arm would be controlled by the arduino by using the (x,y) coordinates gotten from the light emission. Then the arm would move wherever the light moves.

Anonymous on April 17th, 2011 at 9:36 pm said:

No clue. I’d give it to my soon to be 12 year old son for his birthday. His grandfather, a retired engineer, is coming out to visit a month later, so they could make something together.

Ahmed Sammoud on April 17th, 2011 at 11:55 pm said:

What I really want to do with this kit is to be able to experiment if I can build a self managing robot controller which can decided based on sensor data and other robots in a team (of other robots) on what to do to accomplish a certain task. although this idea requires a lot of hardware/Software, but always big things start with small steps, Right :).
I always wanted to try this kit, but due to some reasons I couldn’t.

larabair on April 18th, 2011 at 12:01 am said:

My current dream – to set up a tweeting water level sensor for my sump pump, so next time it spills over I don’t get everything in the basement soaked in water again. >_< And maybe it can also detect when the temperature goes to freezing so we know the sump pump might die.

Coolest project so far – I taught my Mintduino to detect light and blink LEDs. Whee!

Harold J. Soto on April 18th, 2011 at 12:32 am said:

My friend and me are working on a college final project to end this semester, we are using an Arduino Uno for this. It consists of a product for photographers, with this product the photographer can take high speed of drops. We are gonna use a 4 x 4 keypad and a LCD as interface. What you basically will have to do is, in the keypad, enter the time you want to wait for the drops to fall and take the picture. You will have a second option to let fall a second drop, within the time you want, so you can capture that splash effect of 2 drops splashing each other. We are studying Telematics Engineering in PUCMM, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic., we are on 2 year and we hope you like the project we are working on. :D

Patrick Bolen on April 18th, 2011 at 12:46 am said:

I would think that using my arduino and motion sensors I would make a dragon puppet that would move it’s head towards someone who is moving in it’s line of sight.

Scott Taschler on April 18th, 2011 at 1:22 am said:

Currently finishing up a VU meter LED belt. I will be easy to spot at the club! :-)

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 1:33 am said:

Drum machine!

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 1:33 am said:

Drum machine!

Jonathan White on April 18th, 2011 at 1:34 am said:

Used a Freescale HCS12 to build a Smart Shower System. It took in user pressure and temperature inputs.

Troy Davis on April 18th, 2011 at 1:38 am said:

Cool! I would love to use one of these to construct a light beam alarm to let me know when my kid gets out of bed and leaves his room!

karthik on April 18th, 2011 at 2:08 am said:

I actually put some books and my PSP UMD’s there and all my favorites stuff in that shelf which is covered by glass. So, I want to make a lock which opens with a unique code plus a finger print scanner attached to it. It opens only if both the code and fingerprint matches. If either of them doesn’t match, the camera will take a snap and transfer it alng with the timings to the laptop via Bluetooth and I don’t want to turn on a alarm because somebody in my house may try to open that. I want to try all of this with an arduino.

Jonathan Lowe on April 18th, 2011 at 3:44 am said:

I’ve been pondering a microcontroller project for a while that would control a 19 x 19 grid of 3 led cells that would display the data in sgf (Go game record) files. In short, I want to build an led Go board that can display the classic games of the masters. If I get that working, I’ll look into adding touch-pads to make a working electronic board, to play my own games.

Gary Francis on April 18th, 2011 at 3:59 am said:

I’m designing an interactive lightbox/activity thing (not sure what to call it) for my son and other kids w/ Cortical Visual Impairment (CVI). There aren’t a whole lot of items for kids w/ CVI and those there are are expensive. Arduino’s affordability and ease of programming seems like a good basis for it.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 4:16 am said:

I want to build my own 4 (maybe 5) axis CNC using arduino.

gavin on April 18th, 2011 at 4:34 am said:

I’d like to use this excellent little kit to make a steering mechanism for a drive on electric buggy with big chuncky tyres, which my one year old daughter will sit in and drive around the garden giving me time to do some weeding. The idea, is a rehash of the old robot mouse that follows a line, and in my adaptation, I shall either spray paint a line on the grass, or lay down a coloured lenght of rope around the garden, for the buggy to follow. The buggy will be powered by my 26v cordless drill, so will have forward and reverse and speed control….tho hopefully no ability to engage hammer action….

Will Tamblyn on April 18th, 2011 at 4:58 am said:

I have an idea to build an Open Source Neonatal Intensive-Care unit with real time regulation of temperature, humidity and lighting. The project would also provide measurement and display of infant respiration, cardiac function, oxygenation, and perhaps even monitor brain activity.

Jerry Isdale on April 18th, 2011 at 5:13 am said:

Currently building a Chilled Soil Control System, which circulates cold liquid in soil to condense atmospheric water and produce a temperature differential between roots and leaves. The delta T promotes growth and allows high altitude, temperate plants to grow at sea level and in semi-tropics (eg. Hawaii, where we live). An arduino monitors relative humidity, air temperature/pressure, soil moisture/temperature, and temperature of coolant. The arduino controls the cooling system – pumps, peltier, fans in current version. Future versions may use alternate chiller, solar power, solar tracker, charging control, leaf moisture sensors, etc. We plan to re repurpose completed electronics/software for green house control (sprouts, etc), and a distributed weather data collection system.

Michael Daly on April 18th, 2011 at 6:17 am said:

While I have never had the chance to use an Arduino, I have enjoyed reading about the many projects that people have been able to do with them. This, coupled with sharing my life with a person in a wheelchair, has inspired me to want to create an open hardware system for home automation and control that could be shared with the community to help those that could truly use it.

Denise * on April 18th, 2011 at 7:40 am said:

I’m in the process of building a punching bag made of pressure sensors which will act as a drawing tool through it’s connection to processing.

Zvika Markfeld on April 18th, 2011 at 12:47 pm said:

I’ve used an Arduino to build Bubble bot, a bubble-making robot (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJC7PkBrR8Y)

Robert Davis on April 18th, 2011 at 1:34 pm said:

I am currently working on an Arduino based earthquake prediction device. It will map and monitor magnetic fields looking for variations around 1 to 4 hz that may predict earthquakes.

Karl Sanford on April 18th, 2011 at 1:52 pm said:

I would love to build a bubble wall arduino project. This would essentially be a fish tank with many arduino controlled air nozzles on the bottom. The tank will also contain LED’s for lighting. This would allow precise control over the bubbles to create some really cool looking display pieces.

Jhonattan Moreno on April 18th, 2011 at 2:40 pm said:

i have a lot of projects to do in mind!. for example:
– a smart grid for weather monitoring
– build a swarm ( already build 5 robots) of robots for
cooperative applications
– an web server for controling my house lights (across
the web).
– im curently work as teacher of microcontrollers and his
use
and other projects in mind waiting for resources and
tools.

Best regards.

Norantanum Hj Abu Bakar on April 18th, 2011 at 2:53 pm said:

i dream to build an early warning system for fall related injury among elderly using arduino.

Nick Read on April 18th, 2011 at 3:00 pm said:

I want to build a Gir robot from Invader Zim for my girlfriend.

Pete Prodoehl on April 18th, 2011 at 3:11 pm said:

I’d like to combine a microcontroller with my Eee PC to build a telepresence robot. I’d like to be able to use it at BarCamp and DevHouse events to help connection people who cannot physically attend. I’m involved with the School Factory, and through them, people at Sector67, Pumping Station: One, and Jigsaw Renaissance, and it would be awesome to eventually create a platform that would work in all of these spaces.

KurtRoedeger on April 18th, 2011 at 3:17 pm said:

I’ve been planning an Arduino home security system. Reed switches to tell if windows/doors are open/closed, high decibel alarm, remote control, ethernet shield to check the status online, LCD display, etc. Already started some diagrams for the wiring and notes for code.

Dan VanWinkle on April 18th, 2011 at 3:26 pm said:

I would like to build a web based doorbell project.

Mark on April 18th, 2011 at 3:43 pm said:

The MAKE Volume 27 Robot Contest!

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 3:47 pm said:

I’d like to make a greenhouse that can open the vent and start a fan when it gets too hot, deploy shade cloth when necessary, detect high wind and adapt the use of the vent to minimize potential for damage monitor soil moisture and water as necessary, monitor the water level in the tanks used to collect rain water shed from the greenhouse and be tied into a weather radio to close up everything in the event of a potential tornado

Scott Gowell on April 18th, 2011 at 3:51 pm said:

Before my daughter was born I had sketched up some plans for building her a Play TARDIS console. With some help from a friend we had built the shelves that were to hold all of the interactive pieces. I had bought an Arduino Demi and had started playing with XBee but shortly after she was born I lost my job and I scrapped the project. We still have the parts and plan on getting back to it but haven’t had the time. My Daughter loves watching Doctor Who on Sunday Mornings with my while Mommy is sleeping though. (She is about 18 months old.)

Chris Bier on April 18th, 2011 at 4:01 pm said:

My wife and I are wanting to build a 15ft tall animatronic dragon.

itche on April 18th, 2011 at 4:41 pm said:

I would like to use a microcontroller to control an electromagnet, so that a yard stick (with metal end) could be dropped at a random interval. This we would use to test response time in our Science class at our school.

Bruno Afonso on April 18th, 2011 at 4:50 pm said:

I’m building now a wooden platform for an outside milonga, a tango event where people dance together to argentine tango. This will happen in my backyard. it will be an outside summery thing. I’ve been envisioning ways of the dancers interacting with both music and atmosphere lights.

I would like to have some sort of people detector ranging from something simple (it is a single couple nearby or it is very crowded?) to a full blown kinect sensor for that purpose. This device would then do simple music analysis as for example, is it rhythmic or mostly slower and melodic? it would then adapt lights and music volume (maybe some EQ/FX in the future?) according to music type and the nearby audience! This could start from something really simple to more complex stuff as analyzing dancers’ movement and adapting light dynamics to sharp movements of the dancers or the music or weighting both inputs to act upon lights and music. The options are endless! :-)

This would be my hobby arduino dream project for now. For my work, I could certainly envision it being important in data acquisition for my biological samples but I can’t talk about it here (yet!).

Great giveaway!

Justin Benore on April 18th, 2011 at 5:16 pm said:

Servo-mounted coil gun with motion sensor tracking. I imagine it’s been done already, but I can’t get past a “Tower Defense” version of home security.

Richard Smith on April 18th, 2011 at 5:30 pm said:

The project that I’d like to build is a Meat Smoker monitor. I would put a hot plate in the bottom of my square upright smoker and control it though a relay with two thermisters (one for ambient air temp and one for meat temp).
I also envision setting up a “smoke monitor” using a photo resister and a LED in some kind of smoke gathering chamber at the top of the smoker. When the pie plate of hardwood chips/sawdust stops producing smoke an alarm would sound.
I’m also toying with using WiFi so the alarms and alerts could be directed to my cell.

David C Dean on April 18th, 2011 at 5:40 pm said:

I’d like to build one that uses time of day, inside and outside temperatures, and voltage off a photovoltaic to determine when to cause the primary and slave units to open and close 4 sets of blinds in my place using dc motors. I figure it should pay for itself just in reduced air conditioning pretty quickly!

Xenophod on April 18th, 2011 at 6:56 pm said:

I’d love to build a robot that I can control via WiFi/Cellphone. The robot would live in a server room and manually pull computer power cables and plug them back in again. It could also double as a telepresense bot.

Matthew Sparks on April 18th, 2011 at 6:59 pm said:

a networked solar powered weather station with tweet capability.

Mike Marshall on April 18th, 2011 at 9:24 pm said:

Hey! I’ve been working on something very similar for a while. Have you started?

Martin McKeay on April 18th, 2011 at 7:21 pm said:

My sons and I are working on the ‘motion activated attack creeper’. They’re huge minecraft fans and I started working on Arduinos to learn about electronics and teach them how to do the same. I put together the audio amp this weekend, will be working on a wave shield in the near future.

Eric Merrill on April 18th, 2011 at 7:21 pm said:

I made a remote start for my car from scratch using a Basic Stamp.

Roger Leung on April 18th, 2011 at 7:25 pm said:

I’ve been wanting to get into and learn about the Arduino and programing for it. This project pack would definitely help me get started!

Mike Perzanowski on April 18th, 2011 at 7:25 pm said:

I want to make a data logger for tidal levels, then perhaps add other weather instruments.

Ethan Dicks on April 18th, 2011 at 7:27 pm said:

The coolest thing I’ve made (so far) with an Arduino was to stack a RGB LED on top of a Lilypad on top of a Lilypad-sized prototype board then stack that on a AAA-battery-power supply, then add four resistor “legs”, making a little “sheep” sculpture (with the battery for the body and the Lilypad for the head). In addition to the RGB LED, there was an IR emitter and an IR detector by the “mouth”. I taught a workshop where the students each built one “sheep”, then we loaded a basic sketch onto it that pulsed IR out and “listened” for IR in – if the sheep didn’t see enough pulses, they got “lonely” and their LED turned Blue. Too many pulses, and they got “angry” and their LED turned Red. Just enough pulses and the LED turned Green.

coondognd on April 18th, 2011 at 7:27 pm said:

I used the microcontroller in the Vex Robotics kit to create a “Wheel of Fortune”-style Halloween costume to give out candy. I rigged up light sensors that I could use to “cheat” the wheel and have it stop on “Win” or “Lose”, based on how much I liked the person doing the spinning.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKDoC9c9jTo
http://www.kevincooney.com/archives/000154.php

Dan Ng on April 18th, 2011 at 7:28 pm said:

I hope to make one that will be able to control my aftermarket radio head unit using my stock steering wheel controls via the IR ports.

Eric Klaus on April 18th, 2011 at 7:33 pm said:

I would love to build an electronic (arduino-run) scoring system for BB gun matches …. to read where the bb hits the target/backstop via sensors, rather than have to score paper targets by hand. I’ve seen it done with microphones, but I think there could be a better way.

mchlldemos on April 18th, 2011 at 7:35 pm said:

I have an autistic son who also has cystic fibrosis and is obsessed with Doctor Who. I would love to build him a working K-9 that he can roll around his room and make talk.

Taylor Hill on April 18th, 2011 at 7:38 pm said:

I made a toy monster, controlled by an Arduino Duemilanove, and using an accelerometer to cue an animated LED face when it was pushed by kids. It was for the coolest college class ever, Toy Product Design. I’m definitely going to continue making interactive toys when the class ends.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 7:41 pm said:

Currently I am building a 6ft tall animatronic pink flamingo. It uses 4 servos for eyes, beak, head, and wings. It uses PWM and multicolor LEDs for the hypnotic eyes.

artofthefirebird on April 18th, 2011 at 7:42 pm said:

I haven’t done any microcontroller projects yet, and who knows when I’ll get to them. What I’d do with this kit if I won it is give it to my dad, who is REALLY interested in robotics and electronics, for his upcoming birthday. We kids are all planning to give him Arduino stuff already, so something like this would be just icing on the cake!

Doug Rindfleisch on April 18th, 2011 at 7:44 pm said:

I’d build a device that monitors the garage door position and temperature. so it can send me an alert when i leave the garage door open all day in the winter…

Meg Richards on April 18th, 2011 at 7:47 pm said:

For some golf carts we rented for the CMU Spring Carnival Committee I made the ignition controlled via RFID tags instead of hard keys. The arduino, relay, and rfid reader sat in a little project box on the dashboard.

http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~merichar/rfid_golf_cart.jpg

It’d be awesome to add some more features like on-the-fly modifications of the accepted list of tag ids or two factor auth using a button press sequence for each tag.

Brooks Boyd on April 18th, 2011 at 7:47 pm said:

Being a 3D modeler, I dream of one day building a RepRap or similar means of getting my 3D models into meatspace proper!

KillerBeeRelayTeam on April 18th, 2011 at 7:52 pm said:

I’ve always kicked around the idea of getting an Arduino to help expand my circuit bending capabilities, but, as someone who is used to creating from parts salvaged from thrift stores and curbs, the price tag has always been a bit daunting.

Greg on April 18th, 2011 at 7:53 pm said:

I need to build an automated door for my chicken coop. Coyotes and raccoons are a problem here, and sometimes my daughter forgets to close the door at night.

Needs a light sensor to know when to open and close, and a couple big transistors or H-bridge to run the motor up and down. Also a couple limit switches to know when the door is fully open or closed. Hmm. Also needs a couple push buttons for manual control of the door.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 7:55 pm said:

I’m working on a toy for my 1-month-old nephew. It’s my first time being an uncle, and I want to inspire his curiosity early.
I’m making a foam-rubber & cloth Octagonal-Prism-Shaped body, with each side doing something different. It will, eventually, react to sound, touch, light, movement, and whatever else I can make that would be safe for him to play with.
I’ve been exploring Thermochromic & Photochromic pigments, to try and make this thing as close to a deep-sea creature as I can.
Fiber optic cable will carry light from the Microcontroller and LEDs, which will be sealed safely within the foam rubber enclosure, and it will be solar-rechargeable & washable.
An Arduino & accessories would be great for a prototype, or, perhaps, for the final product.
I don’t have a lot of money, so I’m collecting samples, scoping out discounts, and bargain shopping. Winning this would sure help me get this done sooner (I have 2 more months to finish it, before it’s no longer ideal for his stage in development… I’ve been reading a lot about baby toys).

Richard Freeberg on April 18th, 2011 at 7:58 pm said:

Interactive art – hangs on the wall, like a normal picture, a portrait with eyes that move. sonic sensor subsystem allows eyes to sense proximaty of art patrons and track with eyes. Voice synthesizer has messages for viewers, depending on how close they come. Far away it invites but as you come closer it becomes ambivalent, and finally rejecting. When no one is withing range, it will do and say strange things…

Ian Saucy on April 18th, 2011 at 8:04 pm said:

I am dreaming of making a arduino project where all my house is being watched with Ir motion sensors. When one is triggered it starts a alarm and also starts some security cameras in the room it was triggered.

Bret Lanius on April 18th, 2011 at 8:05 pm said:

I want to try to make a unit that will send rs232 commands to video deck

Travis Michael Carr on April 18th, 2011 at 8:10 pm said:

I am working on building a expandable home automation kit. My goal is to have everything modular so that if you move it can come with you, mostly geared for college students, who want to save a bit of money on their bills.

Phossil on April 18th, 2011 at 8:12 pm said:

Made a temperature monitoring system for my homebrew beer project. Temperatures were posted to twitter when they deviated from a certain range.

Alexander Papakostas on April 18th, 2011 at 8:13 pm said:

I am working in a low-cost WSN project and I am thinking to give Arduino a try.

Matthew Roy on April 18th, 2011 at 8:18 pm said:

I would really like to build a robot that is controlled by my brain. Using Some EEG device (like that starwars force trainer)

I also had an idea for a great april fools day prank… it would be an Arduino mounted in my top-opening mailbox with a motion detector. it would have audio with it and a servo. So when the mail man came up on the porch the mail box would pop open and closed like a puppet mouth and talk to him.

Mario Pučić on April 18th, 2011 at 8:27 pm said:

I’ve done a single project on college with Arduino. It was a Plant Care system (similar to Garduino) which was controlled by a DECT phone (that part was done by my friend).

It got me very interested so I would like to do some more projects or even give at away as a present since I don’t have much time right now (for next few months).

Matt on April 18th, 2011 at 8:27 pm said:

Alright…maybe it isn’t the coolest ever. But I have a pretty important application for the kit I plan on building.

I just moved into an apartment building. Their policy is “we don’t have a key to your deadbolt. So if you need maintenance you need to unlock it the whole day while you’re at work, or you need to be present to let us in.”

Obviously I don’t like the idea of leaving my door unlocked all day long. So I REALLY want to make a remote controlled door unlocker for my deadbolt. I need a mechanism for turning/opening the lock, another for wireless communications between the Arduino and a PC, and an Android phone to communicate with the Arduino via the server to control the mechanism. This way, when maintenance shows up, they can call my phone, and I can unlock the door when they arrive. I can ask them to press a button on the Arduino on the way out, so that it locks itself automatically after 30 seconds, OR, so that it notifies my cell phone and I can re-lock it from a distance.

Security holes PATCHED

Joshua Stacy on April 18th, 2011 at 8:34 pm said:

We’re currently developing a completely Arduino controlled hydroponics hot house regulator. It will mix the fertilizer into the water, drip accordingly, measure humidity and temp, etc. We hope to also have this completely controlled remotely via a ethernet sheild.

Alex Leach on April 18th, 2011 at 8:35 pm said:

I have recently thought about building a cluster of sensors that responds to its surroundings and records/creates patterns. Those patterns then would in turn be used to create rhythms . The wearer could then play back sections of or whole of the musical score created. The device itself would take the form of jewelry or some wearable accessory. The resultant music or melody would be stored to an s.d device.

Joel Smith on April 18th, 2011 at 8:35 pm said:

I want to set up a self-watering system for my hops, using the Ardiuno to control a drip irrigation line fed by roof run-off from my pottery studio. And I want to make it capable of emailing me when the water barrel level gets low. And did I mention making it solar powered? That’s the plan.

Jon Reid on April 18th, 2011 at 8:36 pm said:

I’m in the middle of making a mind controlled arcade game. Where does the arduino come into play? I’m using it to get the data from the headset into my laptop so I can get the data into flash. I’m also using the arduino to control an LED RGB strip so that it changes colour based on your concentration.

Video to prove im not making this up. http://vimeo.com/22463842

Zach Shiner on April 18th, 2011 at 8:36 pm said:

I’m in the process of building a light controller for our school’s play. It will have 6 individually controlled 120v outlets, and it is entirely housed inside of a 30 cal ammo can. An arduino will serve as the brains, and will run patterns and sequences on the lights.

Chad Smith on April 18th, 2011 at 8:44 pm said:

I would like to create a project like powdernine’s. However in my case it is my children that constantly
leave the garage door open, and this would be a life saver.

Randy Alexander on April 18th, 2011 at 8:46 pm said:

I would love to build the mailbox notification system that you guys posted before.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 8:50 pm said:

The coolest project I have built is my astromech droid, gotastromech.blogspot.com. Current setup is 2 Arduinos controlling everything from BlinkMs to LED matrixs. I have a .NET controller in there as well. I mostly do charity events with R2. The dream is to start a project helping the local Boy Scouts get their new Robotics Merit badges.

Josh Kenzer on April 18th, 2011 at 8:53 pm said:

I’d like to utilize a GPS sensor and build a hot or cold game played over twitter (you know the ones where you say if the person is hot or cold depending on how close they get to what they are looking for). Players would tweet their location and a hidden Arduino would listen and tweet back if the player was hot or cold in relation to finding the Arduino. The finder would win some sort of prize and then the unit would be hidden again.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 8:54 pm said:

I’m not sure what I’m going to make, but I just ordered the Make Bonus Arduino PDF Pack, so these parts would come in handy.

