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Robotic applications take many forms, but much of the time it comes down to creatively controlling servo motors. If you’d like to control up to 16 servos over WiFi, here’s a solution called the WiFinch. It’s board allows you to control servos via WiFi using an Android app, or you can reconfigure it using Arduino, NodeMCU, or MicroPython. You can see it below controlling a robotic arm via a smartphone.

It can also control electronic speed controllers (ESCs) or any other device compatible with a digital servo signal, so there are certainly quite a few interesting possibilities.

If you’re sure you’re going to build a robot with this device, or just want a few accessories to go along with the board, you could also step up to their “Robot Maker Kit” featuring 5 servos, a battery holder, and a USB cable. Though you could certainly find a use for those components, if you need some ideas, Rototeurs has you covers with their “Printabots” designs.

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Electronic loads are used to draw power from a source at either a constant current or a constant voltage. This comes in useful for things like battery discharge testing or making sure that PCB you designed can actually power those motors without releasing the all important magic smoke. Another cool thing about electronic loads is that you can do all the testing in your workshop and if nothing catches fire, take it out into the real world.

The MightyWatt is a programmable electronic load that sits on top of an Arduino Uno/Zero/Due. Thanks to the built-in heat-sink and fan you can draw 70W before the FET on the board starts overheating. The included Digital to Analog converter lets you set the desired load characteristics through the Arduino. The board creator, Kaktus has made a C# program which you can run on Windows as a simple user interface for the electronic load. The design is fully open source and you can find the documentation over Kaktus’ blog.

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In the Discworld series of books there is a character named Lord Vetinari, who, in addition to being a large city’s ruler, owns a clock that ticks irregularly, but still keeps accurate time. In this series, he keeps the clock in his waiting room in order to unnerve people.

As I haven’t read the books, I’m not sure how effective this is thought to be, but perhaps one would assume that someone who is willing to “modify the flow of time” shouldn’t be trifled with. If you too would like to unnerve your friends and enemies as they patiently wait for you, this kit will allow you to build your own Vetinari clock. As seen in the video below, it ticks irregularly, but always averages out to the correct amount of time.

The kit comes with a circuit board and parts for you to solder onto a provided wall clock. If you’re not crazy about the clock provided, the movement mechanism looks like a standard model that you could find at a hobby shop or at various online outlets. You should be able to disassemble it and make your own custom body. On the other hand, the “ordinariness” of this clock might be an advantage, since your guests wouldn’t initially suspect anything!

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Electric motors are an essential part of modern society. Although you’re not going to power an electric car or even a phone’s vibration function with it, if you’d like to build your own simple motor, this kit from the Mscharlotte store looks like a great place to start. Not only does it allow you to wrap your own coils and make a mass rotate with a AA battery, it also features creatively formed lions to help with these tasks. It is the most visually please learn-about-motors kit we’ve ever seen.

According to the product writeup, it’s inspired by Tesla’s brushless motor, and can be used to demonstrate the relationship between magnetism and electricity. You can see it assembled below, and the results can be seen just after the 19:00 mark.

If you browse around that store, you might also notice a hot wire cutter kit that uses two C batteries. It looks like it could be quite useful if making models, and like the motor seen here, the kit sells for just $10 before shipping.

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Wireless voice transmit and receive is not something you see used in many projects, normally this would be an entire project in itself. The helpful shortcut is to make use of pre-existing modules to get the job done, the SA828 Walkie-talkie module made by NiceRF will do just what you want.

The great thing about these modules is you can embed them into any project easily. Run them off battery power or from a wall wart. Having easy access to the audio input and audio output pins on the module opens up some interesting project ideas. For example you could speak into one Walkie-talkie, and have the output of the other Walkie sampled by something like a microcontroller or a Raspberry Pi to give your RC robot an unhuman voice. You could also do cool things with this like voice recognition and so on.

The output power of these modules is 1 Watt in the 400-480Mhz band which gives you 3km of range in open area. Various parameters can be changed by connecting the module to a computer via the supplied USB-to-serial converter board. Volume control is achieved by soldering on a simple variable resistor.

What would you make with a Walkie-talkie module? Tweet us @tindie

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If you started out working with electronics in an industrial environment, soldering may seem like a pain, and using a solderless breadboard means the potential for wires to come loose. If you long to instead use screw terminals for your maker projects, featuring positive locking without the need to heat up an iron, here’s a solution for you in the form of the Arduino Screw Terminal Shield, available in red or blue!

