MORE ABOUT Arduino

This video shows how to establish a peer-to-peer wireless LoRa communication. With a simple example based on Arduino, it explains how to update the data from a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor to the ThingSpeak cloud. Before being able to send data from sensors to a cloud server, a beginning developer may need targeted assistance to quickly learn LoRa and IoT technology. That's why Elektor has chosen the new Dragino LoRa IoT Development Kit. Soon you too will turn your ideas into practical applications on the Internet of your own Things.

This circular wall clock comes as a partially assembled kit. It is presented in the form of a simple ring of about 25 cm (10 inches) diameter, to hang on the wall. In fact, all you see is this sober black crown a few centimetres in size, which acts as the dial. No display, no hands, no second hand, no pendulum, nothing like that. And yet, like all good timepieces, this one does have hands, a second hand, and even a pendulum.

This new kit is a variant of Elektor’s earlier published sand clock. Instead of writing the time in a layer of sand, it uses a laser module to plot the time onto a piece of glow-in-the-dark sticker material. The original design of the sand clock was modified to fit a laser module running on 3 - 5 V. A switch allows starting the time writing sequence at will rather than at a preset interval. This upgrade-kit is nowavailable in your Elektor store.

Writing the time every minute – or at any other adjustable interval – into a layer of sand is the star attraction of a cool project developed around an Arduino Uno. This video shows how easy it is to build the well-designed gadget yourself from a kit of parts provided by Elektor. All parts are included.

Described in the January & February 2017 edition of Elektor, the Sand Clock project, unique for its mechanical design, is all the better for its availability in kit form, which I’ve wanted to examine more closely. The principle of this gadget is amusing: to write the time in sand every minute, with a stylus on a pantograph and some servomotors, and erase it just before the next minute, and repeat endlessly.

We may have equal rights, but not the means to use them! If we want our children or friends to the same satisfaction in electronics as we do, we need to choose introductory programs that can guide them in gaining knowledge and experience. Here’s an ambitious program built around simple encapsulated bricks, devised to learn about everything from ohms to gigahertz, a system open to the world.

Built around an Arduino Uno, this cool gadget displays the current time of the day, not by showing digits or changing the relative position of a pair of hour and minute hands, but by plotting four digits into a layer of sand. After an adjustable delay two vibration motors flatten out the sand before the write cycle begins again.

The four legged AllBot is a modular robot system with open source soft and hardware using Arduino compatible robot shields. Build and enhance your robot, learn how to program with supplied example sketches, use the free app to control the ALLBOT with your smartphone or tablet (Android or iOS) and have fun! Experiment with programming authentic leg movements with 3 degrees of freedom. Upgrade packs are available for different types of robots.

What’s the difference between Marco Polo and Arduino? None, they both started off small in Italy and prospered in China. Seriously though, I owe you a Test Bench and have in front of me two similar products, the Grove Starter Kit for Arduino, and the mCookie 301 expert kit offered by Microduino. I’ve only got space for one here, so eeny, meeny, miny, mo…

Various circular animations and blinking multi-colour light effects are possible with this simple 32 LED circle. It runs from two CR2032 batteries. The red, yellow and green LEDs are driven by an ATmega328p, easily programmed with the Arduino IDE. Since this microcontroller lacks the outputs to drive so many LEDs individually, these are arranged in a 4 x 8 matrix (only 12 outputs required).