Andrew on April 18th, 2011 at 8:57 pm said:

I’d love to add a bit of tech to my garden by building a device to monitor the moisture content of the soil and add water via a drip watering system when necessary. Combining information the system collects on my soil with weather data should yield some interesting things as well.

Weston George on April 18th, 2011 at 9:00 pm said:

I made a power hour sketch [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Power_hour], that beeps once a minute, with increasing pitch, until the end of 1 hour, it then beeps twice to let you know that you can put your beer^H^H^H^H SODA down, and resume normal activities. Code is posted at: http://pastebin.com/PhpXUA54

I have started working some with servos now, and would love to make a robot that can strum guitar at varying rhythms. I have started working on the project, but I think I need some different servos. The main project I want to build, is an autonomous vacuuming robot, with a cat seat built in. My cat used to jump on a skateboard that we would roll across the floor, so I think a roving vacuum would be right up her alley.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 9:01 pm said:

Would luve to win the kit and help my son use it to control irrigation and lighting on a greenhouse project he is spearheading at his school

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 9:02 pm said:

The best thing I’ve built is a side lit email notification sign as a gift for a friend.

When they receive 1 message the front plate lights white and says;
You’ve Got

Mail
Then when they have 2 to 8 messages the second plate lights green and says

Some

then when they have 8 to 20 messages the second plate turns off and the third plate lights yellow;

A LOT OF

then when they have 20 + messages the third plate turns off and the fourth plate lights red:

A TON OF

My ideal build would be to hook every kind of sensor I could think of up to it and make a data logging tri-corder kind of thing. Ambient sound, Radio, speed, GPS tracking, wi-fi networks, geiger counter, UV meter, acceleration, light, everything. Then work that through a processing UI of some kind to provide an infographic of my day.

Bosco P. Soultrane on April 18th, 2011 at 9:02 pm said:

i have never made an arduino project, but i just got the deal of the day in the maker shed to read up on it all so i can get started. I am hoping to make some cool servo controllers or maybe a little robotics.

Allen French on April 18th, 2011 at 9:05 pm said:

i never had the means to do it financially but i want to make led matrix taillights… led rims…a secrete knock detector glovebox… sound pulse led array… amongst other various car mods with arduino.. i think this would be a good way to start some of those projects

Jonathan Falkner on April 18th, 2011 at 9:06 pm said:

Well, there are numerous amazing ideas already, so all I can say is, here’s why I’d love to have this kit. I have a dozen or so projects I’d like to do, but never have the money to buy an arduino kit to get started. Here are some of the projects I hope some day to be able to do:

– RFID door unlock for keyless entry into my home
– voice activated lighting, sound systems, etc.
– moisture/temperature controlled watering system
– Alarm Clock that turns up the volume on the chirping birds soundtrack slowly while also opening the blinds slowly, so that I go from pitch black to gently being woken up by the sun at whatever time I need to get up (assuming the sun is up).
– A wide receipt printer connected to an arduino that triggers a print job with my daily to-do list each morning and a print job each afternoon with our evening meal plan recipe so the device can just sit in the kitchen, automatically prints, and I can grab my to do list each day, check it of physically as I go, and my wife can grab the dinner recipe, use it, and toss it when done (so she doesn’t have to have a computer open in the kitchen while she cooks). I’m sure I’d come up with many more uses for this device (maybe even start selling kits with the software to install on a local computer in the home network).

I don’t have enough time to detail the others (still working, and need to get back to it), but this is just the tip of the iceburg of ideas I want to eventually do with an arduino kit. Don’t even get me started on the stuff I’d love to do with Lego :-)

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 9:08 pm said:

I built a fake dashboard for a design project in first year engineering at UWO, run by an Arduino, using a modified Thrustmaster gas and brake pedal, a servo, some seven segment displays, an LCD and an RGB LED to demonstrate regenerative braking in an interactive display! We won first place :) All thanks to the Arduino! Would love some more components!

sipple on April 18th, 2011 at 9:09 pm said:

I want to make an alarm clock I can trust to go off and set for holidays

OrangeWhip on April 18th, 2011 at 9:13 pm said:

I’d like to build a device to measure the forces on roller coasters.

Brice Smith on April 18th, 2011 at 9:17 pm said:

I want to install a facial recognition system that reports to me who’s at the door and opens it if appropriate, and the arduino would make for an awesome controller for the mechanical side of things.

Allen French on April 18th, 2011 at 9:18 pm said:

OH… and a Midi Controller Drum Pad… thing

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 9:24 pm said:

Hello World & Make! I won’t tell you much about my project- Artist Code- But, I just recently graduated from a master’s degree at SVA NYC and I’m still paying my tuition! So, I need an Arduino Board to complete a project made with water. The project is an interactive sound installation that will process real-time weather data from satellite and data from the user’s temperature. Through the auditory and somatosensory senses a deeper connection between the user and the piece will be established. Data from the user and from the satellite will merge into a sound composition. That data will also shape the form and the movement of the physical part of the installation.

Tim Cochran on April 18th, 2011 at 9:34 pm said:

I would build a Reverse Geocache. I keep reading about several implementations and have a few ideas to improve upon.

Mike Marshall on April 18th, 2011 at 9:37 pm said:

I would like to build a “robot” that could take as input a piece of paper 11″x14″ that has been folded in half (now11″x7″) and feed the paper in long ways and make 2 more folds ending up with a tri-fold ready to fit inside a standard sized business envelope. I’ve put some thought into it such as type of controller, etc. I am considering taking an old laser or inkjet printer and using it as a base and adding on from there.

Rotwang on April 18th, 2011 at 9:47 pm said:

I modified a cheap toy RC car’s transmitter by replacing its switches with transistors attached to an Arduino. The Arduino receives commands from a Java web server that I wrote that also serves a webpage. The webpage uses JavaScript to send commands to the web server, so the car is controllable from anyone over the internet. I have a camera mounted on top that is wireless as well that is served to whoever is controlling the car via Skype. I had been using my iPhone with Skype mounted on top of the car which actually worked far better, but my friend in Canada who controls the car for me usually likes to fly off the stairs, so I found a mini analog camera with transmitter for about $20 instead.

Here’s video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2O0pCcnRtQ

Chuck Shotton on April 18th, 2011 at 9:50 pm said:

Once upon a time, I was chief software architect for DARPA’s Joint-Unmanned Combat Air System. We wrote some *really* cool software to fly these huge UAVs, but politics kept them from ever getting into the air. After scratching the autonomous air vehicle itch with a Blimpduino, I’d love to be able to take all the cool stuff we wrote and use it to fly a bunch of swarming, autonomous winged aircraft. Arduino would be an awesome platform for this project, since all of the hardware for air-to-air comms has already been baked into some nice shields. Just need a development platform to get it all started!

Alex Boyd on April 18th, 2011 at 10:05 pm said:

I hooked up a microcontroller to an rs232 bluetooth radio, and wired every switch that is in my Mini Cooper to the microcontroller and then I added up a start button and took the key out of my car. Then on the other end of the bluetooth I interfaced to my phone so my phone became my car key. I could then remotely control everything about my car except for the driving. I did this 5 years ago and the microcontoler is very outdated, so I would like to use the arduino and update my car.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 10:11 pm said:

When I was in middle school, I made a lego mindstorms card reader that could unlock the door when I slid a rudimentary barcode under the light sensor. It actually had a feed mechanism to accept the barcode and a touch sensor to eject it once it was read.

Patrick Dolan on April 18th, 2011 at 10:15 pm said:

Using the arduino, I want to make a door bell for my cubicle that alerts me on my computer or android phone via text or interface when someone comes there so I do not jump when someone comes when I have my headphones on.

Diogo Sodré Pereira on April 18th, 2011 at 10:19 pm said:

I want to automatize the whole house…

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 10:20 pm said:

I’ve got an AR.drone and have a fantasy about mounting an Arduino and a WickedLasers G3 Elite 300mW laser on it to pop balloons…

Oliver Hughes on April 18th, 2011 at 10:25 pm said:

i would love to make an automatic cake mixer that can choose from several different recipes that does it all for you up until the moment you put it in the oven. it would have to measure quantities of wet & dry ingredients, and mix them, and (shudder)….. crack eggs …… . Its practical use would be…. limited, but it would be fun to watch(it fail).

Rebecca Stiles on April 18th, 2011 at 10:28 pm said:

I’m entering this contest for my son who is 6 years old. He’s been playing with Lego Mindstorms for 2 years. Just this morning he told me he wanted to learn how to solder so he could make “real” robots…so I’m not sure what project he would make but I know it would be great!

Todd Rathier on April 18th, 2011 at 10:28 pm said:

Currently I’m in the process of creating a full size steampunked R2-D2. My engineering students have obtained a fiberglass radar dome shell from a destroyer class ship for the body and they have created the legs. We are still looking to employ a controller and this would be a great way to go!

Kevin White on April 18th, 2011 at 10:38 pm said:

I had an idea to create a steam-punk calculator, with Nixie tubes, an old rotary phone dial, and a giant lever from an old adding machine to work as the equals function.

Kenneth Finnegan on April 18th, 2011 at 10:46 pm said:

The coolest I’ve built has been a Conway Game of Life simulation on an HD44780 LCD using the custom glyphs.

Jason Tucker on April 18th, 2011 at 10:53 pm said:

I wanna make an alarm that wakes up my 16 year old out of bed on time.

Joona Kallinen on April 18th, 2011 at 10:54 pm said:

http://gardenbot.org/about/

http://www.instructables.com/id/turn-signal-biking-jacket/

http://www.practicalarduino.com/projects/rfid-access-control-system

http://www.practicalarduino.com/projects/vehicle-telemetry-platform

These are just some of those things i would want to make with Arduino. I really like Arduino cause you dont have to be a “master programmer” to get started with your own cool projects. :)
Unfortunately i still havent got my own Arduino’s. :/

Marc Davenport on April 18th, 2011 at 10:55 pm said:

I’ve made a pen plotter that works by recieving the serial code from Reprap and uses a ada fruit motor shield to control some salvaged steppers. Also, I made a blinking LED.

Christopher High on April 18th, 2011 at 10:57 pm said:

I homebrew beer, so I’d like to automatically monitor my fermentation by monitoring the bubble rate in the air lock and/or beer gravity (direct measurement or refractive index). Temperature of the fermenting beer would be tracked for information purposes. When certain conditions are met I will be notified to sanitize and prep a secondary fermenter or keg. Confirming a prompt would actuate a valve on my CO2 outlet and pressure transfer the beer to the next vessel.

JonP on April 18th, 2011 at 11:00 pm said:

I’ve been involved with several interactive displays aimed at kids and an arduino may just add that extra bit that we are looking for

bob on April 18th, 2011 at 11:01 pm said:

I’ve been planning a giant game of pong played on a large wall by a large crowd divided into two teams. Crowd response of each team moves the pong paddles up or down.

Darian Lewis on April 18th, 2011 at 11:02 pm said:

I have a squirrel problem and would like to make a squirrel-tracking automated water canon powered by the water hose, a web cam and the arduino and associated components to help me “encourage” my non-paying renters to move on.