Ironically perhaps, the shield is offered as a kit that requires some soldering to put together. After that though, it allows access to all of the Arduino UNO’s pins, including the extra pins on the R3 board without having to solder or worry (as much) about whether something will stay plugged in. It also accommodates wire sizes between 24 and 14 AWG, which would include sizes much larger than what would normally be used with a breadboard.

The 18Robots Store, which sells this kit also offers a mini screw terminal version for 26 to 16 AWG wire, as well as a CNC shield pictured above if that better suits your needs.

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OpenMV fills the niche of having a small camera connected to a microcontroller whilst having the whole thing be accessible and easy to use. The ARM microcontroller on the board is the powerful STM32F427 running at 180MHz. Thankfully the dark and scary world of bare bones arm programming has been abstracted out to the nicer and much less traumatizing Micro Python. This means you can start taking images, detecting faces, tracking markers, detecting blobs and all of that good stuff in no time at all.

OpenMV comes with its own IDE which has built in Micro Python examples. The best part about using Python is you can easily modify the examples to suit your needs. If you have never used Python before, good news, it’s amazing, and has a shallow learning curve for getting started. There is a great and free Codeacademy course to get you started.

If you are interested in digging down deeper into how this project was put together, the whole thing is documented over on Hackaday.io. Amazingly, the entire board has a Bill of Materials (BOM) of only $15 USD. For a tiny board that can do so much that really is surprisingly cheap. Of course to buy one pre-made costs more but seeing as the designs are all open source it is nice to support those hardware designers who give you the option of making it yourself.

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If you like tabletop gaming, there’s a good chance you use dice of some sort. It can certainly be fun to roll cubes around on the table and see what comes up, but why not take things into the electronics age with this “Shake me like a Polaroid Dice Kit?”

It uses an ATtiny85 microcontroller with a vibration sensor, and is programmed to generate a pesudo-random number from 1 to 6. On the other hand, if you’re somewhat paranoid, perhaps you would only want to use your own electronic die. who’s to say that your competitor didn’t reprogram it to show a certain number if you shake it in a secret sequence?

Though custom electronic dice might not be accepted in Las Vegas casinos, the Rcs27 store has a few more tricks up its sleeve, including this clever LED name badge. Not only can you write on it with an erasable or permanent marker, you can also print your own translucent label to identify yourself. It seems like a great way to stand out at a trade show, or perhaps also if you get together with people who are very bad with names!

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If you’re a good (or even beginning) programmer, you might want to experiment with robotics. Unfortunately, it’s not just a matter of plugging a few more lines of code into your Arduino or Raspberry Pi program, you have to actually build something. Although you could always construct something from scratch, the LittleArm offers an interesting, and very reasonably priced–under $100 before shipping–alternative.

As mentioned in the title, this arm is 3D printed, and the gripper is interchangeable so you can customize it as you see fit. Programming is done via desktop software that you can use to set movement waypoints. You can reprogram the included Arduino Uno board, which comes loaded with LittleArm firmware.

The arm’s electronics and code are open source, so changing things at the Arduino level should be relatively straight forward. It even includes an integrated breadboard on which to add sensors or other gadgets as needed.

If this all sounds interesting, be sure to check out the video below to see how it works in the real world. Apparently it can play chess, add sugar to your coffee (and your table), and even draw a simple face!

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Clocks are certainly interesting devices for people interested in hardware, starting from early in human history. As the years have progressed, some of the most advanced human devices had to do with measuring this unseen fourth dimension. However, with the advent of cell phones, accurate timekeeping on a watch or clock is not as important as it once was.

On the other hand, this makes creative designs that much more appealing. At the very least, it gives those of us that generally make useless devices for our own entertainment something to make that others will understand.

One of the coolest timekeeping devices I’ve seen lately is this “holo clock.” It is literally a clock that is hollow on the inside, and driven as a sort of self-supporting gear set. It uses an ATtiny chip to pulse the motor once per minute to advance its timekeeping rings. Though this likely works well enough, the code is written in the Arduino IDE, so if you wanted to repurpose this device for something else, it would certainly be possible. Internet speedometer? Automotive speedometer? There must be more ridiculous repurposings than these.

Be sure to check out the excellent video below to see how it goes together:

If you’re looking for a unique clock, but this just doesn’t quite suit you, a search for “clock” on Tindie yields a huge number of interesting results!

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