Robots, cars, robotcars, and all sorts of prank devices require some degree of remote control. Most of the time, it's tempting to implement this yourself using XBee or some other wireless technology. Sometimes it's not a bad idea, but more often than not it's an over-powered and somewhat frustrating way to go. You find yourself thinking, "I remember the good old days when I just put batteries in the RC car and pushed the stick and it moved."

Well, welcome back to the good old days.

RC transmitter/receiver combos range from the simple and inexpensive to the seriously tricked-out, but the nice thing about them is that they all stick to a standard which makes them largely interchangeable. It turns out that connecting an RC receiver to your Arduino project is about the same as connecting a servo, and the code is just as simple. In this tutorial, I'll take you through the basics of using your Arduino to interpret commands from an inexpensive RC remote, so you can control anything, from a simple four-wheeled robot to your favorite processing sketch!

[Jean] wrote in eager to share his latest project, a standalone temperature logger with USB connectivity. Back in November, [Jean] found himself wanting a temperature logger that was roughly the size of a USB memory stick. What he found on the market was not quite adequate in terms of price or size, so he decided to design his own. His would be the size he wanted and wouldn’t require any software or drivers to run. You simply plug it in, edit the configuration text file to set your intervals, and off you go!

You can follow along through the entire design and fabrication on his site. He’s really great about discussing why he made each decision and how he resolved any errors he ran into. You can download the schematics and source code on his site.

I do a lot of towing with my LB7 Duramax diesel truck. On hot days I kept having an overheating problem, so I built this six channel temperature scanner for around $40. Compared to an expensive commercial scanner, it's worked out to be a great tool. My scanner is built using a Nokia 3310 LCD screen and an Arduino Pro Mini 3V version. The temperature probes are simple thermistors (see below for Jameco parts list).

A schematic diagram, also called a circuit diagram, is the standard way of describing the components and connections in an electronic circuit. It uses iconic symbols to represent components, with lines representing the connections between the components.

A circuit diagram represents the connections of a circuit, but it is not a drawing of the actual physical layout. Although you may initially find that drawings and photos of the physical wiring can be easier to understand than a schematic, in a complicated circuit it can be difficult to clearly see where each wire gets connected.

Circuit diagrams are like maps. They have conventions that help you to orient yourself once you become familiar with their style and symbols. For example, inputs are usually to the left, outputs to the right; 0V or ground connections are usually shown at the bottom of simple circuits, the power at the top.

Simple remote monitoring using the Eye-Fi wireless SD card and Adafruit Data Logging Shield for Arduino

Nanode is an open source Arduino-like board that has in-built web connectivity. It connects to a range of wireless, wired and ethernet interfaces. It allows you to develop web based sensor and control systems - giving you web access to six analogue sensor lines and six digital I/O lines. It costs under £20 as an easy build it yourself kit. Nanode was designed with hacking in mind.

Jordan Husney, Ted Hayes and myself have written an XBee Internet Gateway for the ConnectPort X2 so that any microcontroller-powered device prototype can connect directly with the Internet. This system is now in use at ITP and in several other locations. Plain URLs sent from an XBee radio (Series 2 XBee ZB or Series 1 802.15.4) radio are processed by the Gateway, retrieved from the Internet, and results are returned to the sender.

Here’s a fun hack we’ve been experimenting with — a computerless Arduino! It’s small, inexpensive, and doesn’t require a computer to change the code, so you can take it with you and make awesome things anywhere.

Mosquino is a software-compatible derivative of the open-source Arduino platform that is designed for extremely low power consumption, operating from ambient (harvested) environmental energy sources such as heat, sunlight and vibration. (Or coincells, if you’re not feeling adventurous.)

This guide details how to build a simple electricity energy monitor on that can be used to measure how much electrical energy you use in your home. It measures voltage with an AC to AC power adapter and current with a clip on CT sensor, making the setup quite safe as no high voltage work is needed. The energy monitor can calculate real power, apparent power, power factor, rms voltage, rms current. All the calculations are done in the digital domain on an Arduino. The Arduino can then be connected to a computer, data logger, lcd screen, Ethernet link, etc to make use of the data.

An open, application platform designed to enable meaningful connections between things and people.

This humble dish could be served as a main dish with the addition of a little fish or meat, but in Spain it is prized as a side dish with chicken, seafood, and roast meats.

