Planet Arduino

Alan Yorinks shared on Arduino Community on Gplus a physical computing environment he created to make it easier for 10 and 11 year old’s to start playing. He picked up an Arduino Esplora, and wrote some software so that it could be controlled from the Scratch and Snap! graphical programming languages. According to Alan, the Arduino Esplora has on-board integrated sensors, actuators and make it a perfect match for the graphical programming languages that the kids love to use.

By combining an Arduino Esplora microcontroller with the esp4s library and either the Scratch or Snap! programming languages, that first line of code can be written in minutes!

Take a look at his documentation on Github.

A science teacher at Bundang management high school, 20 kilometers southeast of downtown Seoul (South Korea) involved his students in an Arduino Music project running on Arduino Uno, Sparkfun Music Instrument Shield and Makey Makey.

Students started studying the principles of sensors and then built their own music instruments using recycled materials. Finally they played them as you can see from the video he shared with us:

See more pictures and videos at this link.

Hackaball is a smart and responsive ball that children can program to invent and play games. It was recently backed by more than 1000 people and reached the goal!

As many other projects on Kickstarter, Hackaball was initially prototyped with Arduino using sensors that detect motions like being dropped, bounced, kicked, shaken or being perfectly still.

We got in touch with its team and asked them to tell us a bit more about the creation process:

Our early versions of the ball worked with the Arduino Uno board, progressing to a breadboard Arduino and then making our own SMD designs with the Uno. In the latests prototypes we used the Arduino Leonardo and our current version runs on the Arduino Mega. Our production version will run on an ARM chip.

We hope to offer Arduino Compatibility as one of our stretch goals in the Kickstarter, so that people can buy a board and put their own code on it using the Arduino software, effectively moving one step up from the app in terms of hacking the ball and making it do what you want it to do. We also believe many adults would love an interactive ball that they can control and design their own interactions – its packed full of features! Hopefully it will also allow kids who’ve outgrown our app to experiment with our technology in a more challenging way, bringing longevity to the product.

We’ve approached the kids who’ll play with Hackaball as the future Makers. The idea of hacking and getting close to technology starts with how the ball first arrives in your home. Kids open the packaging to find the ball is broken: Hackaball has crash-landed on earth and needs to be put back together again. After their first achievement, making the ball, kids are challenged to play games, change existing ones, fix broken games and create new ones from scratch.

We specifically designed the ball and packaging to be gender neutral – making it feel accessible to both boys and girls from the very beginning. We also expanded on the ability of the ball to include both hard and soft skills – from the tactile and linear computational thinking, to the storytelling and imagination-driven game creation, teaching a new generation of Makers to combine technology and creativity. We think that the kids who play with Hackaball would move on to Arduino in their teens!

 

You still have some days to back the project and help them reach the stretch goals, making Hackaball even more hackable!

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

Maker Camp is a free summer camp from Make and Google for building, tinkering and exploring.
Back in July Massimo was invited for a live streaming interview to talk about Arduino (starting at 11’20”) together with Ayah Bdeir , founder of the littleBits electronic components. Enjoy the video!

Toot is an interactive and sound-active toy designed for children aged between 3 and 6 years old that wants to enhance their auditory, music and language skills. It was developed by Federico Lameri as his thesis project of Master of Interaction Design at Supsi and prototyped using Arduino Leonardo.

The toy is composed by eight little cubical speaker boxes:

On each speaker children are able to record a sound. In order to listen back to the recorded sound the speaker must be shaken as if the sound was physically trapped into a box. After having recorded sounds on them, the speakers can be placed in a sequence after Mr.toot, and by tapping on his head it is possible to trigger the playback of the speakers in a sequence. toot is also matched with a mobile application that offers different kind of interactions and experiences. it allows to play some exercise that will teach children to listen, understand and catalog sound and melodies.

The app expands the possibilities of interaction, offering different exercises created with the help of musicians and educators from different areas of expertise,  some of them are also inspired by a Montessori sensorial activity.

Take a look at the video interview with Montessori educator Fanny Bissa:

 

Summer is upon us. The Lightgame Project is a multiplayer reaction time based game built around the Arduino. It’s a perfect rainy day project for those restless kids (and adults!). Designed by two undergraduate students [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] for a semester long project, all the hard work has already been done for you.

There are tons of reasons we love games that you can build yourself. For one, it’s an amazing way to get children interested in hobby electronics, making, and hacking. Especially when they can play the game with (and show off to) their friends. Another reason is that it is a perfect way to share your project with friends and family, showcasing what you have been learning. The game is based on your reaction time and whether or not you press your button when another players color is shown. The project is built around two Arduinos connected via I2C. The master handles the mechanics of the game, while the slave handles the TFT LCD and playing music through a buzzer.

I2C is a great communication protocol to be familiar with and this is a great project to give it a try. [Efstathios] and [Thodoris] did a great job writing up their post, plus they included all the code and schematics needed to build your own. It would be great to see more university professors foster open source hardware and software with their students. A special thanks goes out to [Dr. Dasygenis] for submitting his student’s work to us!

Filed under: Arduino Hacks

A team of students from Marin County Day School built a mobile robot with a sentry gun that responds to its environment.

Read more on MAKE

Primo‘s team sent us exciting news from their HQ about their contribution to the open source community. After the successful Kickstarter campaign to launch the wooden play-set that uses shapes, colours and spacial awareness to teach programming logic through a tactile, warm and magical learning experience, they took a step further. They released all the documentation and the instructions to produce a Primo prototype,  different from the product that they make and sell.

We just finished the first edition of the Primo play-set open documentation, that includes the design files that we used to make our first prototype and a step-by-step guide to make your own version of the Primo play set. This “maker” version of our product can be assembled using rapid prototyping techniques and common tools like Arduino boards.

We recently published a preview of this documentation just for our Kickstarter backers, who already started to build their projects and to translate the document in their language. The FabLab in São Paulo for example already translated it in Brasilian Portuguese, while other languages like Dutch, Italian and Japanese are now in progress.

The whole documentation is completely transparent: it’s written in Markdown using Jekyll and GitHub pages. In this way it is very easy for creators to modify, translate and use it as a starting point for their projects.

In parallel we are developing an industrial version of our product, using manufacture-quality materials and custom Arduino-compatible electronic boards.

 

And if you want to read about the experience of a dad making a DIY version in 1 month and a half of work, follow this link.

Primo is an Arduino At Heart partner. If you have a great project based on Arduino and want to join the program, read the details and then get in touch with us.

The weekly post on the Arduino Micro,  made in collaboration with Adafruit, is dedicated to an installation for kids made by Scott Garner, a designer, developer and craftsman:

Reach is a large-scale interactive mural and musical instrument created for the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh as part of the Tough Art residency program. There are no visible electronics, but when users touch both the moon and a star (either alone or by holding hands with others) a tone is played.

The Arduino sketch and PureData patch are viewable on GitHub and below you can watch an inspiring video of the “Making of”: