Looking for a fun electronics project? Here’s 12 easy Arduino-based gizmos you can build

Arduino has an enormous fanbase around the world and is frequently used for classes, hobbies, computer tinkering, and projects from hopeful inventors. Sure, it may not be quite as user-friendly as rivals like the Raspberry Pi, but this programmable logic controller is even more customizable than the former. To celebrate its long-term success, we’ve collected 12 of the coolest, most revolutionary, and most entertaining Arduino projects currently in existence. Prepare to be wowed — and then inspired!

Do keep in mind that these projects are a bit complicated, some more so than others. A few of them you could probably do in a weekend, but many are long-term projects that are more suitable for a semester project or summer hobby. We also tried to avoid projects that require a 3D printer for most of our top picks, but access to one of these printers may still be helpful.

The Arduino Servo Cat-a-pult

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Cats, for some reason or another, often times will not eat their food — even if the bowl is full — until they witness their owner top off the meal with a little fresh kibble. The Arduino Servo Cat-a-pult looks to automate this rather annoying daily task. A pressure sensor mat — placed in front of your cat’s food dish — activates the device. Once the mat is actuated, the Cat-a-pult hurls its payload of pet food in the general vicinity of the dish before your beloved pet can even begin to complain. Everybody wins.

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DIY Hacking

Nerf Vulcan Sentry Gun

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This project will certainly take a little longer than some of the other Arduino projects we’ve listed — and there are much simpler Nerf gun Arduino designs out there, for those looking for a less daunting task — but it’s worth the extra effort. This schematic transforms your run-of-the-mill Nerf Vulcan gun into a sentry gun capable of tracking your enemies (and loved ones) and unleashing a salvo of styrofoam mayhem.

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Instructables

AR Laser Cutter ChalKaat

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There are hundreds of cool Arduino projects out there, but none of them are quite as cool as this “augmented reality laser cutter,” a phrase we just like saying over and over. To be clear, you will need to use an open-source laser cutter for this project, because it needs to be compatible with your Arduino unit. The goal here is to replace tedious cutting parameter inputs with simple gestures, which also require motion tracking. It all comes together in this very impressive, challenging project called Chalkaat, which is Hindi for “let’s cut!” The device uses motion cameras and tracking pens, so the cost is going to amount to several hundred dollars for all necessary parts.

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DIY Hacking

Easy Robot Toy PipeBot

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If you are looking for an easier project, possibly one you can work on with your kids, then look no further than the PipeBot. The required materials  — which include all your essential mechanical engineering tools plus some inexpensive wheels, motors, batteries, and other odds and ends — keep the price low,  and when constructed, you get a roly-poly pipe that you can control with your smartphone!

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DIY Hacking

Ultrasonic Range Finder

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Well, the name is definitely cool, but you’re probably wondering how this project works. It uses an Arduino Uno, an LCD readout, and a sonic ranging module to judge various distances. A receiver picks up the sonic waves that reflect off objects, and uses said data to compute the distance to a solid object. It’s a little like the laser speed detectors the police use, but this one was developed by a 13-year old for sheer entertainment. We suggest getting a little inventive about how you house the various components.

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DIY Hacking

Fingerprint Scanner

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With a simple fingerprint scanner module and other basic components, you can build yourself a real security scanner for… just about anything that you want. This particular model is for your garage door, which could come in handy, but you can easily customize it to cover a wide variety of tasks. Someone probably needs to make a model that locks the refrigerator from anyone not using your fingerprints.

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Instructables

China’s ‘Monkey King’ robot may help kick off a giant MegaBot fighting league

Why it matters to you

The arrival of China’s

As MegaBots fine-tunes its mighty Mark III gladiator robot for an August duel with Japan’s equally awesome Kuratas contraption, a fierce-looking fighter from China has just made it clear that it, too, wants to get involved.

Rather than have this summer’s eagerly anticipated event descend into a brutal robotic brawl that could see a million nuts and bolts flying in every direction, California-based MegaBots is currently deciding whether to allow China’s “Monkey King” fighter to take on its Mark III bot once the dust’s settled on August’s robot rumble.

At this stage, little is known of Greatmetal’s Monkey King machine, though its promo video (above) and recently published pics suggest it may be able to cause MegaBots’ robot warrior some serious damage. The metal monster, unveiled over the weekend at an event at the Beijing National Stadium, is capable of fighting standing up or on all fours, a handy skill that could certainly make things tricky for rivals.

