Planet Arduino

Finding the perfect gift for everyone on your list it’s fun and inspiring. Let us help you choose the perfect gift: next to our classic Arduino, Genuino boards and goodies, we created 3 thematic guides to highlight the products in our stores that deserve a spot on your gift list. And to make it even more special, we added a FREE SHIPPING* feature for orders over 150$/100€.

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TINKERING
Experience the magic of playing with technology. Your creative confidence is going to boost!

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to Tinkering

• Many people around the world had fun tinkering on the 15 projects featured in the Arduino Starter Kit and Genuino Starter Kit. Now you can make someone happy too for XMas! The Starter Kit is available in English and Italian.

• The 3rd edition of Getting Started with Arduino by Massimo Banzi and Michael Shiloh introduces to the UNO board, gives you lots of ideas for projects, and helps you experiment with them right away.

• If you are looking for interacting with your surroundings in experimental ways, Arduino AtHeart Bare Conductive Touch Board and Touch Board Kit can turn almost any material or surface into a sensor. Connect objects to its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or any conductive material and create amazing musical instruments.

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KIDS
Get inspired and make this holiday special for your kids! Get them to experiment with science and technology and the wonderful world of STEAM.

Click and explore all the products of the gift guide dedicated to kids

• You can share your excitement with electronics playing with kids and teenagers on the TV-B-Gone Kit, a universal remote designed to shut off any TV. It’s fun making it and using it.

• Get started with paper circuits and stickers with Chibit Circuit Sticker Start Kit an imaginative and easy way to make fun electronics projects without coding, soldering, or hands-on experience.

• Play with the most hackable tiny synth ever! NS1nanosynth synthesizer is an handeld 220x85mm analog modular synthesizer coupled with an Arduino Leonardo platform. it’s a tool to explore the potential contamination between analog and digital music creation!

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IOT & CONNECTIVITY
Create connected devices and master your IoT skills. It’s easier than you think.

Click and explore the product of the gift guide dedicated to IoT

•  Blend Micro is a RedBearLab Arduino AtHeart integrated development board. They “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a small single board. You can quickly and easily develop low power IoT projects.

• Making things Talk 2nd edition by Arduino co-founder Tom Igoe, shows you how to get your gadgets to communicate with you and your environment. It’s perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest.In this expanded edition, you’ll learn how to form networks of smart devices that share data and respond to commands

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On our stores we are offering FREE SHIPPING for all orders over 150$ (below 3 Lb) in USA via USPS Priority Mail, and for all orders over 100€ (below 3 Kg) via GLS in Europe.

Delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by December 24th, we strongly advise you to place the order before December 18th.

Free Shipping is available from November 27th 2015 until January 6th 2016.

 

 

Just for fun, I designed my own variation of a treasure hunt game

Read more on MAKE

[Raffi] needed a birthday present idea but he wanted to do something extra special. He realized that a big part of gift giving is the anticipation and excitement of opening the present. In order to prolong this experience, [Raffi] built an electronic puzzle box. The box contains the final gift, but first a series of puzzles must be solved in order to open the box.

The project runs on an Arduino Mega. This is hooked up to several sensors, including a temperature sensor, GPS unit, and CO sensor. There is also an LCD screen and numeric keypad for user input and output. The project page contains a flow chart that shows all of the puzzles and their solutions. One of the more interesting puzzles requires the user to blow tobacco smoke into a tube. The CO sensor detects the smoke and unlocks the next puzzle.

Some of the puzzles require interacting with outside systems. For example, one puzzle requires the user to send an email to the fictional Captain Hermano’s email address. If the correct keyword is included in the email, the user will receive a reply with the code to enter into the box. Another puzzle requires the user to call a particular phone number and listen for another riddle. We’ve included the video demonstration below.

This isn’t the first puzzle box we’ve seen, but each one has its own special flair. This one is very well made and looks like a lot of care was put into it. We’ve seen another that uses only discrete components. We’ve seen yet another that uses Morse code.

