However, there are a few drawbacks. To begin with, swapping a micro SIM between a tablet and a standard mobile phone isn’t practical. Additionally with more and more phones requiring micro SIMs (such as the new Nokia Lumia 800) it becomes difficult to swap one of these tiny SIM cards between a new and an old mobile phone, something that might be necessary if you want to copy contacts from one device to another, for instance.

Taking a new phone or tablet abroad meanwhile, might require picking up a new SIM card on a short-term contract with a local network. But if they only sell standard SIMs, what can you do?

Fortunately there are a couple of methods that you can use to trim down a standard SIM card to micro SIM dimensions without causing damage to the important components.

Anatomy Of A SIM Card

Your SIM card is used to identify your phone on the mobile telephony network. Various data is held in the small gold chip, such as an authentication key and network specific information; numbers for sending SMS texts and details about the mobile network you use.

The gold section, as you can see, contains the vital stuff. Around this, meanwhile, is the card body, which is made from plastic and is only there to provide a shape for the device, important to avoid it being used the wrong way around, for instance.

When comparing a SIM card with a micro SIM you will see that they are both essentially the same item – the micro SIM is smaller and can sit comfortably within the dimensions of the larger card, but the actual chip itself is the same. This makes it easy to create your own micro SIM.

The Quick & Easy Way

Now you don’t have to follow the steps listed here as there is a slightly quicker way of doing this. However it will cost you a small amount and require a trip to eBay. Naturally we want you to be able to do this for free, but we’ll take a quick look at this other method as it provides the background for what we’re going to demonstrate in the next section.

Several vendors on eBay sell SIM cutters – resembling small staplers – that punch the chip from the SIM card at the appropriate dimensions to be used in a micro SIM device. If you wish to regularly switch your SIM between say an iPad and a standard mobile phone, you can then use a SIM adaptor.

Cutting Your Own Micro SIM

You might find a few warnings online about doing this, but as long as you have a steady hand and a reliable blade you can cut your own micro SIM and save yourself the purchase and postage costs of a device which is really intended for bulk use (although before proceeding you may wish to play it safe and order a replacement SIM card, just in case of accidents).

The process for doing this is pretty simple, although it will require a SIM adaptor, which hopefully you already have. You will also need a sharp pencil and scissors.

Begin by placing your current, standard SIM under the SIM adaptor so that all of the edges line up. The chip should be visible through the gap in the adaptor, with a small amount of the card’s plastic around the edges. With a pencil, mark the inner edge of the adaptor onto the card, thereby creating the outline of a micro SIM.

You should have been careful with the previous step, but the real care needs to be taken with the scissors. Follow the pencil line around your SIM, trimming it down to micro SIM proportions. Once you have done this, check the trimmed SIM in the adaptor – you’re looking for a tight-but-snug fit so that the device can operate as intended, so be careful not to over-cut.

A few moments later you should have a micro SIM which you can use with the adaptor in a traditional phone and easily swap it into a tablet.

Conclusion

Obviously there are only certain situations in which you should do this; it really is a last-chance option. There is no need to head off and trim your existing SIM card down!

As long as you trace the line accurately and don’t trim any of the chip, you should end up with a hand-crafted, usable micro SIM, as demonstrated in the accompanying image.

Dare you try this method to make your own micro SIM card? Or is the “hole punch” solution safer for you?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Among the myriad of DIY tablet stand suggestions on YouTube, here are three that caught my eye because they were extremely simple, with minimal need for complicated setups or modifications.

CD Spindle

If you have CDs lying around, you probably had to buy it in packs of 50 or even 100. If you do, there’s a genius little stand hiding underneath and between those CDs. Your blank CDs will have to go elsewhere, but your tablet will stand nice and tall, just like you see here.

This is a screenshot of the 50-CD spindle case, which will work for either portrait or landscape modes. The grooves in the case that are meant to secure the case cover make great slots to put your tablet on so make sure your CD case has those since certain spindle cases might not have them at all.

The 100-CD spindle case will also work pretty well, but as the demonstrator in the following video says, it’s a bit wobbly since the spindle is higher.

This isn’t the only person who figured out the CD spindle stand. There are many more demos on YouTube showcasing this trick. If you can’t view the video for some reason, just do a search on the giant video portal for ‘DIY CD spindle’ or something similar.

