Like a ’70s cop team – one is the goodie two shoes and the other one is the drunk – the DuinoTagger and Talcapult allow you to shoot things and make smoke appear. The gun uses an Arduino board to control a tiny catapult that blows out a little puff of smoke.

The instructions are pretty detailed but you can see how it works here if you’re so inclined.

This pumpkin does a bit more then just fire silly string. It’s controlled by an Arduino device coupled with an IR motion sensor, which allows it to shoot the aforementioned silly string. It also controls a sound box, and will twitter when it fires so you can count how many victims.

It’s not a complicated build, but requires some specialized hardware so you better get to it if you want to be set up in time for the weekend.

[via Instructables]

Okay, just humor me and watch the video, please. It’s not like I get paid to describe things with… those… um, you know, the things that make stuff readable. With individual letters, etc. And periods, commas — the things in between those.

This here’s an interactive, outdoor electronic snowball fight comprised of two life size animated characters made from decorative Christmas lights. Two human players control each animated character, making them either duck or throw snowballs (also made from Christmas lights) at the other. You can’t duck and throw at the same time though.

If nobody’s around to play, the two characters will continue to lob snowballs at each other automatically. Say hello to the new coolest house in the neighborhood, all thanks to Arduino.

[via MAKE]

Droplet from Andrew Rapp on Vimeo.

Need to know the weather? Need to check Woot? Want to read the news? Well, all you need is an Arduino board, an LCD read-out, four buttons, a breadboard, some experience in electronics, and a computer. Then you can build yourself a Droplet.

The device uses a buzzer, and LED, and a few circuits to add notifications to the Droplet system. The system then connects to your computer to pull down data from Google, Twitter, and other sources. Is it a little too complex for its own good? Definitely, but what else are you doing this weekend. It’s overkill but isn’t everything?

Brewing your own beer by hand is soooo 1992. You can now automate most of the process using an Arduino controller and some source code over at Halfluck.com.

As for materials, you’ll need an Arduino board, an LCD and serial board, two temperature sensors, four push buttons, four solid state relays, one 2400-watt heater element, two perastaltic pumps, and one spit motor.

The system, once assembled, can apparently whip up a pretty consistent batch of beer and can be remotely controlled and monitored. As for the copious scrubbing and disinfecting involved with homebrewing equipment, you’re on your own for that.

Halfluck Automated Brewing System (HABS) [Halfluck.com via Make]

Eventually all music will be made this way: a 24-volt power supply, an Arduino board, and three stepper motors. In fact Akon is actually a simple stepper motor attached to a Vocoder and Pro Tools. Look it up! It’s true!

One more video after the jump.

via NowhereElse

The plans are amazingly complete and it could be a fun home project although it looks like it could take a while, especially if you electrocute yourself while wiring everything up.

More information on the Arduino board is here.

This Sparkfun project by Nate creates a keyless entry fob for a Mazda using a Nike+iPod kit, allowing you to leave your car keys at home. Using a serial board you can read the input and output bits of the footpod and grab signals and decode them.

He then used an Arduino Pro Mini connected to the lock and unlock wires in the car. Now all he has to do is walk up to the vehicle and it unlocks automatically.

While testing I found the range of the transmitter (the footpod) was really pretty impressive at 50+ feet. This was cool, but I didn’t want my car to be unlocking/lock while walking around my house or office. To cut down on the reception, I sabotaged the antenna. I could have hacked into the footpod, but then it wouldn’t have fit so nice in my pocket. Instead, I completely wrapped the receiver with a few layers of aluminum foil. This cut the reception down to 20-25ft. Jeesh! What do I have to do to kill the power on these things? These devices are designed and built very well!

The idea is surprisingly simple if you know how the PS2’s analog controller is wired and have some circuit-building know-how — requirements which leave me out. But if you’re crafty, and have access to a giant steel ball and three smaller ones, you might be able to rig this up since the design is open source. It’s essentially just a giant trackball, but it’s not like you can just whip one of those up anyhow.

[via Reddit]

Those little scamps over at Adafruit are always up to something. This time they built a “pager scanner” which is basically a system that grabs all of the pages transmitted on pager networks and displays them. Sadly, the pager network isn’t as juicy as it used to be and now only doles out sports scores and emergency broadcasts.

