It is always fun to control devices over internet. With Arduino and Ethernet or WiFi shields this becomes a piece of cake. Boris Landoni have published his RGB lamp mod where he can control its brightness and color of it from browser.

Arduino setup consists of three layers: Arduino Uno, Ethernet shield (or WiFi shield) and custom RGB stripe driver shield on top. LEDs are connected to Arduino PWM channels  and are driven by n channel MOSFETs.

ManyMIDIprojects end up with several input buttons and knobs. What if you need more inputs to control on your musical device? This is where Chomp (Configurable Hardware Open-Source MIDI Platform) may be useful. It is capable of reading 48 analog and digital signals and outputMIDI.

It is based on ATmega328 microcontroller so the software is written in arduino way – no problem if you want to modify it. Inputs are organized in to several 2×5 ribbon cable connectors, so no problem to attach your custom button boards or integrate in to your projects.

Deadbird is a passionate guitar player and has “right” hands for electronics. This is all you need to avoid high expenses on equipment. So he wanted to squeeze out some more from his Whammy 4 guitar pedal by stuffing someMIDI commands to it. Of course one way to do this is to use aMIDI controller that costs more than … Arduino.

So he hooked an Arduino to pedal MIDI port and wrote some test routines that allowed him to get desired effects. This is still a prototype but he’s working on better version where everything is going to be packet in to aluminum case and have more cool features.

The easiest way of outputting any information on PC is to send it via serial port. Kerry didn’t want to waste a dedicated monitor simply for displaying server status messages. This would men running monitor that requires some power and of course why use monitor jus for few lines of text. So he came up with an Arduino project which accepts messages via serial port and displays on a standard alphanumeric 2×20 LCD.

There is a Linux shell script on a server side that runs periodically and updates server statistics. Then it sends this information over serial port where Arduino captures it. So with this simple solution he avoided wasting power and monitor. Of course statistics message is longer than LCD is capable of displaying. So whole text is stored in text buffer then it can be scrolled with four buttons.

You can’t trust batteries these days. Market is flooded with fake ones. Or simply you have reliable rechargeable battery pack and want to know how much of juice it can produce. Probably only one way to know how good your battery is – is to measure its discharge curve.

Eric shared his arduino based battery discharge monitor. He monitors battery voltage and discharge current that flows through low value discharge resistor producing some voltage drop. DS1307 RTC keeps track of time which gives pretty precise view of battery discharge characteristics. This isn’t thorough test equipment that will tell battery capacity, because it also depends on current flow and other factors like temperature. But for fast test run this may be a great indicator to sort things out.