With home security getting more on demand, we can tinker with Arduino and get alerted when events are triggered and even get a photo of who was there! With a few cimple components and a little soldering knowledge, this project looks at the Arduino with an Ethernet Shied to send a message to an online service that forwards that to your mobile!  Read More...

Intro by Tim from MindKits:
On Saturday 28th of April 2012 MindKits was lucky enough to help support the growing community of robotics enthusiasts and their first competition which was help at NextWindow in Auckland.

Gary T was key in instigating the competition with the aim of  getting people motivated and build robots, for fun and foster innovation. And man, what a lot of fun it was. Gary was kind enough to write a guest blog post for us on the events of the day. Read on for more...

While trying to get such a thing to happen in Auckland on a regular basis, ie 3 - 4 months, the first was small with a single objective, well 5 objectives.  To remove 5 empty drink cans from a 1.2m diameter table as quickly as possible.
 
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It's one of those moments that makes us all sigh and feel a little disappointed. A great company grows and as it grows its pricing and margins go up instead of what we were all told in school about supply and demand causing pricing to come down. Their once great supplies become expensive, we buy less of them and we long for the old days when that company was on 'our side'.  Read More...

After making an awesome Arduino project, you might want to finalize it so you can reuse that Arduino for future creativity.  Here is a link from one of the Tutorials in Mindkits.  This Tutorial can be more than building your own Arduino, there are other great educational links if you are just starting.  It's a way to understand more on Arduino at the same time!

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Could have lots of door locks and chains, but gets difficult opening the door in a hurry.  Some how we need to use what is already there and make it more security.  Let's have a look at Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), that has been check out at MIT Media Lab.  Swipe your card over the RFID reader and the door will unlock, anyone else that is not authorized will have no chance.  You could even use this on you high-tech tree hut.

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We all get mesmerised with LEDs. Instead of making a few turn on, why not make a cube of LEDs!   Here we have a 3x3 cube LED arrangement.  I'm sure you will learn more programming and have a cool use of this.  We have an easy to understand tutorial on how to put this all together and program it.
Video at the bottom running the Cube.

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Wifi is growing, and we want some of the action! If you are interested in security, and want to add a camera (to catch the neighbours dog!), we can look at attaching some Shields to your Arduino. This project uses a cool Wireless SD card that can be detected on you home Wifi network, so you can download photos and videos that are taken without unplugging the SD card.
This is a big project and would be cool on telling your friends that you put it all together and programmed it!
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We all enjoy doing our projects and it's great when all is working...  But sometimes your Arduino my get stubborn and won't allow you to Upload programs, making sure you have selected the right board, it still produces uploading errors.
Before you put your Arduino in the bin, we can try to revive it and get our cool projects running again!  Lets take some time and (a coffee if you like), look at Sparkfun's website, where there is a nice tutorial on Reinstalling the bootloader onto your Arduino.
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