Here’s Bowers on his creation: “The light sensor sends data to an Arduino, which is waiting for a spike in the data. The Arduino runs the sensor data through some averaging filters, and sets a threshold for on and off.”

The robot’s fingers are servos, and its fingertips are made of copper wire embedded in foam. Everything was stuffed “into a modified Pelican case, with a lot of hot glue (non glittery)” and voila! A rockin robot that looks like an iPhone lobotomizer. Enough talk, let’s see it rock!

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

I can still hear the rhythmic squeaking.

[via Boing Boing]

The entire costume–you didn’t think it was just the Proton Pack, did you?–took Instructables ghostbustin’ guru depotdevoid two years to perfect. Not two entire years, mind you, but two years of costume-compiling. I can’t say I blame him; if I made a costume this awesome, I’d wear it every year.

A khaki flight suit, lasers (!), props, and an Arduino are the key elements required to build your own Ghostbusters costume, though I also recommend such luxuries as time and enthusiasm. However, from the instructions, it seems like just about any big Ghostbusters fan could put this together, if they were dedicated enough… thanks to the handy guide, anyway.

See the whole rig here:

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[via Hack N Mod]

That’s what synth hacker Denkitribe did when he rewired an old Famicom/NES Power Glove to control an Arduino-based controller circuit. The Arduino translates finger movements into MIDI CC messages, which in turn control a digital synthesizer. Want to hear what it sounds like? Then check out this video clip…

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The initial prototype still uses the old-school ultrasonic microphone sensors from the original Power Glove, but Denkitribe plans on eventually upgrading the glove to use modern accelerometer technology. But once he does that, I doubt he’ll be able to play any more Super Glove Ball or Bad Street Brawler anymore. Oh, the things we do in the name of hacking.

Just plug the WiiChuck into to bottom of your Wii Nunchuck controller, and you’ll have access to all of the wonderful data the controller can generate. No more cable cutting! The teensy adapter board provides quick access to the Nunchuck’s interface, letting you use data sent from the controller’s 2-axis joystick, two buttons and a 3 axis ±2g accelerometer.

And if you’re into Arduino build projects, you can head on over to TodBot’s site and grab some open source libraries to get you started with reading the data from the Nunchuck and using it in your own programs. The best part is that each WiiChuck costs just $2.95 (USD). Head on over to SparkFun and grab one if you have any interest in hacking your Nunchuck.

Tom Hobson taps his feet, but now, thanks to the magic of an Arduino controller, he can do it with honest-to-goodness drum sounds. From a distance, this seems awesome. If I was in the same room… well, I’m not, so everybody wins.

Friendly and helpful fellow that he is, Tom wants you to be able to rock out at all times, too, so there’s a helpful how-to on his site. Go forth, tappers, and make your own Beat Sneaks. But check out this video first.

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[Beat Sneaks via MAKE]

Here’s a demo of the hack in action. It kind of hurt my eyes trying to read the message. How about a widescreen Meggy Mr. Oskay?

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If this is the first time you’ve heard of the Meggy Jr RGB, you can get more details about it here. For those who already own a Meggy Jr RGB, you can download the necessary software for the project here. Check out the original post at Evil Mad Scientist Labs for detailed instructions. Because I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to explain it to you in my own words.

The BlinkM from ThingM (I just love saying that) is a compact module that contains an ultra-bright RGB LED and a microcontroller that you can program from your computer.

You’ll need an Arduino I/O board to program your BlinkM, plus a 5-volt power supply to juice ‘em up. The ThingM guys have alread created a handy drum-machine-like sequencer application for Macs and PCs so you can easily program each one to any color, or to a color sequence of your choosing. There’s full 24-bit color control, and you can program up to 49 commands in sequence. And with a single two-wire network, you can connect up to 127 BlinkMs together to do you bidding. There are even 18 built-in light sequences, so even if you’re not that creative, you might already have one that does what you want.

There’s also source code available for you to do custom-programming to your heart’s content. Here’s a video of a couple of cool lighting effects ThinkM’s Tod Kurt put together using a bunch of BlinkMs:

BlinkM LED modules are available now over at the Adafruit store for $13 (USD) a piece. What’s the most creative thing you would do if you had a bunch of these modules? Me, I’d build an ultra-low res television.

[via Adafruit Blog]

But let’s get back to that eyebrow thing.

The Ponghatduino project is designed to allow the user–er, wearer–to play Pong against themselves by using the hat, and its pressure against your forehead, as the control input. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Ridiculous and yet completely awesome. This is all about novelty, folks, not brain surgery.