DVD Case

You probably own a library with DVDs of all types of movies, concerts and maybe even documentaries. Then all you need to get a tablet stand is to remove the DVD, take out the movie information slip and cut out the plastic around the case with a  knife. After that, you’ll need some ribbon or some kind of string and tie it around the grooves in the center DVD holder, which will hold the case and prevent it from going down flat when it has the weight of the tablet added.

For full instructions, see this video.

The coolest part of this, even though it’s not demonstrated in the video, might be that you can collapse the case shut, making it quite portable and slim. Since the stand doesn’t take much space, it could certainly make a good travel companion.

Card Holder

A mesh business card holder from Staples is a great investment (around $2) if you’re looking for a tablet stand. It can hold your iPad or other tablet on landscape mode without any problems. However, because of the way it’s constructed, it cannot hold the tablet in portrait mode. It will lose its balance and tip over.

A remedy is presented here by andytraub, who recommends either clamping out or bending towards the middle part, and extending the back side of the card holder. See the video for full instructions.

The result will look something like this.

We’ve also published an article on making your stands for your iPhone/iPod Touch or other smartphone here. Have you seen some other ingenious DIY tablet stand ideas elsewhere? Let us know in the comments section below!

Image credit: someToast

Such videos are much better than a written guide or review because you can see how something works or where you can find it. You can also hear the person who made the video talk about what he or she is doing, along with any other notes. A video, therefore, is much more effective.

Let’s see how we can construct them ourselves.

How Do You Make Them?

That’s great, but how do they make those videos in the first place? What do you do if you want to make a video yourself? You’ve may have seen some people use their video camera to point to the monitor, but those look very unprofessional when compared to others that show only what the monitor shows, without the monitor acting as a border around the video. Those people use screencasting software.

What Does A Screencasting Software Do?

Screencasting software works much like the PrtSc button on your keyboard, as known as “Print Screen”. In Windows, this button copies the entire screen onto your clipboard which you can simply paste into Paint or any other image editing software. In Linux, the button copies the entire screen and then opens a window to ask you if you want to copy it to the clipboard or save it as a file.

However, screencasting software captures the screen and makes a video out of it instead of an image, and also lets you capture the sound that would usually be coming out of your speakers or whatever is picked up by any attached microphones.

About Kazam

Kazam Screencaster is an easily available free screencasting tool that you can use on Linux to make such videos. There are a couple of other tools out in the wild that you can use, but Kazam seems to be one of the easiest to work with. It seems that Kazam is only officially available for Ubuntu as there are PPAs for it, which is a shame, but I’m sure that someone can take the source code and compile it themselves on other distributions.

Installation

To install it, you’ll need to run this command in the terminal if you use Ubuntu 11.10:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:bigwhale/kazam-oneric && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install kazam

If you use a previous version of Ubuntu, run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:and471-kazam-daily-builds && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install kazam

If it asks you if you want to continue at certain steps, make sure to hit “y” or enter for each request, depending on which button it asks you to hit. Wait for that to complete, and then you can launch Kazam by searching for it in Unity, Gnome Shell, or menus, depending on what desktop environment you’re using.

Usage

From here on, Kazam should be easy to use.

You can immediately start recording a video, with or without sound.

After pressing start, Kazam will do a countdown until the recording starts, and you can stop recording by clicking on its icon in the tray at the top right of your screen.

Once you finish, you can save or edit with the Kazam software for quality and where to export to, including YouTube. That’s all there really is!

Conclusion

Kazam is ridiculously easy for such a fine screencasting tool. For those who don’t need a whole lot of settings and let the dedicated video editor do the editing, Kazam is a great way to make those screencasts.

What’s your favorite screencasting tool? For Windows and Linux? Let us know in the comments!

In case you’re doing the latter, there are many DIY projects that are lengthy and awesome enough to be as good as retail gifts. Here’s a small selection of such DIY gifts.

Kitchen PC

Touchscreen technology in the kitchen to view recipes and check emails? That sounds like you need to buy a new tablet of sorts, but that’s not the case. The Instructable calls for regular PC parts that you can get from your old computers, like a an Intel Atom N270, 2GB of RAM, etc. along with a 17” touchscreen USB kit that you can get from eBay and runs for $70, though there are cheaper 12″ kits.

With such a processor, this beautiful system is meant to be for light tasks, such as web-browsing. On the software side, this PC uses Windows 7, as you can see in the picture, with the Rainmeter theme Omnimo, which aims to bring the WIndows Phone 7 experience to a Windows 7 desktop. For full instructions, visit Instructables.