Keith Nelson on April 18th, 2011 at 11:05 pm said:

I dream of making props for airsoft games. I’m gathering parts to build a suitcase bomb (not a real bomb) that will have an arming and disarming sequence, count down and can be defused by cutting wires in a certain order.

Fightcube on April 18th, 2011 at 11:07 pm said:

I’d like to have a kit like this for my 5 year old soldering son http://www.adafruit.com/blog/2011/04/18/greatest-hack-yet/ who is interested in making robots and other gadgets with his dad ;-)

Michael Cheng on April 18th, 2011 at 11:17 pm said:

I would want to try to connect this to a Kinect Controller and to awesome motor and other component commands.

bill on April 18th, 2011 at 11:21 pm said:

I would love to automate some thing in my home.

Nick Hennecke on April 18th, 2011 at 11:31 pm said:

I’d like to make a few star trek like projects. Lighting and electronics that respond to vocal commands. Perhaps a motion sensing automatic door. Beyond that I’d like to construct a small interactive play area for my son. Perhaps a “space ship”. Or I could converge the two ideas and do something like a shuttle craft and have one of the front seats and control panels be for his entertainment and the other be a work space for me.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:34 pm said:

I made a full color audio spectrograph to visualize ambient sound or music. I built and connected a RGB LED matrix to an Arduino programmed to compute the FFT of continuous samples taken from an amplified microphone source. Each result of the FFT was plotted as the rightmost column of the display with color representing the average magnitude in a range of frequencies corresponding to that particular row. Each iteration also shifts the previous image on the display left by one column meaning that the final output was a continuous scrolling spectrogram. I want to scale this up to be an installation piece like 50×200 LED’s – big enough to put on a wall at some kind of party or show.

Chris Maurer on April 18th, 2011 at 11:35 pm said:

For an Aerospace Engineering class on weather balloons, we were assigned to devise our own “mission” and payload for the balloon to accomplish said mission. Everyone else in the past has done boring stuff, like measuring weather data, or taking photos of a plush school mascot in near space. My friends and I decided to take it to the next level. We are dropping from a yet to be determined altitude (ITS OVER 9000), an arduino/ardupilot, automated glider which will find its way back home. We’ve got the ardupilot and glider pretty well done, but havent flight tested it yet. We need, very badly, a second arduino to operate the balloon’s gps tracking, radio transmitter, release mechanism for the glider, and automate the recording process for the video camera that’s going to tape our glider being dropped.

Greg Corson on April 18th, 2011 at 11:36 pm said:

I’m trying to build a quadrocopter (this is an X shaped gadget with 4 motors and propellers, one at the end of each arm of the X). With luck, I’m trying to make one small and light enough to fly in the office. If that works out, I’m going to try to build one big enough to fly a pocket camera around outside.

The thing uses accelerometers & gyros to keep it stable and control the 4 motors so it can be hovered and flown more easily.

Matthew M-W on April 18th, 2011 at 11:36 pm said:

I would like to make a compartment in a wall and put a picture In front of it and then attach a servomotor that would slide the picture on rails and the servomotor would be activated by voice control like it would be activated by something like “reveal your secrets” and after the picture moves out of the way there would be a door and it would have your secret knock detector that would slide a dead bolt unlocking the door and if they got it wrong three times it would take a photo of the perpurtrator and send it through Bluetooth to a pc and also it would slide the picture back in place and lock for 2 minutes

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:46 pm said:

I would like to try and desin a romote controlled airplane that would have a camera in the cockpit to give me a “life like” view of the country. I would also try and waterproof the whole rig and put floats on the bottom so I could land in water. I would also like to put different probes on the aircraft to measure air pressure and temperature and moisture content of the air. Maybe I would even try to create an auto pilot mode with a level of some sort so the plane could fly itself around in circles.

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:50 pm said:

As someone who consistently checks his email, I’d like the ability to passively monitor my email status in a more non-obtrusive way than glancing at my computer screen. Instead, I’d like to integrate an email checking system (python can check gmail relatively easily), and forward the counted unread emails to an arduino in charge of powering an led display.
The led display will mostly look like several columns of leds indicating time since last email recieved, current unread count, and perhaps something whimsical. The idea is that the led display will look very neat, and will provide a decorative piece as well as a functional informational tool. The row of leds could be in any form, such as a circle or a straight up column. And the arduino will be necessary mostly for powering that whimsical display of leds… (since I believe a lower computationally-powered device would be able to handle the first two described functions)

Anonymous on April 18th, 2011 at 11:52 pm said:

I have been dreaming of making a 4 color miniaturized printing press with on the fly motorized registration (calibration from one color to the next) inside of the impression cylinders. The Aruino with the project pack would be the perfect platform to accomplish this!!!

Jeff Conrad on April 19th, 2011 at 12:00 am said:

I want to create a series of lego-building bricks lit up with LEDs, each of which corresponds to a service component for an internal network. Then I want to build up those brick similar to an architecture diagram and stack them like the diagram from front end to back end, and mount it in the little cubicle window attached to my cube so anyone walking by can see the status of the entire environment at a glance.

Aemon Malone on April 19th, 2011 at 12:01 am said:

I’m designing a weather sensor using Arduino to tell me the exact weather at any given time at my beach house 400 miles away!

Michael John on April 19th, 2011 at 12:02 am said:

Using Picaxe I made a games timer for a school project, it powered a bunch of relays, LCD panel and sound along with a homemade card reader as an input
It was a parental control that acted like a junction box between the games console and tv, through the likes of SCART, RCA etc, included wired internet cables. It had a countdown timer which it read from various times on each card and saved them to EEPROM so the kid couldnt reset it by cutting the power. The parent reset the device by typing a code in using the standard tv remote.

With arduino I would like to build a 24×16 RGB LED matrix that would act as mood light, but also react to sound

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 12:03 am said:

I’ve been studying up on the arduino for a while now but don’t have the funds to buy one, So until I either get the cash to buy one or get lucky and win the giveaway, I’ll just keep researching the possibilities and filling my brain with ideas on how to utilize it when I get one.

raymond on April 19th, 2011 at 12:16 am said:

The coolest microcontroller project I have built to date was a control system for a remote control truck. We used the camera from a wiimote and turned it into a “laser guided” truck. You shine a laser pointer in front of the truck and it follows the laser.

Martin Glennon on April 19th, 2011 at 12:20 am said:

I want to make a motion activated sound box to go with my daughters rocking dinosaur. I also want to make a web enables programmable thermostat to control my heat and AC.

Joshua Hockman on April 19th, 2011 at 12:26 am said:

I will make my own “YPS”, or Yard Positioning System, using ultrasonic emitters, to guide my arduino powered automatic electric lawnmower. For real.

Andrew Macdonald on April 19th, 2011 at 12:31 am said:

I always wanted to build and code/animate my own 8x8x8 LED Cube. Best night-light ever!

Andrew Robinson on April 19th, 2011 at 12:31 am said:

To tell you guys the truth I an a total NOOB when it comes to Arduino. I saw some of the Make projects and I was hooked. I finally got one and I havn’t been able to stop. What I dream to build is an intire Arduino controlled mini-golf course. I’m talking windmills, obsticles, and even something to help you keep track of your score.

Don Johnson on April 19th, 2011 at 12:44 am said:

definitely a control box for my smoker … or at least an internet-enabled remote thermometer.

Renee on April 19th, 2011 at 12:44 am said:

I am a weaver and new to building microcontroller projects. Am curious to see if I can apply it to weaving. Also, Wednesday is my birthday!

Zach Grossi on April 19th, 2011 at 12:46 am said:

I already made a scrolling LED display and would like to try to expand this idea and make it bigger. Either that or build a central control system for various functions for my car like the Jeep Control panel based on the arduino.

Adam on April 19th, 2011 at 1:09 am said:

admittedly, I am a total newbie to the arduino. but after reading the maker post “the art of productive procrastination”, i decided that I would give myself a practical goal and project in order to dive in and learn some arduino.
I would like to craft a tool that helps my paralyzed friend navigate his apartment better. my friend Alex is confined to a motorized chair, and while the chair aids him in getting around, closed doors sometimes hamper him until a more able-bodied person can assist him in opening the doors. I’d like to create a way to set up sensors near the doors, which then open the door and keep them open long enough for him to pass through, then close again. this would enable alex the mobility within his apartment that he hasn’t been afforded since his confinement to the chair.

Jay Wasserman on April 19th, 2011 at 1:14 am said:

need to start with a basic vision and motion control. This all goes towards an auto lego sorter!

Juli Fowler on April 19th, 2011 at 1:42 am said:

The laser harp would be EPIC.

Todd on April 19th, 2011 at 1:50 am said:

The “coolest” project I have under my belt so far is a safety restraint system that allows a user to walk freely about the cabin of an aircraft in flight but detects excessive webbing velocity and/or excessive aircraft acceleration and locks the webbing payout to prevent the user from falling or being thrown out of the aircraft through an open cargo door or winch port.

A TI MSP430 senses direction and velocity of rotation of the webbing retractor spool via interrupts and aircraft acceleration by polling an accelerometer. It triggers a solenoid to act on a mechanical ratchet pawl when locking of the webbing is required. The MSP430 sips power to allow for extended storage and service life of the system.

dwdillard on April 19th, 2011 at 2:03 am said:

I want to make a motion controlled, baby-proof, electronics bunker (using an old ammo can and this kit).

Jamey Anderson on April 19th, 2011 at 2:19 am said:

I really want to create an integrated, solar powered, sap flow monitoring and data logging network. Monitoring sap flow in trees tells us a lot about water movement, photosynthetic rates, and tree vigor as well as providing much insight into the physiology of trees in general. Using established sap flow sensors (placed into the active tissue of the tree), I would use a combination of temperature, light, and humidity sensors to not only supply additional SD logged data at each tree, but also use these analog data inputs to, in turn, control an increase or decrease in the sap flow sampling rate. Being able to catch additional data at an increased rate when changes in temperature, light, and humidity induce physiological changes is insanely cool, and powerful. I would use Arduino’s to control this adaptive sampling regime along with something like Xbee’s to provide real time access and data transfer to a centralized (easy to access) location for redundancy. Such existing (and much less powerful) systems cost thousands of dollars and are largely proprietary. Nothing would please me more than to learn more about microcontrollers and put together a system like this with open source hardware and software. If you’ve read this far, thanks much for listening to my overenthusiastic tree geek babble!

Robert Former on April 19th, 2011 at 2:32 am said:

I have been sorting out a design out to use an Arduino as both a PSK31 controller as well as a Weak Signal Propagation Reporting (WSPR) beacon. My hope is to build a 500mW 10.1387 MHz 30 Meter or 14.0956 MHz 20 meter QRPp SSB transciever and add the Arduino to drive the beacon and to act as a decoder. Another option is to add the Ethernet shield to allow reporting the reception into the database online. A primary advantage I see is ground isolation to improve SNR running the whole kit from a LiPo and solar panel out in my yard.
Check out http://www.wsprnet.org/drupal for details on WSPR
N8TYZ

Charles Haase on April 19th, 2011 at 2:56 am said:

Coolest so far? Controller for a lighting system on an RC plane.

JustJon on April 19th, 2011 at 3:29 am said:

I’m torn between my coolest Arduino project between a LEGO TARDIS with working lights and plays the theme song and a LEGO Green Lantern that lights up when the ring is brought up to the front of the lantern.

Cam on April 19th, 2011 at 3:34 am said:

My dream project is to make an OLED watch with GPS/Bluetooth: Display Time/GPS info, receive incoming call/SMS info from phone, who know what else?

