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Here's an instructable showing how to Control a Hand Drill with an Arduino / roboduino to spool solder. This may not be on the top of everyone's project list, but a hand drill is strong enough to do a lot of tasks, so we hope this will be helpful to someone with another project idea,... maybe spooling guitar pickups.

Rather than use TRIACs to mess with the 120VAC, we found a servo was an easy and safe way to control the drill's trigger / throttle.  The setup also uses a home made optical encoder that triggers an interrupt in the arduino code.  The code is available here, and contains some useful bits like lookup-table speed control, state machine menu system, and interrupt based speed sensing.

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We program boot loaders on a decent number of ATMEGAs for our roboduino kit, which involves a lot of pin bending and IC pulling. To speed up the process, Oren transformed this arduino into a program-o-duino by soldering on a ZIF(Zero Insertion Force) socket.  Now it just takes a quick pull of the lever to pop the chip in and out.

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Here's a quick demo of our new FM Radio Shield, featuring its ability to read the RDS text data off the radio stream and display it in the Arduino Serial Monitor. 

The FM Shield also:

• digitally control station, volume
• read station strength to find good stations, or empty bands
• head phone amplifier, uses headphone wire as antenna

The FM Radio Shield is available for purchase.

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We're happy to release a new FM Radio Arduino Shield that lets you listen to and control FM Radio.  With its abilit to read RDS info, the station / artist / song names can be displayed, and with a bit of code, you could have it automatically change channels when commercials play.

You can also digitally change the station, volume, and read the signal strength to find the strongest or weakest stations.  Finding weak stations could help you find a good transmission gap for your FM transmitter.

If there's a station broadcasting traffic info via RDS, that would also be available. 

 

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One complaint we received about the roboduino is that standard shields couldn't be plugged in since the roboduino has male pins instead of the female headers found on arduinos. These female-to-female headers now make it possible to easily plug in shields to the roboduino (an arduino-compatible for robotics that makes it easy to plug in servos and battery packs). Read More

The stribe shield lets you read in up to 13 analog channels into an arduino diecimila or duemilanove. It's based on the analog multiplexer CD4051 chip, and was originally made to simplify connections to our Stribe1 touch display strips. We're also releasing a double and quad base that can be used to mount either 2 or 4 Stribe1s along with an arduino. Read More

Both black and clear acrylic arduinome cases can now be ordered. Our first batch is very limited, but more will arrive soon. This post will detail the building and programming process. Read More