YourITronics

This is a project you don’t see every day. Could it be more practical and more cooler than it is ? probably not. I mean I want it, i know you will too. I think they should mass produce these things. Now for those of you who don’t get the ideea, this is a cube with a light inside, you hook it to your computer and when there is new mail the cube lights up green.

If you don’t happen to have a glowing cube lying around, you can modify this to work with almost any output device you could think of, from a simple LED, or a buzzer, to something far more clever like moving a servo. The interface between the cube and your computer its done via an Arduino board. The Arduino talks with your computer over a serial connection, which runs over the normal USB cable you use to communicate with your Arduino. This is quite simple to do, and fully documented on project page so follow the links if you decide to build this project.

Gmail Light Cube - New Email Notifier: [Link]

Here is a simple tutorial on building your own Arduino compatible breadboard. The board is controlled with an ATMEL8 AVR microcontroller and a Spark Fun Breakout Board for FT232RL USB to Serial .Its a good project to start into programming microcontrollers, but if you dont like building it you could buy one already built from the Make store.

Arduino compatible breadboard with an ATMEL8 AVR microcontroller : [Link]

Many people are still thrilled when they hear the phrase “Knight Rider”, and guess what is the image that comes to their mind when thinking at Knight Rider ? Yes you know it, its the Light Bar so well known. I recently came across John Tokash’s blog, where he shows pictures of the circuit that he build using schematics and sources from the internet. Its pretty cool all you need its an Arduino board and 18 LED’s conected with some resistors. Plain simple, but i wouldnt recommend this to begginers as it requires some experience.

If the subject got you, head on the Authors Page and follow the instructions there.