John on April 19th, 2011 at 3:37 am said:

TRYING to build an Arduino based Super8 telecine. At the moment working on acurate speed control (want around 3 fps) and a trigger to capture the frame.

Would be cool if I could work out how to store a frame on an micro SD card directly on the Arduino.

Louis Davidson on April 19th, 2011 at 3:38 am said:

I would like to develop a bluetoothe mailbox sensor that would detect the opening of the mail box and send a signal to alert the homeowner that mail is here. Saves a walking trip to the mailbox for nothing especially in the rain. The signal could be audible or visual.

Feild Craddock on April 19th, 2011 at 3:58 am said:

I want to prototype beer gasses that are equipped with LEDs and sensors, which will enable bar goers to interact in a real life social game. Each time one of these glasses is “cheersed” or tapped with a unique glass, the LEDs in each glass with grow brighter. As you interact with more people and cheers them you will get the brightest glass in the bar.

Garrett DeRosset on April 19th, 2011 at 4:03 am said:

I made my Arduino unlock my front door when I knocked the door to the Mario theme song.

I don’t know where the Arduino is now though. I’ve moved to Japan and I miss it.

Joseph Carson on April 19th, 2011 at 4:06 am said:

I dream of building a total house monitoring system that saves money and is good for the environment. Automatic monitoring the number of people in the house and setting the house zones for best comfort. Add security and entertainment. I would most likely need multiple arduino’s networked together.

joer on April 19th, 2011 at 4:31 am said:

My dream project is a home brew PDA. The first bit would be a simple text editor. I’d type stuff and save it to an SD card. A music player would be next. Eventually I’d add a GPS and have it log my movements. A universal remote is on my list, and someday when the SDK supports it, a rudimentary camera.

I know I could probably get a linux cell phone that would do all this stuff out of the box, but I love the idea of building it piece by piece, adding as I go.

Todd Barrow on April 19th, 2011 at 4:38 am said:

My current dream project is to interface a Mindset to fire off a nerf gun at the office with the powers of my mind!

Alex Mau on April 19th, 2011 at 4:40 am said:

I dream of building a fart(smell) detector for the office similar to the smoke detector or a portable very loud noise maker for women to protect themselves going home alone at night.

Dave P on April 19th, 2011 at 4:45 am said:

I want to be one of the cool kids and show up an Honolulu Hackerspace’s Andruino night with this awesome Projects Pack!

k r on April 19th, 2011 at 4:46 am said:

mini roomba: – arduino, wheels, distance traveled encoder form optical mouse, some bump sensors, small cleaning pad or a blowing fam, or even a mini vacuum(?!!). Program to make it walk around wooden floor and keep cleaning it.

npkeith on April 19th, 2011 at 5:22 am said:

I have this idea for a homebrew beer fermentation temperature controller… Use an arduino as the temp controller, but also have it control a pump that runs glycol over a peltier junction and down a tube-within-a-tube that sits in the fermenter – Down the center, then swirls up the outside tube. Arduino should be able to reverse the current to the junction and warm things if it gets too cool. If the thing can cool close to freezing, I might even be able to make a lager, which I’ve never been able to do before….

Andrew Hou on April 19th, 2011 at 5:25 am said:

It’d be awesome to have a microcontroller to create kinetic sculptures that functioned as clocks, now if only i had an arduino…

Trinity Phan on April 19th, 2011 at 5:42 am said:

i like to build the mini segway robot like the one from hack n mod…
http://hacknmod.com/hack/make-a-mini-segway-using-the-arduino/

Trinity Phan on April 19th, 2011 at 5:42 am said:

I like to build a mini segway like the one from hack n mod website…

http://hacknmod.com/hack/make-a-mini-segway-using-the-arduino/

Jonathan Agno on April 19th, 2011 at 5:43 am said:

I want to make the ultimate automatic vacuum cleaner, where it senses and learns where all the furniture and walls are and has a very low probability to bump into objects. Also, it must maximize the space it cleaned as well as minimize the time cleaning. Take that! I’ll never have to clean the floor again! MUAHAHAHA..

andrebruton on April 19th, 2011 at 5:58 am said:

I would like the Arduino package to build a lightning detector. The system would record flashes from the lightning (later add a RF detector) and the position from a GPS chip and then send the data to a central URL and based on 3 or more detectors report the direction and distance to the lightning strike. The website would display live the lightning strikes. The website would also have info on the project for other people to build similar units and contribute to a worldwide lightning strike map

scottem on April 19th, 2011 at 6:12 am said:

Make Arduino Kit Giveaway: I want to create a system to help me make better bread in my bread machine. Part one would track the internal temperature and vibration to tell when the heat and motor cycles happen. Graphing those on the computer I would make more accurate cycle alarms that would be communicated by part 2 through SMS or Twitter to remind me of the next step in my baking.

Brian Frost on April 19th, 2011 at 6:40 am said:

I want to make the ultimate cannoli filling machine…

Mark Allen on April 19th, 2011 at 6:51 am said:

I dream of building an Arduino with an OBD-II shield, a GPS shield, and that wirless shield with SD card support. It’ll record my vehicle’s movements and OBD-II data, then whenever the coordinates reported are “home” it will attempt to connect via the xbee/ethernet host to upload its most recent data. That’s one. Bonus points if I can unplug the OBD-II and take it on walks and have that part still work.

I want to create a combination ambient orb and awesome button in a single unit. (Button will be small and on the side) – the only question is whether it can be an HID keyboard AND communicate over the USB port at the same time, or if I’ll need a serial port shield or something.

I dream of making an anti-screensaver unit, with an LCD screen and selectable increments of 5 minutes at a time, to cause mouse or keyboard movement. (Will only be used for good, I promise – such as reading documents.) For bonus points, combine with the previous unit above.

I want to figure out how to receive a signal and cause my camera to take a picture, then try to catch pictures of rabbits, squirrels, birds, etc. in our backyard.

I’ve always wanted to make an automated sun dial. You heard me. Sundial denote the time, value gets read via sensors. :)

I’d love to make something so that when our dog scratches at the printer (!) for attention, it’ll buzz at him. Maybe also play around with RFID on his collar and make a time of day thing to give him a treat.

I picture a soil moisture sensor – or possibly a couple of them – to notify me when it’s try enough for me to mow the lawn. (Pacific Northwest)

…and most of all, I want to get both of my daughters to build this stuff and learn it with me. Their grandfather is an electrical engineer – I’m not, and have always regretted it.

Matt Johnson on April 19th, 2011 at 7:06 am said:

I would love to build a “dog-sitter”, that can monitor our dog’s barking throughout the day, and whistle and release food to distract her from occasional (I hope) compulsive barking. Perhaps even monitoring her movements in some small way would allow us to reduce the impact of her senile barking on our neighbours.

Thousands more, but there’s one to start with.

ROMAN OSREDKAR on April 19th, 2011 at 7:55 am said:

ARDUINO IS A NICE LEARNING PLATFORM. I will teash my young boys some basic steps in electronics and programming and who knows what will they MAKE? perhaps a new controller for home automation, plant watering, SUN tracker for solar cells, moving camera for surveillance, robot for help to their grandparents …

Thomas Adney on April 19th, 2011 at 7:59 am said:

I always wanted to make a gizmo that would tell me if my cat was hiding inside my closet. I feel bad when she gets accidentally shut in. The idea would be a PIR sensor inside the closet connected to some sort of visual or auditory alert outside the closet. Sure, I could look and see, but where’s the fun in that?

james watson on April 19th, 2011 at 8:10 am said:

im planning to automate my entire house, and to access it remotely from my iphone :)

Fish and Lily Farm on April 19th, 2011 at 8:12 am said:

I am designing a distributed arduino based PIR sensor mesh. The plan is to stick JeeNodes http://jeelabs.org/ or something smaller with RF transceivers and PIR modules (and possibly other sensors) inside garden solar lights. These can then be unobtrusively spread around the perimeter of a property and provide good sensor coverage. Additional sensors such as temperature, soil moisture etc… could also be incorporated. Use the RF network to communicate to a base station, which can take appropriate action (turn on flood lights for instance, or sprinklers as appropriate). I plan to turn the solar lights on for a little while in the evening, so they appear to behave like solar lights. Then turn them off, The led’s can be used to light up if movement is detected. Sticking a 2500mah NIMH in each solar light, and shutting down as much as possible except for the PIR trigger on an interrupt, and periodically waking up to notify of status and any other sensors attached, should mean each sensor pack could run autonomously for a very long time. I am at research and prototyping phase.. So need gear to get started ;-)

Ken Atendido on April 19th, 2011 at 9:36 am said:

As a hobbyist coming from the pic world, One of the collest thing I did was when I decided to learn avrs and lo and behold there already was Arduino. Intrigued by the ease of use, I decided to try arduino on breadboard and soon later-on built a severino s3v3 r2 board using overclocked atmega8L at 16MHz (only atmega8L’s are easily available in my part of the world from local electronics stores).

One that I have been contemplating on building for a long time that I think is really cool is a stand-alone home automation/security system that can be connected to the pc/laptop via ethernet and usb/serial and remotely controllable either via gsm sms, bt from mobile phone or web. We always have our mobile phones with us so this would be the main controller interface for mobility.

Some of the main features I want are:

1. Keyless entry BT controlled front lights/front gate/garage (or any other devices you can think of).
2. Home security and control via SMS, BT (for activating/deactivating) and web access via phone browser (for mobile) or from a deskpc in the office.
3. An open energy monitor (initially for the whole household and then later on add on energy monitor on a room level (or even appliance level).

I dont think with the features and sensors required, this wont fit into an uno so this is more probably for a mega.

I think if I would start from scratch using a pic or avr, this would be very complicated project and when I saw all the available codes for the arduino, this type of project is easily doable via arduino.

Kevin Goosie on April 19th, 2011 at 10:14 am said:

The coolest microcontroller project that have built is the one that has not been built because I have never built one. Ever since I saw the ambient light project someone did from hackaday, http://goo.gl/CAm9f. I have wanted that to be my first project but on a larger scale. I help run the visuals at church on the weekends and thought it would be cool to add ambient lighting to the two screens for the projectors that we have. In the end wire it up to the lighting board so that it can have more control.

Bj Backitis on April 19th, 2011 at 10:26 am said:

Right now I’m designing some sort of motorized assistant to go on my new Dobsonian reflector telescope to make it easier for my son to use. What I’m thinking of doing is using two stepper motors, one to control the azimuth rotation and one to control the altitude elevation. The plan is to have a simple four switch keypad to control left/right and up/down, a reset button, and an LCD display (suitable for nighttime use without ruining night vision). You’d slew the scope around so that the tube is perfectly level and pointing due north, then hit the reset button to zero out the display. Then using the switches to move it up and swing it around, with the LCD display showing the direction and elevation where the scope is pointing. Not going to mess with trying to convert to right ascension and declination, and no intention of making it “track” against the earth’s rotation, but you can get charts that show the az-al location of planets and starts at different times during the night, and this would make it much easier to find them. Never been a fan of the pure “Go-To” systems, I like being in control but a little automation help would be nice! I have two steppers with 4000 step rotations, should be able to get pretty good resolution with that. I’ll probably have a two or three speed set up so that I can zip the scope around at higher speed plus do the fine positioning at a much lower speed. I think the Arduino would be the perfect controller for this.