So the touchscreen kit and Windows 7 (if you don’t have a copy already) doesn’t exactly make this a very cheap gift, but it will definitely be a very memorable one for your spouse at least. Not only that, it will leave guests really impressed. If you want to make something smaller but following the direction of this system, you could also try creating digital picture frames.

Magnetic Spice Rack

This neat project not only organizes spices and condiments, it also adds a touch of sophistication to any kitchen. Magnets are applied to the bottoms of clear-top tins with epoxy paste. Then each tin is labeled and affixed to some metal or magnetic surface. Here’s another way to present a spice rack.

Angry Birds Gifts For Your Child

The popular video game has transcended digital platforms and has made its way into toys of all shapes and forms. If your child has a soft spot for this game, you can make some really great Angry Birds figures using polymer clay, an inexpensive and non-toxic moldable material that can be baked into hardness. If you make enough characters, your child could even have his or her entire little army of pigs and birds.

You can see the instructions on this video. For more Angry Birds crafts, check out this article.

Make A Coloring Book

If your child isn’t obsessed with propelling birds, here’s an idea – a coloring book. This Instructables teaches you how to make black and white coloring pages from your own photos with photo-manipulation software. You don’t even have to use Photoshop if you don’t have it since the instructions actually indicate how to create the coloring pages using Pixlr, a web-based image editor that focuses on speed and features.

A bunch of coloring pages might not be enough for a present, you say. Well, if you want to go further, there are many tutorials that teach you how to bind a bunch of sheets into your own book. A warning: Some Instructables, like this and this, require sewing, but there’s also this tutorial that doesn’t mention sewing at all. With or without sewn parts, the end result could look just like any other retail item.

Giant Fn Computer Key Stool/Chair

This cool stool was made originally for Valentine’s Day, but it can really suit any other holiday. I mean, who doesn’t need a multipurpose stool for his or her feet? And the coolest part is that this stool is completely eco-friendly as it requires recycled box cardboard.

You’ll also need some white paint and paper mache paste, which consists of a mixture of glue and water (or alternatively, flour and water). There are recipes that you can look up for the exact quantities. The stool parts should have a minimum of 3 layers of cardboard to ensure it’s sturdy enough.

For more instructions, click here.

LEGO USB Stick & Other Projects From Our Article Vault

There are many cool DIY gadgets that we’ve discussed previously here. One of the mentioned projects is this epic USB drive with a DIY touch, which you can further upgrade by loading it with lots of office-friendly and open-source portable applications. Beauty and brains, packed in a neat little flash drive. It doesn’t get any better than this.

Do you have any ultra cool DIY projects that could serve as cheap holiday gifts? Let us know in the comments!

In fact, thanks to the embedded references in applications that use VBA, you can input and output webpages via your own applications. If you’ve followed our past scripting articles, then you know we love VB script and VBA, like my article on maximizing windows, Paul’s on self-updating charts, and Saikat’s on sending out mass emails.

Using the approach below, you can use Word, Access or Excel to read HTML documents on the web, alter those documents, and then output whatever you want in a new browser window.

It may sound like something that only an experienced VBA programmer can do, but in this article I’m going to show you how you can do this yourself, starting with a basic procedure to output data from within your own application to a webpage.

Enabling Microsoft Internet Controls

The first step, no matter how you want to make use of the ability to input/output your own HTML via VBA, is to enable the Microsoft Internet Controls reference.

In Excel, you do this by clicking on the “Developer” menu item, clicking Design Mode, and then clicking on the “View Code” button. This may appear different in older versions of Excel, but essentially you need to find where you can launch the VBA code editor.

In the VBA editor, click on Tools, and then References.

In the References window, scroll all the way down until you see “Microsoft Internet Controls“. Check the box and then click “OK“.

Now, within your VBA code, you will be able to create objects that can get information off the Internet, and you can output your own HTML documents that the user can view in their own browser.

Inputting and Outputting HTML

The first thing that you’ll want to accomplish here is outputting information to HTML. Think about how much you can do once you can output information to a perfectly formatted HTML webpage. You can extract data from your Excel spreadsheets and output them in a nicely formatted report.

To create this feature, you’ll need to insert a command button on your sheet. Under the Developer menu, click on Design Mode, and then click the “Insert” button. You’ll see a dropdown of controls that you can add to your sheet.

In this case, click the button control and place it in your sheet. Make sure there’s some data in the sheet (or any sheet), that you want to output to a report when the button is clicked. Left click on the button to select it and click “View Code“.