First up, however, is MegaBots’ clash with Suidobashi Heavy Industry’s Kuratas. Both teams have been strengthening their respective creations over the last few years to ensure they can comfortably withstand carefully aimed strikes in the technicals.

While MegaBots Mark II machine had been deemed strong enough to deal with a serious assault, the team discovered the on-board human pilot would likely die in any such event. Not wanting to incur any casualties during this summer’s showdown, the team have been busy reinforcing the pilot’s protective cage as part of its Mark III design.

“We have about 3,000 wires on the robot, around 300 hydraulic hoses, 26 of the fastest hydraulic valves in the world, and a 430 horsepower gas engine that wants to be in a car and not a robot,” MegaBots co-founder and CEO Gui Cavalcanti told Digital Trends in April.

By any measure, the Mark III is an awesome machine. Weighing 12 tons and standing tall — very tall — at 16 feet, this mighty bot can hurl 3-pound projectiles at speeds of more than 130 mph — power its team hopes will be enough to take down Kuratas.

But the Japanese team is all set and knows how it wants to win: “Just building something huge and sticking guns on it — it’s Super American,” Suidobashi’s Kurodo Kurata says, adding, “If we’re going to win this, I want to punch them to scrap and knock them down to do it.”

The battle of the really big bots is just a few months away, though an exact date is yet to be announced. We’ll keep you posted.

Apple’s stunning ‘spaceship’ campus looks ready for workers to move in

Why it matters to you

Fans of modern architecture, as well as of the company itself, will be excited to see Steve Jobs’ vision for Apple’s new HQ finally realized.

Back in September 2014, the cleared land once home to Hewlett-Packard was little more than a field of dust. Today, as the first of 12,000 employees prepare to move in, it’s the location of Apple’s gleaming new headquarters.

Officially called Apple Park but still better known for its “spaceship” nickname given for its futuristic design, a new drone video posted in recent days by Matthew Roberts shows the sprawling, 176-acre Cupertino campus in the final stages of construction.

While at first glance it looks pretty much complete, closer inspection reveals work continuing in a number of areas around the site, including at the Steve Jobs Theater, the company’s subterranean 1,000-seat auditorium featuring a 20-foot-tall glass cylinder, 165 feet in diameter, supporting a metallic carbon-fiber roof.

Apple employees are expected any day now to begin transferring to the distinctive, doughnut-shaped main building, which is wrapped in the world’s largest segments of curved glass and topped off with a covering of solar panels that will help power the campus. The process of moving all 12,000 workers to the new site is expected to take up to six months.

Besides the main building and theater, the tech giant’s new base includes a 100,000-square-foot fitness center to keep Apple’s team in top shape, a research and development facility where Jony Ive and co. will endeavor to cook up the company’s next big success, and expansive landscaped parklands.

Notably, Apple claims its new HQ is the world’s largest naturally ventilated building and is therefore not expected to require heating or air conditioning for nine months of the year.

“Steve’s vision for Apple stretched far beyond his time with us,” Apple boss Tim Cook said in a statement earlier this year. “He intended Apple Park to be the home of innovation for generations to come. The workspaces and parklands are designed to inspire our team as well as benefit the environment. We’ve achieved one of the most energy-efficient buildings in the world and the campus will run entirely on renewable energy.”

Fans of the company, or those with an interest in stunning modern architecture, are invited to drop by Apple Park’s visitors center, which, as you’d expect, includes an Apple Store as well as a cafe.

The design of Apple Park is the work of acclaimed architect Norman Foster, though it was the former Apple boss and co-founder Steve Jobs who drove the ambitious project forward in the years and months leading up to his death in 2011.

Leaked 3DMark score hints at AMD RX Vega performance, and it rivals the GTX 1070

Why it matters to you

AMD’s Vega graphics cards could well offer solid competition for Nvidia’s top end, though maybe not at the bleeding edge.

AMD’s long-expected, high-end graphics card solution, Vega, may turn out to be pretty capable, though not as powerful as Nvidia’s top-tier offerings. A new leak of 3Dmark results which seem to come from an RX Vega card, suggests it could be roughly as powerful as a GTX 1070.