Find PDF-Find ebooks on April 19th, 2011 at 11:06 am said:

Hey,

My entry to the contest is:

Make a arduino controlled bot (RC car type) managed via internet. (remote controlled)
Bot is equipped with video camera (viewable from internet controlling page, temperature, light and gas sensor. All information will be centralized via web interface along with home automation (for turning on/off lights, etc).

Cheers!

Matthew Dares on April 19th, 2011 at 11:27 am said:

My best/most fun microcontroller project to date have been two seperate lego builds using PIC micros as controllers. Also did some preliminary work using several PIC micro’s to mock up a networkable controller for small inverters (less than 15kW) when in school. My next planned build is a autoplaying guitar with an easy to program interface for inputting new songs. Have started playing with an Arduino as the platform to use, and for this type of project it is much more fun than my big box of PIC micro’s.

Christopher Gosnell on April 19th, 2011 at 11:53 am said:

We had an idea for our cats:
In the winter our cats lay on top of the heat registers in the floor restricting the air flow. We want to build a ‘cat warmer’ using a heat lamp and cat bed activated by an RFID (or similar) tag in the cat’s collar. Because we have three cats, and because we don’t want them fighting over the bed, each of three beds would only respond to the tag in a specific cat’s collar. As long as we are at it, might as well set up a wireless LAN connection for the beds to tweet whether or not the cats are using the bed.
I’m not sure that RFID is the best solution, but its a start…

Scott Tuttle on April 19th, 2011 at 11:55 am said:

I just want to learn about arduinos

hak42 on April 19th, 2011 at 12:58 pm said:

I love the idea of using my Arduino to help maintain my indoor garden. Great for forgetful days as well as vacations!

mattbrauchler on April 19th, 2011 at 1:17 pm said:

I want to use one to track how much free coffee we consume at work and post it to our career/culture/job site. I am a bit if a data junkie and want to graph it out. I would also like to setup a site where folks can subscribe and be alerted when the pot is finished filling.

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 1:22 pm said:

We’ve recently acquired a welded metal “spaceship” at work, and it came with a skinny 4′ sheet metal alien. The CEO has given me permission to go to town with electronics — I’m thinking a motion sensor, glowing eyes, maybe a Wave Shield, et cetera.

charles ashcom on April 19th, 2011 at 1:24 pm said:

I’m and enginerd that hasn’t ever used arduino. how sad is that? I have an art friend who is always creating. if I had these I could give him a rapid prototype of whatever design he desires. For myself I would have to build up an “annoyatron” that only activates when the lights are off. my wife finds them too quickly when the lights are on :)

Mario Klingemann on April 19th, 2011 at 1:25 pm said:

I’ve used an Arduino to hack an old electric typewriter which then prints out photos by overlaying multiple layers of letters on top of each other to simulate the brightness value: http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/5203908319

We could make good use of the Projects Pack for our FabLab in Munich.

Todd Tilghman on April 19th, 2011 at 1:39 pm said:

We have a helium weather balloon that we want to launch (goal is a picture of the curvature of the Earth). We also have a launch vehicle, GPS enabled cell phone and we’d like to create a device, using Ardunio, to record Altitude readings and Time; for bragging rights and to sync with the camera shots. Our project team members are our sons, ages 16, 9 and 5 (team lead). We’ll post pictures; even add prominent product placement Make logos on our vehicle! (…Going to do that regardless now that I think about it!)

Naxxfish on April 19th, 2011 at 1:49 pm said:

I’m moving into my first unfurnished flat soon, and as such building quite a bit of furniture to save money (and for fun!). I’m planning on building a bed which has built into it load sensors, which may be then connected to some kind of microcontroller, with an Ethernet connection (preferabley PoE). It would then also have LEDs around the base to indicate state.

The sensors would then allow me to log my sleeping patterns – how much I move around in my sleep, and so on. I could also add in additional functionality, like a vibration motor and program my home server to wake me up at certain times (possibly with a cron job!) or after a certain amount of sleep.

Lee Falin on April 19th, 2011 at 1:52 pm said:

The coolest microcontroller project we’ve done so far is when my 8 year old daughter and I used the Arduino to build a visual telegraph. It gave me a chance to teach her about:

– Why subroutines are useful (having a dot() and dash() function, rather than coding the LED blink sequences manually for each letter)
– The history of morse code and the telegraph
– How the telegram in Totoro was sent

She’s been so excited she’s been sending me morse code messages via email, manually typing the dots and dashes. If we had a second Arduino, we could build a system to send and receive!

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 2:05 pm said:

I want to build a decorative Digital Clock Wall Art piece that shows the binary time in a 12hr time format of “Hr Hr Min Min” that will change every minute as the time changes, but otherwise looks like squares mounted slightly raised on the wall with LED back-lighting. I am considering additionally specifying that the underlying color I am using as the LED “rimming” color for the boxes switches at the am-pm boundary, so that I don’t need to display the time in 24hr format, making it easier to read (to someone who knows binary formated numbers ;), but otherwise it’ll look simply like a wall art installation of light-rimmed squares on the wall.

Adam Cox on April 19th, 2011 at 2:09 pm said:

I recently built a model railroad in my apartment and would like to use the arduino to create a wireless controller as well as automating some lighting and signalling.

Bob Clagett on April 19th, 2011 at 2:11 pm said:

I was thinking of making a.. thing.. that programmatically controlled (replaced) the potentiometers of a guitar pedal so you create preset buttons for complex setting combinations of your favorite effects

Thom Edwards on April 19th, 2011 at 2:16 pm said:

Just finished putting up my square foot garden. Now, to build my own version of the Garduino to check soil moisture and sunlight. Maye build an Xbee network that monitors sunlight at different spots in the yard to find potential areas for some more garden boxes.

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 2:23 pm said:

I’d like to make a camera intervalometer with the Arduino to control a 808 key chain camera and mount it on a dog collar to see what he sees during the day.

Ryan Holler on April 19th, 2011 at 2:29 pm said:

I want to make an arduino controlled garden monitor. Something to monitor soil moisture levels, rainfall, etc. Possibly use Gerry Chu’s interactive fountain( http://www.gerrychu.com/fountains/interactivefountain/interactivefountain.html ) as a pest control measure.

Speer on April 19th, 2011 at 2:40 pm said:

I need the projects pack to begin development on my mini Arduino Army. They are Mankinds last hope against the coming zombie invasion. They will assemble around the attacking horde, link up via a bluetooth connection, and play Michael Jackson’s Thriller non-stop. No self respecting zombie can ingore displaying their one true talent of performing the Thriller dance. Once locked into this endless loop like the poor cast of Dancing with the Stars, the second wave of the Arduino Army will attack. Their role is to attach to sybmiotically attach to the zombie with a USB cable plugged directly into the brain, and use the undead bodies for the final chapter. They will turn the Arduimbie’s against their former owners and kill all of Mankind.

On second thought, maybe I better not win this.

Kuroshi on April 19th, 2011 at 2:53 pm said:

The coolest one I’ve built is just some random projects with my LoL Shield. I hope to have an arduino working as a intermediary between a computer and a bunch of sensors for a rudimentary smart-home. Ideally, I’ll also connect it to the internet (perhaps through the computer, perhaps directly, not sure yet) and communicate with it using a custom app for my android phone.

Pearl Chen on April 19th, 2011 at 3:09 pm said:

I want to make curtains for my bedroom out of felt. The felt would have laser cut designs and strategic placement of shape memory wire. From my Android phone I could set an alarm and it would trigger an Arduino to start passing electricity through the memory wire and start opening the curtains!

Milan Balogh on April 19th, 2011 at 3:12 pm said:

I’m working on an automated Plant Waternig and analysis system. It would send data through ethernet shield on soil and air humidity, sunshine, height of plant (growth). I can’t figuire out the webcam part yet, but I’m planning to use an IP cam, but would control the rotation with arduino. Also want to control small taps for the watering pipe system. Everything would be visible on an html page. These are for my tomatos in the house.

Zack Yoscovits on April 19th, 2011 at 3:13 pm said:

I want to build an intervalometer for kite photography

Tyler Ricketts on April 19th, 2011 at 3:16 pm said:

I plan to create a large set of the Animusic video ‘Future retro’, minus the music.

george on April 19th, 2011 at 3:46 pm said:

I think Arduino has lots of potential to automate some basic tasks to make it easier for the elderly to live independently.

I love my mother, but I’m getting a little frustrated with explaining and re-explaining how to use the 4 different remote controls to switch between the cable box, DVD player, and Roku box. I want to build her a task-based remote control that will combine multiple functions at the press of one (easy to read) button press i.e. “Cable to DVD” or “Roku to Cable.”

Warren Ondras on April 19th, 2011 at 3:49 pm said:

I am *finally* taking the plunge into embedded development, something I’ve been itching to do for years. First project will be a super LED flasher for a prop a friend is using for his LARP (live action role playing) costume.

Later projects will include modding devices so they work they way they should have already, replacing aging devices with functional equivalents, and so much more…

Arne on April 19th, 2011 at 3:50 pm said:

I have three networked webcams that I use to make timelapsed movies of various events (like this one http://vimeo.com/4401792). For a long time I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have them pan from left to right (and back again) over a set period of time. I’ve tried to set up a system using on old chicken rotisserie motor, but that didn’t quite work out… I think an Arduino board with a bunch of stepper motors would do the job perfectly!

Brunoip on April 19th, 2011 at 3:57 pm said:

A walking robot

Eric Lott on April 19th, 2011 at 4:20 pm said:

Would love to make a movement/dance based visual and music performance art project with one of these.

Hugh Knowles on April 19th, 2011 at 5:07 pm said:

I want to integrate emotional data into Twitter. No idea how to do that but working on a plan. Basic aim – use sensors to baseline various measurables from the body e.g. heart rate, skin conductivity etc against emotional state and then use that to automatically feed in extra data into twitter. If anyone has any ideas how this might be possible then would be interested to talk.

Wayne Dancer on April 19th, 2011 at 5:13 pm said:

The coolest project I did with a uC was a simulated Mars rover with some other students. It would wake up, seek out an IR beacon that was previously “landed”. Then it would then conduct humidity, light levels (in red, green and blue, wavelengths using a color wheel over a photo transistor), temperature, and soil conductivity (two nails as a probe). It would then collate the data, time stamp it, and send it over a 2-meter transceiver as Morse code. On the other end we had another micro that would receive the data, convert the Morse into text and display it on a terminal. We could even send simple commands back over the link for some control over the rover.

Why Morse code? The instructor thought using a link with a modem would be too easy and wanted us to work around an odd method to teach us flexibility. We also had to build in a 3 minute delay to simulate the time it takes for signals to come from Mars. Really frustrating since you couldn’t even see if it was even operational as it was in another room away from us.

Michael Berneis on April 19th, 2011 at 5:16 pm said:

Building an automatic door-opener by making the arduino listen to a ‘knock-code’ from the doorbell.
This is for an apartment building where the only access is via the common control-panel

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 5:18 pm said:

I’m a graduate student and I use robots in my research. One day my nephew came by my lab, took one look at the robots, and decided he was going to be an engineer. When I saw him three days later, he showed me page after page of his version of a robot that he wanted to build. If I got one of these kits, I’d help him build his first robot.

