Building bots can be fun. Especially when you don’t have to deal with electronics very much. Just grab an Arduino board, mount  it with several additional components as SN754410 H-bridge motor driver chip.

Put couple DC motors with wheels mounted. Just few lines of code and you are ready to buzz. Simple, easy, fast and great fun - especially when doing it with kids.

This is great project that could make your bike stylish. So called m123s is a device that can be fixed to bicycle wheels and can create various colourful graphics while they are spinning. It uses 32 Full color ultra bright wide angle LED’s, ruggedized construction that is resistant to water and dirt. It also has four pattern buttons for fast display customizations.

Everything is controlled by AVR ATmega168 microcontroller. As there are 32 full color LEDs, then it means controlling 96 single color LEDs. This wouldn’t impossible without serial-in parallel-out shift registers (STP16L596). I don’t know if it’s worth trying to build it by your own because you can get it for $64.99 - cheaper than you can spend on parts and manufacturing. Don’t wait and put some action on your wheels.

Various event notifiers are becoming more and more popular. So why not to have one for Gmail. Isn’t it a great idea to have a light cube standing on your table and attracting your attention when ever you get email.

Physical Gmail notifier consists of three major parts:

• Software on PC side;
• Controller hardware;
• Firmware on controller

Controller hardware is nothing more than Arduino board. If you have one, then consider half project to be finished. As output device you can use anything like lights, sounds, etc. In this case there is a simple LED cube used which actually looks cool. Arduino board communicates with PC via serial cable. It’s a simple loop that checks if there is new mail or not.  On computer side a Python scripts is running, which communicates with arduino board via serial port and talks to Gmail server to determine if there is a new mail received. That’s it. If you get lots of emails you can prepare to dance with flashing light

This is interesting way of using a PS2 controller. Curious Inverter has constructed a PIC based PS2 game controller in to MIDI controller. PIC18f4550 microcontroller firmware does button remaping to different notes and functions.

This controller can be built by anyone with intermediate electronics skills. Circuit includes only interface connectors while other functions are performed in firmware. In case you want complete device you can order kit or fully assembled (and tested) construction and enjoy being a MIDI or guitar hero.

Looking forward to play the paintball game, but fear of the pain when got shot?

Now, with this paintball safety system, you don’t need to afraid the pain anymore!

This sophisticated paintball safety system consists of the sensor circuitry and the microcontroller code. The main purpose for this design is to ensure that the paintballs travel in a safe speed, which under 300 feet per second.

The main function of sensor circuitry:

• Base on the “beam break” concept for triggering the microcontroller.
• IR diodes always in on position and will be saturated the phototransistors.
• It will automatically detect the balls or no balls condition, where if with ball is 4.2V while no ball is 0.1V.

If timer overflows and the ball was took longer time to reach the rear sensor (>1.666 miliseconds), this will considered as a “PASS” condition as it’s speed less than 300 feet per second. If otherwise, then it is a “FAIL”.

Green LED indicates, “PASS” while red LED means, “FAIL”. Both of them will stay on for two second until the reset.