And, if you’re of a DIY-mindset yourself, this looks pretty simple to assemble, though you’ll have to bring your own hat.

[via Instructables]

With a metal ball, an optical mouse, bits of PS2 controllers, and a little help from Arduino, Kellbot put together the roll-a-riffic controller of all Katamari lover’s dreams. Now if only we could get that in, say, a giant beach ball form.

Kellbot calls the controller “a hella fun way” to experience Katamari Damacy, and the video footage makes me want to agree. It also looks hella accurate, while we’re throwing qualifiers around.

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[Life-Size Katamari Controller via CrunchGear]

Peter Sands’ garden-bot will create a garden in the space provided, down to planting seeds and tending the veg, but it doesn’t work on its own: the robot is really just a proxy gardener manipulated with a gaming controller. Much easier than breaking soil with a pickaxe!

There’s video of the project, too, but unfortunately, it’s a little short on the gritty details. Cool to see the scope of the garden-bot, though.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

[adafruit via Hack a Day]

With a colorful 8×8 RGB LED display, the Meggy Jr RGB handheld platform gives you everything you need to create your own mini-games or pixel art displays.

Each colored dot actually contains three tiny LEDs, for a total of 192 uniquely addressable positions. The kit includes 6 clicky button switches, an audio transducer and additional LEDs for keeping track of things like your score or number of lives left in your custom games.

Meggy Jr even offers customizable handles so you can pimp out your handheld with your own design.

The Arduino-based Meggy Jr RGB kit comes with a pre-installed game called “Attack of the Cherry Tomatoes”, a little side-scrolling shooter, but the real fun comes from writing your own games. All you need is a USB-TTL cable, and the open-source Meggy Arduino developer library.

You can get your hands on Meggy Jr. over at Evil Mad Science with prices ranging from $65 to $95 USD.

[Meggy Jr. RGB Details]

Matt over at Liquidware decided to build an “open source Gameboy” (known as the Gamepack) using off-the-shelf parts, including the modder-friendly Arduino microprocessor. While the Arduino may provide the brains of the operation, the 128×128 TouchShield Stealth color OLED touchscreen is most definitely the soul. Rounding out the build is an Inputshield board, which provides a tiny joystick (complete with rumble) and control buttons as well as a flat Lithium battery pack.

The Gamepack system is now available in kit form so you can build one for yourself. At this point, the Gamepack only runs some rudimentary homebrew demo code, but the hope is that others who grab the kit will contribute more advanced games, or maybe even a Nintendo emulator.

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At $249 for the Gamepack kit, you could buy more than 10 used Gameboys. But none of them would be nearly as cool as the one you built yourself.

[Liquidware Antipasto via Boing Boing Gadgets]

This nifty project was created by Randy at F.A.T. He says, “The breathalyzer microphone is a system for the inconspicuous collection of blood-alcohol content level data sets. In other words, you can measure a person’s sobriety with a device, that for all intents and purposes, looks no different than a standard microphone.”

He kindly put the how-to up on Instructables, in case you’re inspired to make one of these for use on your drinking buddies. In essence, you rip a cheap karaoke mic apart, add some wires to the XLR and the switch, make a tricky bracket, attach it to an alcohol sensor you previously ordered from Thailand, and voila. To make it portable, you can use a tape deck or something else to hide a datalogger and arduino.

Then you just have someone talk or sing into the microphone, and use a computer to get the SD card readings to get the info. Now you know fo’ sho’, that mofo is DRUNK. And you have computer data to prove it to him.

[via Make:]

Adafruit’s Botanicalls Twitter Kit lets your plants communicate over the web, letting you know when they need water, or if they’re feeling happy that they’ve been recently cared for. And since Twitter can notify your mobile device of new posts, you can receive a text message when your plant is feeling blue.

The easy-to-assemble electronic kit uses wired moisture sensors to detect your plant’s state of mind and send information out to the Internet via an on-board Ethernet jack. Connect the board to your PC using a USB cable, and the Arduino-based circuit can be programmed to send custom messages to Twitter.

The kit is available from Adafruit for $160 USD. All I need now is for my dogs and cat to start Twittering too and I can finally take a nice long vacation.

[via MAKE]

With a few bucks worth of off the shelf parts, an Arduino board, a USB cable and a little code, you too can have one for your website, thanks to this detailed “how-to” article over on Tinkerlog.

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While I think the idea is really clever, I think you’d end up throwing the thing against the wall if you have even a mildly popular website. But if you just have a personal blog, or only want to monitor a single page, it could be gratifying to hear the little bell ring every time a visitor pops by.

Ding!

[via MAKE]