K Candan Herdem on April 19th, 2011 at 5:25 pm said:

Currently, I am studying new wearable interfaces to meet the possible needs of mobile device users. I am prototyping a tool/device that helps to measure the affective outputs of human emotions through physiological sensors and speech processing. I will use such a professional kit to produce new ways to predict human emotions in a better way and to make technology more friendly for the use of human. Through emotional design paradigm, machines will understand and adapt its behaviors to cover human emotional needs and we will be less frustrated by machines.

Frank Hernández Stengele on April 19th, 2011 at 5:55 pm said:

For my bachelor thesis project I constructed a prototype of an “intelligent” prosthetic leg controlled completely by an FPGA. This prototype had to be able to mimic the movement of a real leg and respond to the angles generated at the hip by the remaining limb. My thesis was part of a bigger project currently being developed by my former university with the goal to create a cheap “intelligent” human leg prosthetic for commercial use in Mexico. The final result was esthetically not very appealing but it was functional, of course there was room for much improvement :)
At that time, I had to use the university material for the construction and I wasn’t able to keep anything when I graduated… except for the knowhow ;) and ever since then I have wanted to make something similar. I think an Arduino would be a very good opportunity to do so.
Here is a very bad quality video from back then: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jlXSuPNzCo

Alex Martinez on April 19th, 2011 at 6:04 pm said:

Healthy Advertising needs people that can actually execute great ideas themselves. Arduino is definitely the way to do it. I’m reaching out for that.

Jack Zhuang on April 19th, 2011 at 6:37 pm said:

Hi I want to use this to build an auto-driving car for my kids.

Abdullah Ahsan on April 19th, 2011 at 6:53 pm said:

I have been planning to make a self balancing robot when i get my hands on some microcontrollers in the summer break. After i am finished with that, i’ll hack some rc cars and planes to do all kinds of good stuff with them (pwm, autonomy, etc). I would also like to do a propeller clock. Unfortunately there is no retailer store in my country that supplies the arduino and i am really new to all electronics engineering and i would really love to start off with this nice arduino kit.

Sean White on April 19th, 2011 at 9:46 pm said:

I’m currently working on setting up Arduino with menu buttons and a GLCD to control dimmable LEDs for my seahorse tank. It will also monitor temperature and control a heater or chiller as needed. I also plan to have it monitor the PH of the water. As well it will control solenoid valves that will automatically add water lost to evaporation. It may do more beyond that but that’s all I have planned for now.

Jason H Denham on April 19th, 2011 at 9:54 pm said:

What I would like to build is a motorized camera mount controlled by the Arduino.
Once I get some experience I can add active tracking.

Eric on April 19th, 2011 at 10:21 pm said:

I’m in the early stages of learning enough to build a robot for backyard exploring, with the Arduino at the core of the system.

Raymond Hale on April 19th, 2011 at 10:57 pm said:

I have a serious interest in electronics and programming and have not done much yet, but someday, my goal is to create an alarm clock with an extra button on the side that, when pressed, the clock will speak the time. I would love to learn this stuff!!!

bklnyc on April 19th, 2011 at 11:53 pm said:

No project ideas here. I am still trying to figure out what this is all about!

Anonymous on April 19th, 2011 at 11:55 pm said:

My dad has a bit of a meteorological obsession, so he likes to track the weather, particularly along a route he drives often. His passenger (usually my mom) gets stuck taking notes about location, temperature, elevation, you name it. We want to use an arduino and a weather shield to make an attachment for his car that would make that process faster, more accurate, and automated (and also to save my poor mom from a fate of taking notes in the car during every trip!). Honestly, that’s not the only obsession we’d want to use it to investigate, but we were talking about that just last night, so it would most certainly be the first one.

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 12:12 am said:

I’d like to build a better device to reduce my dog barking. I think I could come up with a way to play music that would distract the dog better than spray or shocking him

Philip Polstra on April 20th, 2011 at 2:00 am said:

The coolest microcontroller thing I have built so far is a USB duplicator/imager/write-blocker combo that uses a Vinculum II (VNC2) development board to duplicate and image USB flash drives and this board interfaces with a Vinculo (Arduino format with VNC2 chipset) to provide a write-blocker and a computer interface to the duplicator/imager functionality. Of course it is all open source!

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 2:24 am said:

I want to be able to control my home appliances over the LAN, as well as the Internet!

Harald Ruda on April 20th, 2011 at 2:47 am said:

I’d build an aquarium controller, to control the filter/bubbler, lights, and one day even the feeding!

David Belanger on April 20th, 2011 at 3:05 am said:

i’d just like to rig up a motion detector around my moped in the garage so if someone goes near it, it will connect to my wifi network @ my apt and send a tweet to me as a notifier. simple, but effective. i’d also like to do the same thing for my bedroom door, but have it take a picture of said intruder, and include a timestamp and image in the tweet.

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 3:47 am said:

I want to make a lamp that shines a different shade depending on the temperature outside. I work in a subbasement and see no sunlight from 8:30am to 5pm and think it would really prepare me for my exit each day. I’m sure an arduino is at the core of this plan.

Christian Restifo on April 20th, 2011 at 3:50 am said:

Remote controlled model rocket launch pad with a TV remote. Let’s hope Mitch Altman’s TV-B-Gone isn’t being used nearby lest I lose an eye.

Michael Rucci on April 20th, 2011 at 4:14 am said:

I want to make a drum machine.

Isaiah Olson on April 20th, 2011 at 4:46 am said:

One time for my English Class my teacher offered extra points for a creative medium for our poem, so I programmed an ATMEGA328 I had laying around with an extra LCD I had to scroll the poem across. It turned out fairly nice and got me some XC !!!

J.Rendell on April 20th, 2011 at 6:48 am said:

Whatever my kids dream up: I’d use it to help them learn how to make their ideas into reality.

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 9:38 am said:

I want to try the food projects in MAKE Volume 25.

Guillaume Oules on April 20th, 2011 at 10:16 am said:

My dream projects :
– laser tag modules for toy guns (nephews…)
– automated dust painting system (with a “dust burning” laser :)

malloc555 on April 20th, 2011 at 11:21 am said:

I will with a friend, automatise an aquarium. From light to PH, pump, salt. At the end, I want to insert Data logging and status verification by internet. It will be very funny to do it for an aquarium of 6′ x 3′ of tropical fish.

inf3rn0 gt on April 20th, 2011 at 11:34 am said:

Well since my son is a massive Godzilla and Robot freak (at 6 yrs old) this would be the perfect item to help us build a radio controlled Godzilla (or Mothra as that is the favorite monster in the collection this month) He is already building a lot of really advanced things with Rokenbok and K’nex and has been working on the RC’s with me for a few years now…. This would be a great upgrade from his snap circuits….

Stephane Letourneau on April 20th, 2011 at 11:37 am said:

My next project will be to create a case with sensor to monitor flamable gas, temperature, light, carbon monoxide and so on. I want to see how many sensor I can install in a simple case with as base a simple arduino uno. I will try to use I2C and shift register to bypass the limitation of the I/O. I know it’s simpler to use a Arduino Mega, but I want to see what I can do with the memory of an Uno.

Greg Surniak on April 20th, 2011 at 11:59 am said:

I am building a r2 unit for my daughter, complete with a hologram projector (By hologram I mean lcd) AI and learned behavior (by that I mean sensors that go beep when she plays with it) and hiding spaces that respond to her command (I saw a project that looks like a arduino clapper, program a certain number of knocks and it opens) The metal working I have, now I need to learn the electronic portion!

Luis Sismeiro on April 20th, 2011 at 12:21 pm said:

I always dreamed about doing a robot to help me doing things in my house. Cooking, cleaning and washing clothes is no fun when you have many more things to do like reading the Makezine and also do some actual work on our daily job.

I think that with the right tools, some imagination and Arduino programming, I can create a robot to do some of the daily home tasks but my first try with a robot will be to get some fresh beer from the fringe and bring it to me when I tell it to.

O suppose the Projects Pack for Arduino V2.0 will help me to learn everything I will need to get this projects running.

Stacy Devino on April 20th, 2011 at 1:28 pm said:

I would like to build a fully integrated multimedia control station.

The plan is for digitally controlled audio-quality relays for input switching and output selection! Bluetooth (SPP), IR, and Ethernet/Wifi so that it may be adjusted with a simple remote and I can create custom, adjustable interfaces with my Android Phone. It will also have a separate Bluetooth A2DP receiver (so that I can stream from laptops or phones – likely a CSR BlueCore) with its I2S going as an alternative input to the DAC chip (Can’t decide between the ESS chip or a PCM as I already have TOTL DACs from Wolfson and AD). Another arduino will handle the digital filtering and switching of those filters. For displays, I have a very large 320×240 5-inch graphic display with CCFL Backlight already however the 3.5inch color models with the built in display boards are very cool. The volume control will be a Texas Instruments PGA2311 (two of them for balanced or fully differential signal handling).

I already have the enclosure which is aluminum and the panels will be done my FrontPanelExpress for a professional finish.The power supply will be enclosed in the same style of enclosure (already have).

What I have so far:
– Both cases needed
– PGA2311 control code
– Relay Driver board and relays
– One Arduino
– Bluetooth SPP module
– Multiple Displays
– 24-Bit USB to I2S module
– Plenty of chips/transistors/parts to make a discrete differential output stage

What I need:
– One Arduino Mega
– One Arduino Uno ( this is so that I can have a USB input to the computer that acts like Keyboard Control!)
– CSR BlueCore A2DP Module
– Ethernet/Wifi Shield

Coolest practical integration setup ever? YES PLEASE!

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 1:44 pm said:

I want to design and build a combination intelligent home thermostat and micro Web server to display the tech manual for the home. The intelligent thermostat will include temperature sensors in every room and motors to block the vents to each room individually, so that if one room is too cold in the winter (assuming the heat is all going down a straighter run into another room) the less restricted vent can be closed off, forcing the heat into the colder room. And obviously, similar benefits for the air conditioning. I hope to save some money over the Texas summers with that.

The tech manual for the home will include instructions on operating the thermostat, parts listings and schematics for the custom lighting circuits, schematics for various speaker systems around the house, and the CAT5 cable layout (currently 2/3 installed, I plan to add a 3rd network for a VOIP phone system).

I am planning on having the thermostat connect to the home network for programming, but may have an optional LCD on it as well.

In the long run I’d also like to write an Android app to control the thermostat so anyone in the house can just grab their phone and set the temp in their own room without having to get up and go to the thermostat.

Louis Davidson on April 20th, 2011 at 2:05 pm said:

I just wanna learn all about Arduinos. I use Mindstorms NXT and this looks like a great complement to them.

anthony perry on April 20th, 2011 at 2:08 pm said:

My dream project: use arduinos in high school science classrooms! Instead of expensive, black box data collection packages the arduino can do most of what we need. Save the school money, empower the students in the process.

Greg Tarnoff on April 20th, 2011 at 2:14 pm said:

Ok, I haven’t actually completed anything with Arduinos yet, but I just ordered a bunch of parts this week to make a “drawbot” with my two daughters 11 & 13. The bot when completed should create wonderful drawings to hang on the fridge. I’m hoping they get into the idea of coding and building things,s o having a parts kit would be really handy. We’re all excited to build bots for spring break next week.

pdxNat on April 20th, 2011 at 2:57 pm said:

I love Arduino! I’ve made a few simple cause and effect projects, the kind where you trigger a sensor, process the information, and then do something about it–a door opens, send a tweet; swipe rfid fob, change LED light show; stuff like that. That’s fun, but I’ve got a project I’d really love to make. I’ve designed a handheld Reversi game box that can be played solo or against a human opponent on the same box or against a human opponent wirelessly networked on a second box! It’s ambitious and it’s expanding my range of electrical engineering knowledge (hobbyist.) If I won the Projects Pack, then this would be the Summer of Reversi!

