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This sms-to-LED tutorial shows how to automate the manual button input on this $13 scrolling LED belt buckle with an arduino, and then how to pass SMS messages through it. A USB Host shield connects an android phone that passes SMS messages on. Full code is on the tutorial page.







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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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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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