Arduino is very rich in its shields so there is another fast and great project – WiFi controlled Arduino robot. The platform is pretty simple – mainly made of wood. Interesting part is that Arduino is equipped with WiShield from AsyncLab’s that allows controlling bot remotely via TCP.

Robot platform can be controlled via Zipit or joystick. And of course it can perform standard movements autonomously. Project may be a great start to get used to programming WiShield that may push projects to a new level.

Rocketry is very exciting hobby. But building and letting plain rockets wouldn’t be so fun without countdown. For this you don’t need much – An Arduino, ULN2003 chip to actuate relay and dot matrix LED display – the bigger the better.

You can guess what it does actually. So code is pretty simple. When button is pressed countdown starts. When it reaches zero, Arduino triggers the relay where the ignition is connected. That’s it – enjoy the show.

I can imagine that rocket modeling is a real passion for real hobbyists. They keep building and upgrading rockets to reach better results. KoD and Navic have decided to add active rocket guiding system built of Arduino Pro Mini. It is equipped with 2 axis accelerometer that is constantly measured during thrust.

According to accelerometer data 2 microservos adjust fins to keep rocket vertical. Keep in mind that rocket thrust lasts only three seconds – there is quite task to keep rockets center of gravity right above center of pressure. Field tests show pretty positive results that you can see in the video.

Arduino is well known and well recommended open source microcontroller platform in the world. If you are starting with this you will definitely need to go through basics to start working with it. Finding good tutorial is essential to make successful projects as fast as possible. Tronixstuff has prepared a nice Arduino tutorial which will lead you from basics of it to more advanced techniques that helps to make great designs.

What differs this tutorial from others? Probably illustrations – lots of them. Every action is followed by illustration or video material where you can check visually your actions. Sometimes reading only can get you confused especially if you are new to these things. There are only thirteen chapters so far and seems that they are actively updated.

Building such LED boards is a real fun. More LEDs means more resolution. This pegboard uses 350 LEDs and is combined of 10 5×7 arrays. In order to drive such amount of LEDs there are MAX6953 chips used that are designed to drive four 5×7 matrix displays. So to drive 10 matrix-es there are totally three needed.

LED Wall from Norm on Vimeo.

Drivers get data from Arduino Duemilanove via I2C interface. To be more interesting there is also a WEB interface implemented by using ioBridge to get data via Ethernet so pegboard would be able to display some interesting data. When looking at prototype it seems that there is quite some effort in that – especially gluing and soldering. So now next step make it RGB?