We are getting famous! MAKE Magazine placed an article about a-blocks in their 25th edition titled 'Microcontrollers and Arduino'. MAKE Magazine is a quarterly published hybrid magazine/book from O'Reilly. MAKE is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. Buy the magazine (also available in a digital edition) and check out the a-blocks article at page 78.

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In this tutorial we show you how to build a wireless temperature and humidity sensor. Using an internet connected A-blocks interface the monitor data is made available through a web interface for review. We will be using Pachube so your data will be accessible in a number of ways. One of them being mobile devices. In this setup we will be using 2 Arduino's. The first one has the connected sensors for measuring the temperature and humidity. The data read is sent through a wireless connection to a second Arduino. This second Arduino has a LAN connection so it can report the data to the Pachube website.

On 30 March 2010 we will be at the Microsoft DevDays in The Hague. If you are there drop by at our presentation during Geeknight. We talk about the Arduino and communication with .NET applications. The session start at 21.00 hr in the Atlantic room. In a few days we will be offering a special DevDays kit on this webshop for a nice price. See you there!

The LivingColors lamp from Philips that was introduced in 2007 is a big succes. The RGB LED design lamp has sold over a million copies. It may have a nice remote control that let's you select a color from a color ring but we want more. In May 2008 the electronic magazine Elektor placed an article from Jeroen Domburg who reverse engineered the communication protocol and wrote the article on how to control the LivingColors lamp using a cc2500 transceiver. Thanks to the pioneering work of Jeroen we can present you a tutorial on how to control the lamp from an Arduino or PC.

We are asked by several people how to create a geo based puzzle using A-blocks. Inspired by the wonderful project The Reverse Geo Caching Puzzle from Mikal Hart some people want to make their own puzzle. If you did not read the story yet make sure you do before you continue. Since we want to promote creative thinking we did not want to copy the project. So in this tutorial we are handing you the basic blocks to get you started and challenge you to build upon the idea and create your own geo based puzzles.

We have added serial LCD's from Sparkfun and a GlobalSat EM406-A GPS receiver to our stock. You can find them in the components category.

Most applications have some kind of user feedback. In many cases a simple led is all you need. But in some cases you want more verbose feedback. This is where a display comes in. Although you can use a fancy OLED display that can even show video all we want in most cases is just plain characters. This tuturial shows 2 different ways how you can easily add a 2 x 16 character LCD display to your A-blocks application.

We have added a new category to our shop with components. Here you will find parts that we use in our A-blocks and also non-A-blocks parts used in our tutorials. We have added the popular Hope RF transceiver module RFM12S. Also the RFID reader ID-12 is now available separately. We also added some relays.

This example shows you how you can build your own heating or cooling controller. To build the controller you need an Arduino with A-blocks interface, button and led module (optional), temperature sensor, rotary sensor and a LCD display. Connect the button and led module to port D4, the temperature sensor to port A1, the rotary sensor to port A4 and the LCD display to A2.

This tutorial explains how easy it is to connect a GPS receiver using A-blocks (no soldering required). We use a EM-406A Sirf III receiver but for other GPS device the connections would be very similar. The EM-406A is delivered with a 6 pin connection cable. It has one gray wire which is pin 6. Starting with the wire from pin 1 we carefully remove the wires from pin 1 to 4 from the connector. We do not need the wires from pin 5 and 6 so we leave these in the connector.