It’s been a long time since AMD truly rivaled Nvidia at the top end of the graphics card power spectrum, often preferring to offer competition at the midrange and entry-level. However, rumors over the past six months suggested that Vega could well do more than that and though these leaked results don’t make it a world beater, offering real competition for the GTX 1070 would still be quite a feat.

The 3Dmark result pairs a “Generic VGA” card with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X. That card, however, has the Vega device ID (687F:C1), which is what tipped off Guru3D to its true identity. The card achieved an overall score of 5,950 and a graphics score of 5,721 in the TimeSpy demo. That’s comparable to the GTX 1070 test results Guru3D achieved in its own internal testing.

If the card is indeed an AMD Vega graphics processor (GPU), it’s not necessarily the world beater some expected. However, it comes with 8GB of (most likely) HBM2 memory and a clock speed of just 1,200MHz, which suggests there could be a lot more headroom. It could be that this isn’t a top-of-the-line Vega graphics card and AMD could have something else up its sleeve for the top end too.

The driver used in this test are beta, too, so post-release drivers with optimizations could also yield higher scores.

At the very least though, third party options with more impressive cooling and an aggressive overclock should make a card like this a viable contender for GTX 1080 performance. It’s also fair to assume that an Intel CPU could lead to an improvement in overall performance, though that wouldn’t do much to the graphics test score.

Much of this is speculation for now. It could turn out that GTX 1070-level performance is the best we can hope for Vega, or this could be a test card that doesn’t perform as well as the final product. In either case, the market at the GTX 1080 and beyond level is very small, and not something that offers much financial incentive to AMD, even though the moral victory of having the most powerful cards in the world can do a lot for a manufacturer’s image.

The natural gas you pass is being turned into natural gas you can use

Why it matters to you

Portland’s repurposing of our natural waste may point the way to a more sustainable future.

Portland, Oregon is turning what we flush down the toilet into something safe for the planet.

When it comes to renewable resources, we’re pretty good candidates ourselves, at least when it comes to the waste we produce. After all, with over seven billion of us on the planet, and all of us, you know, creating waste on a (hopefully) daily basis, we’ve got a lot of sewage to work with. And now, the Oregon city has found a way to do just that.

Just before Earth Day this year, the Portland Environmental Services announced a “groundbreaking project that will convert waste methane from the city’s sewage treatment process into renewable natural gas.” So yes, friends. Your gas is being converted into gas that you need.

The resulting fuel promises to be both clean and locally produced (in more ways than one), and will be sold in Portland and other areas as a replacement for diesel fuel in trucks. Apparently, this project will be hugely beneficial to our planet at large, as Portland promises that this repurposing of our natural waste ought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 21,000 tons a year. Moreover, it’s projected to generate more than $3 million in revenue on an annual basis, and will replace 1.34 million gallons of diesel fuel (154 garbage trucks’ worth) with renewable gas.

“We are creating a triple-win for the public in terms of revenue, climate action, and cleaner air,” said Portland Commissioner Nick Fish. “The renewable natural gas we will produce is truly local and homegrown, a by-product of the waste from every Portland household that we can now repurpose.”

Portland hopes that by the end of the year, the fueling station will be finished and ready for use by Environmental Services and other city trucks. By the end of next year, Environmental Services thinks it can begin sending renewable natural gas into NW Natural’s network.

“Because our product is a renewable fuel and not a fossil fuel, it commands a five-to-ten times higher price on the renewable energy market,” said Environmental Services Director Mike Jordan. “Doing the right thing turns out to be a great deal.”

Ditch plastic bottles with this smartphone-activated water fountain

Why it matters to you

Bottled water may be convenient, but it’s harming the planet. Reefill wants to help with its smartphone-activated system of water fountains.

Bottled water may soon be a waste of the past — that is, if Reefill has its way. The New York City-based technology startup is taking advantage of your smartphone to help you save the planet with a system of phone-activated water refill stations. So as long as you have a reusable water bottle with you, you’ll be able to access unlimited cold, filtered tap water just about anywhere.

As it stands, Reefill can claim eight pilot stations in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. But a new Indiegogo campaign hopes to expand that presence to 100 locations across the city. The goal is simple: to help rid the United States’ most populous city of plastic water bottles.