Erik Ratcliffe on April 20th, 2011 at 3:04 pm said:

One of the projects during my first year in the U of Utah’s fine arts program was a “Dream Box”. For this project, we were instructed to construct a structure of some kind that represented a dream or a series of dreams, whichever is preferred. One of my super-powers is the complete inability to recall my dreams for more than a minute or so after waking up, so you can imagine how I felt about this assignment.

All I had to go on was this: the farther away I get from my dream (i.e. time awake), the less I recall of the details. Armed with this, I set off to build my Dream Box.

Here’s what I did:

• Built a skewed-perspective house about 2′ x ‘2 x 10″ deep. Think Bugs Bunny cartoon house and you’ll be close.

• Painted the interior with all manor of bizarre patterns and added gee gaws, mostly built from Sculpey, the accuracy of which was moot because 99% of the time they’d be in the dark.

• Installed four Basic Stamps (one BS1 “1D” and three BS2 “Boards of Education”) across the back of the structure as well as one servo under the front door, three sets of IR transmitters/receivers, and various small lamps to illuminate the interior of the structure. A set of 9 volt batteries (all I recall is there were many more than 4) powered this beast.

Here’s how it worked:

The “house” remained dark until someone got within 1′ of it, then depending on what face of the house was triggered, one of the following would happen:

• On the sides of the house, lights would illuminate the portion of the interior closest to the IR tx/rx that was triggered, then when the person stepped back, they’d go out.

On the front of the house, the front door would fly open and lights would illuminate the interior/center of the house. When the person stepped back, lights would go out and the door would slam shut.

In the end, my project was one of the most successful in the class. People wouldn’t stop messing with it! It was simultaneously embarrassing and cool.

Before I started this project, I knew absolutely nothing about microcontrollers. $400 and countless sleepless nights made me an enthusiast. I have since moved on to Arduinos, a far superior platform IMO. I still have my Basic Stamps, though. I don’t have the heart to chuck ’em.

Thx!

E.

Chris Knight on April 20th, 2011 at 3:34 pm said:

My favorite: an arduino / xbee based remote control that slowly lowers a dangling 3 foot wide spider from the overhang from our porch on unsuspecting trick-or-treaters with just a push of a button. If you listen closely, you can still hear the screams!

Jason Ormes on April 20th, 2011 at 3:45 pm said:

I’m taking a little VW Beetle RC car and controlling it with an arduino via a wifi shield. wanting to add sensors and video to it as well.

Alec on April 20th, 2011 at 4:01 pm said:

I need this kit because I’m a 16 year old kid with no money. With the Arduino I would make my toilet tweet when it’s flushed, connect it to a joystick and control my bedroom with it, or use it to help stop the barking dogs next door (the parental units would enjoy that)!

Cheers!

Michael Schnell on April 20th, 2011 at 4:02 pm said:

I have never made anything with a microcontroller but after reading how much you can do with them I would like to make an controller for my saltwater fish tank. This would enable me to control certian fuctions and get updates on my iphone of temp, ph ect.

Konrad Szupinski on April 20th, 2011 at 4:57 pm said:

I would like to control display lighting to take multiple pictures of objects under changing lighting patterns. My idea is to control the patterns via my Android phone. To control the lights I would use the Arduino. The Arduino would receive commands from the phone (most likely via the audio jack) to change the lighting.

Mike Broome on April 20th, 2011 at 5:09 pm said:

This would be a great kit to get started hacking on the Arduino! There are two projects that have in mind for the short term: The first is a “Garduino” system like the one Make: Vol 18 to automate watering our plants (https://makezine.com/18/garduino/). The other is a “Doorduino” system for our local hackerspace (Splat Space – http://splatspace.org/) so we can use prox fobs rather than keys to access the space.

T W on April 20th, 2011 at 5:14 pm said:

I want to build a household robot. It would need to be big enough to set small items on it and smart enough to navigate from room to room. You could tell it to take that item to room X and drop it (socks) or wait for someone to take it (margarita.)

Hellmark on April 20th, 2011 at 5:18 pm said:

One project I want to work on it an automated turret. My one cat enjoys stretching her claws on my chair, and when I am around I squirt her with a water bottle and she stops for a while. Problem is, what do I do when I am not around and she gets the urge? If I have a turret to automatically squirt her, she’ll never be able to get away with it.

Hellmark on April 20th, 2011 at 5:18 pm said:

One project I want to work on it an automated turret. My one cat enjoys stretching her claws on my chair, and when I am around I squirt her with a water bottle and she stops for a while. Problem is, what do I do when I am not around and she gets the urge? If I have a turret to automatically squirt her, she’ll never be able to get away with it.

John Massaglia on April 20th, 2011 at 5:28 pm said:

I’m interested in making a bunch of network-enabled sensors in my home with arduinos and I want to make an old R/C car into a simple robot to introduce my kids to robotics.

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 5:28 pm said:

I am a homeschooler who has convinced his mother that I can learn cross-curriculum by working with the Arduino micro-controller. I first want to simply my chores by creating an automatic chicken coop door opener – where I live we have long winters. Along the same thread, my mailbox is a long ways down that same cold driveway and if I could make it communicate with me when the mail has arrived it would eliminate the guessing and multiple trips to the box.

Tinus Scheppers on April 20th, 2011 at 6:48 pm said:

I want to build an automated pigeon feeder for my friends grandfather. He is now in a wheelchair but still wants to enjoy his pigeons. My friend can’t do all the work himself because he still studies.

Frank Moody on April 20th, 2011 at 6:50 pm said:

It is time to hook the washer and dryer up to the home network… Not only for status updates but, in theory, I should be able to replace the control panel mechanical inputs and hardwired cycles with completely flexible electronic one able to do ‘custom’ cycles.

Two hurdles remain: Reliable feed of detergent and the Wife Acceptance Factor…

Rich Quackenbush on April 21st, 2011 at 12:38 am said:

In this case, you might be better off asking forgiveness from the wife. :-)

Jeff on April 20th, 2011 at 6:52 pm said:

I’d like to make a remote-access telepresence robot so that I and others can remotely attend meetings at our hackerspace. After looking at some of them online, it looks like I’ll need some Arduino support for the drive and audio beyond what’s provided by the main laptop or netbook.

A J on April 20th, 2011 at 7:42 pm said:

I get worried when my cat sometimes doesn’t come back for night, so I had a bit crazy idea to build a fleet of aerial drones for search operations. There’ll be different scouts, relays and mothership (this could be stationary). Yeah, an overkill for searching for a cat, but still I dream of building this in a couple of years, when my skills gets better.

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 7:52 pm said:

My 9 year old daughter has enjoyed her Lego Mindstorm, but I’m hoping to help her branch out, and see the arduinos potential, as well as her own.

My plan is to build a slow moving vehicle with stepper motor(s) to attach a “time lapse” camera to for various projects. The first being to rotate 180 degrees from sunrise to sunset.

Cory Griswold on April 20th, 2011 at 8:20 pm said:

I wish to use the arduino platform to control my xbox.

Craig Lester on April 20th, 2011 at 8:29 pm said:

It may seem trivial but I want to create a bizzy-box for our cats. Not everyone operating machinery sees like us or thinks like us or behaves like us. Arduino seems like the ideal way to test interface concepts on another species while using up my stash of motors, lights, drivetrains and other components. And the entertainment potential is tremendous.

Christopher Burdick on April 20th, 2011 at 8:29 pm said:

My plan is to use Arduino to control the components of a home automation system, SARAH-style.

Chris Pearson on April 20th, 2011 at 8:46 pm said:

As a photographer I’d love to look into automating a DIY panoramic head with an Arduino.

Ellis Farmer on April 20th, 2011 at 9:02 pm said:

Temperature recorder that uploads to my server. From there I’ll expand it to measure humidity, appliance usage, electricity, etc.

Side project is to unroll wire and cut short lengths. Many short lengths.

And yet another is a remote data logger for water level to help measure storage & flows in basins.

David Waldorf on April 20th, 2011 at 9:27 pm said:

I would build a self-focusing cantenna that sweeps an area for an SSID and then focuses in on it until it has the best signal strength

Yoseff Ben-Yehuda on April 20th, 2011 at 9:36 pm said:

I want to use arduino to push my architecture research further. I am working on developing meaningful relationships between how we design with technology and the output of that process. Long story short, our buildings today are more and more like robots, mechanical and electrical systems are computerized and highly complex. By designing with arduino as a simultaneous platform and medium I would work to better choreograph the relationship between man and machine in the built environment. I’m not kidding – I know it sounds a bit grandiose but these issues are of the utmost importance to architecture and society today. Arduino is an accessibly and nearly intuitive tool that can scale much better than off the shelf or highly customized systems that architects typically include in their buildings. Lots of photos, drawings, diagrams and models to be shared if I win…………

Mark Daniell on April 20th, 2011 at 9:37 pm said:

My dream project would be a internet radio for the masses.

Matthew Flach on April 20th, 2011 at 9:38 pm said:

I think a perfect project for the Arduino would be the development of a low cost navigation aid for the blind. Using an Arduino, gps and audio shields, it would be pretty cool to have some preset way points that guide you to your target using left, right, forward, back auditory cues. It would also be slick to include some proximity sensors, maybe even an IMU (well not so low cost with an IMU…)!!

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 9:40 pm said:

We did a near space balloon launch where the sensor package consisted of:
1 Arduino Nano
2 DS18B20 (monitoring internal and external temperature
1 BMP085 Barometric pressure sensor
1 Open Log to log the data to
8 high intensity LED’s flashing on the outside of the payload.

We used a Kaymont weather balloon and sent our sensor package and three cameras to 100k feet before it burst and fell back to earth. Total flight time was over 3 hours.

Next up, I want to build a UAV with a solar cell that can perch to recharge and then continue on when its batteries are full again.

Guy on April 20th, 2011 at 9:44 pm said:

I dream of using an Arduino to run my very own RepRap machine so I could print out so many other wonderful things, including more RepRap machines!

Anonymous on April 20th, 2011 at 9:46 pm said:

I would like to create a Draw bot that well.. draws the pictures :) of any photo I sent to it from computer/cellphone.. or a bit bigger idea will be to use a hover platform (Quad-Copter) which will hold the camera in the air which will be programmable to move as the director requires it to move, thereby capturing the angles not possible using the conventional Track based method.The device can even have a face tracking software built into it so that the director can record the facial expressions as the person is moving.Further it can be used to track objects as they move. Consider I threw a Frisbee or a ball and the device can stay focused on it all through its path. Since it is programmable, only director’s creativity will put the limits on how this device can be used in taking videos.Further the devise will use Gyros and Accelerometers to counter-act the disturbance in the video caused by the movement of the camera thereby providing a stable image. I guess my idea juice is exhausted for now :)

Robin Gingerich on April 20th, 2011 at 9:55 pm said:

I’d like to make a small robot to play with our puppy, dog and 3 cats during the day.

Guylain Carrier on April 20th, 2011 at 9:56 pm said:

I want to automate my aquarium :-)

Ray Benjamin on April 20th, 2011 at 9:56 pm said:

I’ve been thinking about making a tea brewer that will brew my tea at exactly the right temperature and time for each type

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