[Thanks Simon]

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

Last week we published our gift guides presenting you a list of products  available on the Arduino Store and divided by topic for Kids and people interested in IoT, Home Lab and Fashion Tech.

Now we’d like to give you some suggestions for gift ideas fitting anyone’s piggy bank:

Gifts Under 15€

Arduino ISP

It’s a tiny AVR-ISP (in-system programmer) based on David Mellis’ project FabISPand useful to anyone needing more space on the Arduino board

 

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Flashing Card Set – Merry Resistivities by Bare Conductive

The Merry Resistivities Set contains all the materials you need to make three flashing greeting cards using Electric Paint. This fun activity is great for makers of all ages.

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Minipov by Adafruit

A simple POV toy for beginners who are looking to learn how to solder, how to program microcontrollers, or make LED blinky toys. Because the programmer is built into the kit, one does not need a special “microcontroller programmer”.

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Arduino Proto Shield

The Arduino Prototyping Shield makes it easy for you to design custom circuits for your next Arduino project. You can solder parts to the prototyping area to create your project with extra connections for all of the Arduino I/O pins.

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Make Robot Notebook Moleskine

Pocket Moleskine Notebook – Fresh from the Maker Faire comes our exclusive mini-Moleskine (5.5″x3.5″, 30 pages) notebook, available with Robot logos.

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Gifts Under 30€

Getting Started with Arduino – 2nd Edition

This classic book to start tinkering with Arduino gives you lots of ideas for projects and helps you work with them right away. From getting organized to putting the final touches on your prototype, all the information you need is here!

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Arduino Case + Breadboard Wires Kit

This lasercut (in Officine Arduino), wooden case is perfect to host your project and store electronic parts. It features two drawers, a confortable surface for a standard breadboard and the space for two Arduinos to be hooked up. It’s stackable, perfect for teaching material or group work.

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Arduino UNO

If you want to make any beginner happy, this is the perfect gift. “Uno” means “One” in Italian and is named to mark the upcoming release of Arduino 1.0. The Uno and version 1.0 will be the reference versions of Arduino, moving forward. The Uno is the latest in a series of USB Arduino boards, and the reference model for the Arduino platform.

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Lumi Red or Blu

Lumi is a new DIY alternative to screen printing.The process works on cotton, linen, silk, rayon, canvas, and any other natural & absorbent fiber. Once finished, your print is permanent and can be machine washed without fading.

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Blend Micro by RedBearLab

Arduino At Heart Blend Micro is RedBearLab first integrated developement board, they have “blend”ed Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy (aka BLE or Bluetooth Smart) into a single board. It is targeted for makers to develop low power Internet-Of-Things (IoT) projects quickly and easily.

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Gifts Under 60€

Arduino Esplora

The Arduino Esplora is a ready-to-use, easy-to-hold controller that lets you explore the infinitive possibilities you have in the world of sensor and actuators, without having to deal with breadboards, soldering or cable. There is no limits to the sensors applications! Adding a LCD module you can make your personal videogame!

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Bare Conductive Touch Board

Touch Board can turn almost any material or surface into a sensor by connecting it to one of its 12 electrodes, using conductive paint or anything conductive. It’s designed as an easy-to-use platform for a huge range of projects, whether it’s painting a lightswitch on your wall, making a paper piano or something nobody’s thought of yet.

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Intel Edison

The Intel Edison is an ultra small computing platform that will change the way you look at embedded electronics. This kit also includes a Arduino Breakout, which essentially gives your Edison the ability to interface with Arduino shields or any board with the Arduino footprint.

 

Arduino Yún

Arduino with onboard Wi-Fi connectivity and a Linux computer. Great for IoT projects. The Arduino YÚN is the combination of a classic Arduino Leonardo (based on the Atmega32U4 processor) with a WiFi system-on-chip running OpenWrt-Yun.