Last year, the Reefill team notes, U.S. bottled water sales topped $21 billion, bringing in more revenue than the soda industry. And while it may be good for our waistlines that we’re choosing bottled water over sugary carbonated drinks, it’s not doing much for Mother Earth. The problem, of course, is that those of us who do opt to carry around our own reusable water containers often find ourselves at a loss when it comes to refills.

There aren’t all that many public water fountains — at least, those that dispense water that you’d actually want to drink. Reefill seeks to solve this problem by providing the public with a convenient water solution without waste and for a low cost.

To use Reefill, members are asked to pay $1.99 per month, which grants them unlimited access to all Reefill stations. Then, simply download the Reefill app (available on both Android and iPhone), and search the in-app map for the nearest station. Once users have arrived at the nearest fountain, they can activate the station using Bluetooth via the app, and fill up their bottles. The app also keeps tabs on how many bottles Reefill user have saved from the landfill, as well as how much money members are saving by opting out of buying bottled water.

“Reefill’s pilot program has been a huge success and we have gotten great feedback from our users who let us know that they are eager to see a citywide network,” said Reefill Co-founder and CEO Jason Pessel. “We are ready to make that a reality and help as many people as possible ditch bottled water.”

Apple has reportedly amassed a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash reserves

Why it matters to you

Apple has enough money in the bank to facilitate even the most outlandish research and development projects, but the avenues it will pursue remain to be seen.

On Tuesday, Apple will submit its earnings report for the second quarter of 2017, and the company is expected to announce that its cash reserves exceed $250 billion. This enormous amount of money serves as a very reassuring safety net, but it’s thought that the announcement may prompt calls for Apple to invest more of its available resources.

As of the time of writing, there’s no firm confirmation that this figure is accurate. However, given that the company reported cash reserves of $246.1 billion in December 2016, it certainly stands to reasons that another $4 billion could have been added to its coffers since then.

Apple may delay spending too much of its reserves to see whether or not President Donald Trump will follow through on campaign promises that would allow money being held overseas to be brought back to the United States at a reduced tax rate, according to a report from 9to5Mac.

Rumors often circulate about major acquisitions Apple could make by utilizing its considerable war chest. In late 2016, the company apparently considered buying Time Warner before it was eventually sold to Charter Communications, and there are persistent reports that it might make a play to purchase Netflix, in an attempt to bolster its entertainment portfolio.

Apple got into the habit of keeping healthy cash reserves under the leadership of Steve Jobs. During the 1990s, the company’s financial situation got into such dire straits that it took a $150 million investment from Microsoft to keep the ship afloat.

Today, Apple is obviously in a much more advantageous financial situation. However, its massive reserves will prompt big questions about whether the cash should be pumped into research and development, or returned to shareholders. With more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in the bank, it’s perhaps unsurprising to see the company investing heavily into what’s coming next.

Measuring how fast you walk could be an early warning system for health problems

Why it matters to you

MIT researchers have developed smart sensors that can work out how quickly a person is walking, and this data could serve as an early warning system for possible health problems.

Measuring a person’s walking speed using a wearable device is actually a whole lot more difficult than you might think. For example, devices such as FitBits base their estimate of how fast a person is walking solely on the number of steps taken, resulting in numbers that aren’t always accurate.

A new research project carried out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claims to have cracked this challenge, however — with a system that can measure the walking speed of multiple people with 95 to 99 percent accuracy. Most impressive of all? It doesn’t require any wearable tech whatsoever.

Instead, it involves a wall-mounted sensor called WiGait that can be placed in a person’s home. By analyzing the wireless signals reflected off a person’s body, the team is able to make its accurate predictions. It is also able to ascertain a person’s stride length with 85 to 99 percent accuracy.

Jason Dorfman

But while this certainly an impressive computer science demo, it’s what the team wants to do with this data that’s really exciting.

“This builds on our earlier work measuring breathing and heart rate by analyzing the surrounding wireless signals, without any wearables,” lead author Chen-Yu Hsu told Digital Trends. “We picture a connected world where we can equip our homes to use ambient wireless signals to monitor our health, from tracking metrics related to chronic diseases to alerting us about health emergencies. WiGait’s ability to monitor walking speed, stride length, and changes in mobility habits is a big leap in that direction.

In this scenario, being able to measure walking speed and stride length could provide useful health insights. This is something already being backed up in independent studies. For instance, features like cognitive decline and possible cardiac disease could be sensed by looking at the speed at which a person moves. In the future, the team also hopes to train it on people suffering from walking impairments such as Parkinson’s disease, which could have its progression tracked by a person’s stride length, since the disease is characterized by small shuffling steps.

