Probably you know that programming Arduino is easy task even for novice. So if you are just starting electronics and looking towards robotics, this Motorduino might be a great starting point.

This board equipped with all necessary interfaces to start with various motors including regular and servos. It also allows easily adding various sensors without additional need of Arduino shields. Despite various peripherals, Motorduino is still compatible with additional standard Duemilanove shields just in case you need more interfacing or expanding. They are working on final tweaks before letting board out. Stay tuned.

Thinking about building a robot? Why not to use Arduino for this as it has all you need – a great prototyping board, developing platform and lots of shield boards that makes various interfacing really easy.

This robot uses a bunch of sensors built on proto shield that allows navigating around. These include IR sensors, ultrasonic range finder mounted on rotation servo. The robot is really fun to build and even more fun to program and see how it acts in certain situations.

Probably you know that Matlab is a great tool for data processing, simulation and other engineering programming. So why not use it in embedded application like Arduino.

Here you can find simple and fast asynchronous Arduino to Matlab communication sources. It can be handy for fast sensor data displaying in convenient graph and even do some analysis.

Don’t throw old CD driver – it can be useful in various projects like this one. Michael have used CD laser head moving motor for moving lock as it provides linear motion. He connecter motor to Arduino through H-bridge.

Arduino-Controlled Lock from nootropicdesign on Vimeo.

To unlock the door, the pass code has to be entered on a standard 3×4 button keypad. This is a great example of this how dead things like CD player can be relived for new different life.

Arduino fans were stuck with pretty low memory in Aruino boards. Biggest MCU built in and supported was with 32kB of Flash. But we know that AVRs can do much more that this. It seems that things had changed. Finally you can have Arduino with Atmega1280 MCU where you get plenty of memory, plenty of IOs.

Latest Arduino Mega from Arduino team has expanded the board with Atmega1280 to have 54 digital (with 14 PWM feature), 16 analog, 4 UARTs. Of course it kept earlier Arduino features – so it is still compatible with all earlier shields that worked with duemilanove. Imagine what now you can do with so many IOs and 128KB of flash, 8KB SRAM and 4 KB of EEPROM.

All that wouldn’t be possible with new release of Arduino IDE software, where among bug fixes and new functions is a third-party hardware support added. So thanks to this probably we will see many new major Arduino releases. Let the Arduino Mega be the first breaking the front line.