 

Remember

FREE SHIPPING to European Union for all orders over €100 (below 3Kg overall weight). Should you need delivery by Dec 24th, we strongly advise you to place the order before Dec 15th. FREE SHIPPING is available from Dec. 2nd 2014 until Jan 6th 2015. Read more about the shipping policy.

Regardless of your budget, time and flair, there’s a perfect pick to put under your friends’ and relatives’ tree this year. We created a series of Gift Guides to help you be more relaxed and efficient in finding the best solution for all. You can check below and find out also some good news regarding free shipping (check at the end of the blogpost!)

Kids

Winter holidays and Christmas is the time most of the people focus on kids and family in the most broader sense. And never like today we have the chance to make a present and open up new worlds to the little ones.

Yes. I’m talking about the experience you have playing with littleBits Base Kit for the first time. It’s an excitement for electronics you can share with kids and teenagers also happening when playing with Bare Conductive Pen, Voltage Village  Glowing House or the TV-B-Gone Kit designed to shut off any TV. They are like an entire universe hiding into a game box!

Explore the gift guide dedicated to kids

 

IoT & Connectivity

IoT and connected devices  has absolutely exploded in the past year, so if you’ve got coders and startuppers on your gift list, these ideas could save your time. In this gift guide you’ll find a selected list for different tastes and for sure there’s something for everyone.

From the well known Arduino Yún to the Annikken Andee for Android  smartphones designed to make mobile integration simple, you can learn how to build Wireless Sensor Networks and test the power of Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy with Blend Micro.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to IoT

 

Home Lab

Some people say that in the future our homes will be fully automated, with refrigerators ordering your milk when it’s over, and other gizmos enabling the materialisation of a truly smart home. Is this what we want? Probably we’re not sure yet but there are a few tools  that you can buy for your house that will get you and your friends to feel like what it means to have a home lab.

Starting from a Materia 101 kit to 3d print cool decorations for Christmas and you can take your holiday time to build it with the help of some friends. Or use some quite days to dive in the world of electronics exploring Make Electronics book by Charles Platt or tinkering with some components you’ve never had time to explore like the Arduino Wireless SD Proto Shield or the Tinkerkit DMX Receiver .

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Home Lab

 

Fashion Tech

Fashion and tech are closer than ever these days. Textile sensors make every interactive project comfortable to wear and easy to prototype. Soft potentiometers, Textile push buttons, Stretch sensors connected to an Arduino Lilypad are the best components to explore this promising field. You can begin with the Open Softwear book 2nd edition plus the Easy Wearable Kit and then move forward with  yellow EL-Wires to brighten your winter. If you want to explore new approaches not related with electronics, then try  the DIY alternative to print fabrics using light with Lumi KIT Red or Blu.

Explore the gift guide dedicated to Fashion

 

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Arduino Store is now offering FREE SHIPPING to Europe via GLS for all orders over €100, below 3 Kg overall weight. GLS delivery will take 4-5 working days to reach you. In December, this may take longer due to end-of-the-year seasonality. Should you need delivery by Dec. 24th, we strongly advice you to place the order before Dec. 15th. Learn more about shipping

Mike Buss used an Arduino Duemilanove, Parallax RFID reader, micro servo, and piezo electric speaker to make a personalized, lockable keepsake box for his girlfriend’s birthday:

The outside of the box is really simple: it just contains a button and an RGB LED. When she presses the button, the LED lights up green or red depending on if the box is locked. When she waves one of the three personalized RFID cards over the box, a little tune plays and the box unlocks.

As part of the project I also did some cool trick with a Pololu pushbutton power switch to make the battery last a lot longer. Since the Arduino is only powered for a few seconds when listening for RFID tags, the battery lasts a lot longer. When the box is finished locking or unlocking (or after a small time delay), it sends a signal to the power switch to turn off the power and conserve battery life. The box has been running on the same 9V battery I put in 4 years ago!