Arduino

​Open source hardware and software company Arduino has teamed up with Google to develop and launch the Arduino Science Kit Physics Lab. Designed for students aged 11 to 14, the kit helps kids experiment with forces, motion, magnetism and conductivity.​

Most home robots aren’t particularly customizable. Now robotics startup Ohbot has unveiled its newest creation Picoh, a blank slate of a robot that can be programmed to do basically whatever you want it to do.

​We've seen a number of frankly bizarre time-keepers over the years. Architect and hobby tinkerer Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi joins that strange clock party with the Edgytokei, where dancing mechanical arms show hand positions on a clock face ... except there's no clock face.​

Thecorpora has launched an Indiegogo campaign to get the Q.bo One robot into the hands of kids, educators, developers and robot enthusiasts. The open source desktop bot is described as easy to build, simple to program and easy to hack.​

Price is a problem for consumer robot arms, so they generally aren’t worth it for interested tinkerers. Ufactory has unveiled new consumer-level robot arms, the uArm Swift and Swift Pro, that are aimed at being cheap enough to splash out on, even if all it does is stir your coffee for you.

​​We’ve played a lot of video games in our time, but Objects In Space is the first we’ve had to start one with a key. With huge panels of LEDs, buttons and switches, the game deliberately slows down the pace of space dogfights and tasks the player with micromanaging their ship’s systems.

When one Texas high school player suffered a concussion, he was inspired to develop a more protective helmet and shoulder pads, inspired by nature. ​

Netflix has released a step-by-step guide to making socks that detect when the person wearing them has fallen asleep and pauses the currently playing program to prevent them from losing track of their favorite show.

Arduino is a great platform for those wanting to get into both software and hardware development, but incorporating voice commands into these projects is not without its challenges. MOVI is a standalone speech recognition unit that aims to make this task simple.

What if you were able to have a real adviser sitting on your shoulder when learning a new task that not only offered advice but oversaw and guided your actions as well? The Grasp telespresence robot is designed to do just that.

A new car racing game is bridging the real and the digital worlds. 3DRacers makes use of 3D printing, Arduino-based electronics and smartphone control. Users can design their own cars, 3D print them at home or via 3D Hubs, customize their performance and control them via a mobile app.

Between potting parsley and tending to tomatoes, a vegetable patch requires a fair bit of work and even more know how. The MEG Open Source Greenhouse is designed to tap into the collective knowledge of green-thumbs around the world, with an internet-connected indoor microclimate.