“Many of us worry about the health of our parents and grandparents,” Hsu continued. “We see this as filling a need for in-home non-invasive health monitoring that can give us peace of mind about our loved ones’ health. We believe that having a smart device like this that analyzes the wireless signals can address some of the key issues we face in healthcare.”

Project Scorpio vs Xbox One – is the upgrade worth it?

One of the biggest reasons to upgrade to a new console generation is power. Better graphics, better processing capabilities – all of it leads to bigger and better-looking games. With its upcoming new version of the Xbox One, codenamed “Project Scorpio,” Microsoft wants to convince you that adding more technical firepower shouldn’t be reserved for new consoles.

While the Scorpio is a still an Xbox One, it’s heftier, faster, more powerful under the hood. It’s the younger sibling with years worth of extra development and planning behind it and should, in theory, offer substantial performance and feature improvements over its predecessor. But is it worth buying over the affordable original?

While we won’t be able to judge Project Scorpio fully and fairly until we get out hands on the hardware itself and take it for a spin, thanks to a recent report from Digital Foundry, we now have enough specs to help you get a sense of just how big a jump you would make by upgrading from an Xbox One or Xbox One S to Project Scorpio.

Specs

Xbox One

Xbox One S

Project Scorpio

CPU
8 core, AMD custom CPU @ 1.75GHz
8 core, AMD custom CPU @ 1.75GHz
8 core x86 CPU @ 2.3GHz
GPU
AMD GCN GPU @ 853Mhz w/ 12 compute units
AMD GCN GPU @ 914Mhz w/ 12 compute units
AMD custom GPU @ 1,172MHz w/ 40 compute units
Memory
8GB DDR3, 32MB ESRAM
8GB DDR3, 32MB ESRAM
12GB GDDR5
Memory bus
256-bit
256-bit
384-bit
Memory bandwidth
68GB/s, 204GB/s
68GB/s, 219GB/s
326GB/s
Storage
1TB/500GB 2.5 inch HDD
1TB/500GB 2.5 inch HDD
1TB 2.5 inch HDD
Optical drive
Blu-Ray
4K UHD Blu-Ray
4K UHD Blu-Ray
4k Support
No
Yes, limited
Yes, native
HDR support
No
Yes, HDR10
Yes

Study suggests gender bias exists in open-source programming

Why it matters to you

That the tech industry suffers from gender inequality is no secret, and this study appears to offers some confirmation.

Evidence that gender bias exists in the field of computer science has emerged in the form of a new study examining acceptance rates of contributions from men and women in an open-source software community. The study’s findings indicated that women’s contributions were rejected more often, but only if their gender is identifiable. If, in fact, it is unclear whether the contributor is a man or a woman, women’s contributions tended to be accepted at a greater rate.

“There are a number of questions and concerns related to gender bias in computer programming, but this project was focused on one specific research question: To what extent does gender bias exist when pull requests are judged on GitHub?” Emerson Murphy-Hill, corresponding author of a paper on the study and an associate professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, told phys.org.

In order to conduct this research, Murphy-Hill and his colleagues analyzed more than three million pull requests (methods to improve code on a project) from around 330,000 GitHub users, about 21,000 of whom were women. Within this group, 78.7 percent of women’s pull requests were accepted, while 74.6 percent of men’s requests were accepted.

But when gender got involved, things got a bit more complicated. Murphy-Hill also looked at pull requests from individuals who were not considered “insiders” on a project, and found that gender appeared to play a role in acceptance. Computer scientists who were easily identifiable as women (as a result of their name or profile picture) ended up with lower pull request acceptance rates at 58 percent than male users at 61 percent. Curiously enough, female programmers with gender neutral profiles had the highest acceptance rates of all in this group (70 percent), even more so than men with gender neutral profiles (65 percent).

“Our results indicate that gender bias does exist in open-source programming,” Murphy-Hill said. “The study also tells us that, in general, women on GitHub are strong programmers. We don’t think that’s because gender affects one’s programming skills, but likely stems from strong self-selection among women who submit pull requests on the site.”

You can check out the full results of the study in the open-access journal PeerJ Computer Science, where the research is published under the title, “Gender Differences and Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women Versus Men.”