The "Hello Arduino" section in Chapter 11 of Getting Started with Processing shows how to read data into Processing from Arduino. In a nutshell, the Arduino code (example 11-6 in the book) reads data from a light sensor and writes it out to the serial port. The section then goes on to describe a number of increasingly sophisticated sketches that retrieve and visualize the sensor data using Processing's Serial library.

This Codebox shows you how to save this sensor data to a Google Spreadsheet. The cool thing is that you can then use any of the goodies that Google provides (charts, gadgets, maps, etc) directly with your data. While the light sensor is pretty basic, you can use this basic setup to record data from more sophisticated sensors, such as a Parallax GPS receiver module into Google Spreadsheets, and then create a map of where you've been that you could post as a gadget.

Arduino is a fascinating and very easy way to make the world of electronics fun and interesting. Scroll down to read what we’re up to!

After nearly two years in the ‘Arduino Business’ (its more like the ‘Arduno Hobby’ actually), I finally got my self a pair of XBees! Kept in a box for a month, but this weekend I’ve unpacked the hive and put them to make some honey.

This weekend me and a friend (Ian Gallina) set up the XBees as ‘Coordinator’ and ‘Router’ and put the ‘router’ on a shield with a pack of sensors (temperature, light and presence) collecting data from my living room and sending it over the air to my laptop. The idea was to save the data in a database so that It can be used to make graphs or publish it in a website showing the environment status for the room. Anyway, I probably won’t do it, for I need my Arduino for other hacks.

We needed a datalogger that provided a timestamp, and that would last 2 weeks in the woods. Using a laptop would require a generator or humongous battery. This Instructable shows how to make a datalogger from an Arduino and datalogger shield connected to a TelosB wireless sensor board and a battery that is large, but not wheelbarrow large. Your data goes onto a SD memory card on the datalogger for pickup later (whenever you have to change the batteries on all the wireless radios in your network, for example). The main challenge is getting the serial signal out of the TelosB before it gets translated into USB. We could probably have reprogrammed the TelosB to output the serial on another pin, but why program when you can solder? 

This project is near and dear to the sprout board crew. Ultimately this concept was the genesis of a flexible platform with many applications. As our designs evolved we realized the tremendous opportunity to create something meaningful with this concept. This focus ultimately guided our decision process create completed projects in place of generic code snippets as a way to encourage the actual use of our projects.

A couple of months back, the guys at GitHub bought a stoplight. They ordered it on Ebay from a seller in the UK. Their plan was to hook it up to their build system.

The idea was that when they check code into their continuous integration system (see defunkt/CI Joe) the stoplight would turn yellow while the code was building, red if the build failed because of failing tests, and green if the build succeeded. It would give them a large unmissable indicator in their office for the status of their current code.

We get a lot of questions about how to run an Arduino off of solar panels. We decided to do a bit of testing and came up with three pretty simple ways to run an Arduino even if you aren’t near your computer or an AC plug.

Arduino is a great platform for prototyping, but sometimes it can be hard to figure out exactly which board you need. We've created a tutorial called the Arduino Buyer's Guide that will hopefully alleviate some of the confusion! And now...new products!

This is a bit of a side note, there's no LCD included with the Arduino starter pack, but I figure its a popular request, so here we go!

The LCDs we sell at Adafruit have a low power LED backlight, run on +5v and require only 6 data pins to talk to. You can use any data pins you want!

This tutorial will cover character LCDs

The Hall Effect sensor (usually shortened to “Hall sensor”) is an amazingly useful bit of circuitry: a simple, easy-to-use component that responds to a magnetic field by changing the voltage level it emits. What it does is so simple it’s not even obvious why it’s useful until you start seeing where and how hall sensors are used. One of the more useful things you can do with a Hall sensor is to detect motion and to count motions without touching the thing you’re detecting. Imagine you want to detect if a door is open or closed, and you want to count how many times the door is opened or closed. The simplest solution might be to put a physical switch somewhere near a hinge or latch, but this is hard to do without interfering with the door’s regular operation. Instead of modifying the door, you could instead use a Hall sensor with a magnet. The magnet goes on the edge of the door and a Hall sensor goes on the door frame so that it lines up with the magnet when the door is closed.