Interested in making neat stuff with an Arduino but not sure where to start? This kit includes all the pieces needed to complete 11 different circuits, along with a experimenter’s guide booklet & breadboard layout sheets. Basically everything you need to be playing within minutes of its arrival. No soldering required!
Sylvia builds two different super simple Arduino Projects: The “Randomly Influenced Finger Flute”, or R.I.F.F., and an Adjustable Strobe! For these easy projects, all you need are a computer, an arduino, and one or two other common parts. Super simple at it’s best.
As someone who has actually made a working printer solution for the Arduino (one of the very few, from what I can tell), it’s still my opinion the solution below is optimum, as of this writing. The parallel to serial conversions and Arduino pin-count issues make the parallel approach a non-starter.
1) Acquire an RS232 serial shield. If from http://www.cutedigi.com, then these three Mods will be required:
MOD1: Bend shield pins 0 and 1 so they do not plug into the Arduino TTY dedicated digital IO pins. This allows the Arduino serial com to remain available to USB debugging.
MOD2: Add jumpers between whatever two ports you wish to use as printer IO pins and the RS232 shield pins 0 and 1 (remember – we bent the shield pins so they are no longer talking to the Arduino, but the RS232 shield is still expecting TTY-level serial data on its pins 0 and 1 anyway. The jumpers will “fool” the shield into believing data is from Arduino pins 0 and 1, when actually the signals are coming from whatever Arduino pins you jumper them to.)
MOD3: Add a reset button to the RESET and GND pins. Grrr. The shield completely covers the Arduino reset button. Who designs things this way?
2) Plug in your receipt printer to the DB9 pin of the shield and start churning out paper.
Believe it or not, it’s that simple. Why someone hasn’t make a decent printer shield is beyond me. I spoke with the support person for the RS232 shield about the issues, and he responded to me as if I were speaking Martian. It took me a year to find this solution. Enjoy.
We are very happy to announce a new product. I have always liked the Boarduino as a concept, but have been frustrated that you can’t easily use it for that semi permanent prototyping, and you can’t use it with Arduino shields. Both these problems are now solved with the Boarduino Shield. Available at the wickeddevice store. It uses long pin headers, so you can mount shields on the top and/or the bottom of the proto-shield. We think it’s pretty nifty.
Interesting! We are hoping Wicked Device makes it an open source hardware project too, like the Boarduino – Update: The makers say it’s open source hardware! (We couldn’t find the files, license, etc. Sorry for any confusion on our part).
I’ve recently purchased the new Arduino Ethernet shield. This new shield has been revised to have a micro SD card slot that I hear can read/write cards sized up to 2GB. This can be useful for serving up files or even making torrent clients (albeit slow).
The first project that I have completed is a small program that will upload the temperature of my room every 10 seconds to an online service called Pachube, which is a service for uploading sensor data.
I used some code found at Pachube, modified it a bit, and combined it with some code from one of Adafruit’s tutorials. You can see my Pachube feed here.
In the future, I plan on adding some more sensors and also combining it with a web server run from the Arduino.
It’s a quicky project and demonstrates what you can do, but it isn’t 100% perfect so you should be ready to modify it if you’d like to do other stuff, ‘K? This is a good beginning to a logging web-monitor, or remote storage system.
Arduino Web Server and Cisco IP Phone. Nate writes -
This is the new Arduino Ethernet+SD Shield functioning as a standalone web server. It’s currently hosting a few small websites and it’s also hosting a handful of XML files that are driving my new Cisco IP Phone Service application.
Le Concretophone derived from a performance research on working environments. Its name derives from a Brazilian art movement contemporary to Beat poetry which started as Poesia Concreta. It is a telephone made interactive with the combination of an Arduino microcontroller (www.arduino.cc) and a Waveshield (www.ladyada.net).
When picking up its handset, we are greeted by a sound mix of various customer service answering messages ( Talk Talk, House of Commons, White House…). Choosing between the options by pressing its buttons, we then hear a selection of six poems (Ginsberg, Decio Pignatari, Eliott).
The listener, faced with a transparent 1980′s retro phone is put in the playful position of wanting to pick up, promptly surprised by a disturbing set of forcefully suave voices, a deranged blend of familiar instructions.

Instead of sought after customer relief, the listener is now bound to hear poems about time, leisure and imagination.
The sound content can be changed according to the environment, the context and our intentions, thanks to removable SD card. We intend to continue developing its interactivity, aesthetic, and humour.
Enclosures for Arduino – hot off the press! We use a very nice arbor from PanaVise. We’re making up the next batch now, sign up on the product page to get a notification once they’re shipping, should be in the next day or so!
The GfxHax drink shield is an Arduino shield that converts an arduino into an Open Source Breathalyzer.  It come complete with a light bar to show the intoxiciation levels.  There is a series of 11 lights down one side of the shield that go from green to yellow and ultimately to red.  There are also player ready lights.  Why are there player ready lights?  Well, this is because the shield is not just a standard Breathalyzer but can be used as a party game.  With the GfxHax drinkShield you also get a GPL game that lets you play with your friends and keep highscores!  This software is licensed under the GPL so you can add features and will have unlimited free updates to new versions.
The drinkShield itself is licensed under the Creative Commons license and is free to modifications. Â The libraries and Source code are licensed under the GPL or public domain. Â It comes as a kit and is a really fun starter project to those just learning how to solder. Â This kit is specifically designed for Hackerspaces around the world. Â A hackerspace can host a class and afterwards celebrate by throwing a party! Â We offer bulk discounts on the web for classes wanting to buy kits.
Frank Hernandez created this “dungeon puzzle” using an Arduino and some silicone molding skillz. He writes:
I am a Dungeons and Dragons fan, so I always wanted to put together something that would enhance the experience of the game a bit. I also enjoy learning, and I always wanted to learn the process behind creating silicone molds as well as learn more about circuits.
Printable catalog (PDF)
– Update: The makers say it’s open source hardware! (We couldn’t find the files, license, etc. Sorry for any confusion on our part).