What’s that you say? What if, during my day-to-day, activities, these haX0rs try to steal my pages? Well, remember, if you’re still using a pager you’re either a doctor or a drug dealer stuck in 1992 so you either don’t care if someone sees your pages or you deserve to be snooped upon.

One concern: the video is pretty darn obtuse so unless you know what “bit banging” is, I’d avoid giving this a try. Still, they give you the full breadboard diagram and a bit of background so you can try this trick yourself.

9×9 isn’t enough space to even fit most NES sprites into, but you could probably animate a passable goomba. Or you could watch Futurama on it (with room to spare!). Or, and I think this is the best option, get a game like Dodge Club running on there. It’s got an Arduino powering the display, but I’m sure you could find a way to pass a video signal from Windows into it.

[via HardOCP]

So you need your project to pause for a preset number of minutes but you can’t do it programatically? Why not connect a micro-controller to an hourglass egg timer to sense when the sand stops moving through the glass. A motor then resets the hourglass once the sand runs out, thereby repeating the process ad infinitum. Pretty groovy, huh?

Think about it: what if we are in an hourglass and we’re all going to be flipped over like at the end of the universe? I know, right?

The Teensy is Arduino-compatible, so you won’t have to revamp your whole DIY lifestyle and learn a new platform. It looks super easy to connect and comes with tools to load its 15.5K of memory with whatever good times you’ve got planned.

[via MAKE and AVR Freaks]

Make’s Phil Torrone entered this odd gadget, the Tweet-a-Watt, in the Green Gadgets design competition. It’s essentially a Kill-a-Watt with a capacitor and transmitter added that will Tweet your current power usage using a nearby computer or wireless Arduino mini PC.

Phil powered the transmitter using a large capacitor that charges, transmits, and then discharges over time. They then used an XBee module to transmit the information read by the Kill-a-Watt, giving you an up-to-the-minute reading of your energy usage.

The kit is going open source shortly so you can make your own.

We’re publishing the source, schematics and the idea for others to run with – Energy change and consumption can happen many ways, we feel there is a social imperative and joy in publishing one’s own daily KWH – by sharing these numbers on a service like Twitter users can compete for the lowest numbers and also see how they’re doing compared to their friends and followers.

Make, as usual, has an excellent round-up of open source hardware kits based our own favorite, the Arduino. The list includes all the add-ons, like the Ethernet and Motor shields, and devices like the Seeduino, a more powerful Arduino clone.

My buddy Paul has a few of these and is building stuff as we speak. I don’t really have the patience for this kind of low level electronics, but I’d love to hear about some projects you guys have cooked up. Anyone?

I’d definitely be rocking one of these if I had the time to throw down on some sweet high-speed shooting. His gallery is here, but there are more photos over at Hack n Mod.

This haxor installed an Arduino Mini into a Game Boy case and then used a MIDI keyboard to play through the internal speaker. It basically turns the Game Boy into a synthesizer. The code is open so you can mod it all yourself. The Arduino is an open hardware platform that we’ve covered here quite a bit.

This odd fellow is an Arduino-based system for reading – and reacting to – incoming Twitter messages. While his eyes look like they’re made of CORN it’s nice to see someone as sad as me about getting incoming Tweets.

via Giz

Anita Lillie at the MIT Media Lab created an Arduino-based sleep tracker to process where she keeps her arms while thrashing in the great deep sea of sleep.

The best part is that she created a graphing system that shows her movements and positions while she slept.

My main problem with waking up in the morning is that feeling of grogginess along with an intense desire to sleep more. However, I’ve noticed that sleeping without an alarm clock, and just waking up whenever I wake up, helps. And I’ve also noticed that sometimes when I wake up I am dramatically more refreshed than usual. Reading about sleep on the web led me to learn more about sleep cycles. One interesting page (”The power of the Sleep Cycle”) claimed that it wasn’t the amount of sleep one gets, but the part of the sleep cycle we wake up in. The author suggested that, because we sleep in cycles about 90 minutes long, we should aim to wake up in the transition between sleep cycles, since the brain is more alert and refreshed at that time.

A noble goal and a great way to look like a cyborg while you sleep.

via Make