Enter the following code:

Sub Button1_Click()

 Dim objIE As Object

 Dim HTML As String

 '----------The HTML CODE GOES FROM HERE AND DOWN----------

 HTML = "<HTML><TITLE>HTML Report Page</TITLE>" & _

 "<BODY><FONT COLOR = BLUE><FONT SIZE = 5>" & _

 "<B>The Following Are Results From Your Daily Calculation</B>" & _

 "</FONT SIZE><P>" & _

 "Daily Production: " & Sheet1.Cells(1, 1) & "<p>" & _

 "Daily Scrap: " & Sheet1.Cells(1, 2) & "<p></BODY></HTML>"

 '----------The HTML CODE GOES HERE AND ABOVE---------

 On Error GoTo error_handler

 Set objIE = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

 With objIE

 .Navigate "about:blank"

 Do While .Busy: DoEvents: Loop

 Do While .ReadyState <> 4: DoEvents: Loop

 .Visible = True

 .Document.Write HTML

 End With

 Set objIE = Nothing

 Exit Sub

error_handler:

 MsgBox ("Unexpected Error, I'm quitting.")

 objIE.Quit

 Set objIE = Nothing

End Sub

This code outputs the HTML that you’ve defined in that output string. As you can see from my example above, you can embed data from any sheet in Excel into your HTML string. Here is the resulting webpage report:

Now that you have HTML output working, the next step to make your VBA script work virtually like a web browser is to read in HTML from some website, manipulate the data, and then output it into an HTML output page.

Sub Button1_Click()

 Dim objIE As Object

 Dim HTML As String

 On Error GoTo error_handler

 Set objIE = CreateObject("InternetExplorer.Application")

 With objIE

 .Navigate "http://www.google.com"

 Do While .Busy: DoEvents: Loop

 Do While .ReadyState <> 4: DoEvents: Loop

 .Visible = True

 HTML = objIE.Document.Body.innerHTML

 .Document.Write "<html><title>My Own Google Results!</title><body><h1>This is an Edited Version of the Google Page!</h1>" & HTML & "</body></html>"

 End With

 Set objIE = Nothing

Exit Sub

error_handler:

 MsgBox ("Unexpected Error, I'm quitting.")

 objIE.Quit

 Set objIE = Nothing

End Sub

What I’ve done here is used the IE object to read HTML from Google into a text variable in VBA called HTML. I then placed my own HTML output text in the top of the page, and then outputted the same HTML to the VBA HTML output. This is what that looks like:

This is a very basic example of what this is capable of. But if you think about it, once you have the HTML from a webpage loaded into your VBA string variable, you can search for specific lines in the page, look for images, search out email addresses of phone numbers – or you could rewrite the entire input page into a new, edited version of the same page in whatever format you like and with any modifications you like.

Doing this would require a bit of string manipulation prowess – but nothing is impossible once you’ve read in the HTML source from the web.

Do you see any potential for using either HTML input or output in your own applications? Can you think of any cool uses for this script? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Image credit: Shutterstock

This isn’t a how-to article though – I couldn’t possibly write about how to build a PC from scratch in one article. Instead, I will give tips and describe the process in a whirlwind manner, but you should maybe think of it more as motivation for you to try the same. The whole process took about 2 hours.

If you haven’t already seen them, we have a number of fantastic free downloadable guides on the matter:

• Your PC Inside & Out Part 1 – Case, PSU & Motherboard
• Your PC Inside & Out Part 2 – CPU, RAM & Video Cards
• The Idiot’s Guide To Building Your Own PC

Here’s what I gathered together to work with:

• An Asus p5B motherboard, dual core Intel CPU, and 2GB RAM. This was left over after my last upgrade so it’s already assembled.

• A standard ATX case I’ve had sitting around boxed for about 10 years.

• 380w power supply, with a variety of molex and SATA connectors, bought recently for under $50.
• A nice 17″ Dell monitor I rescued from the trash at Kyoto University last year, and a USB mouse and keyboard.
• Selection of 160GB SATA hard drives (I’ll be using 3 for this).
• Multi-DVD RW drive (IDE).

So here we go. The first step is to open up the case and add the motherboard spacers.

These screw into holes in the case and raise the motherboard, and must be matched to the form factor of the motherboard you are using.

Connecting The Case Switches

This is probably the hardest step of all. Before securing the motherboard to the case, I made sure to write down a quick diagram of the jumper pins for the case switches and LEDs as they’re difficult to see once the motherboard is in place. These can be found on the bottom left, if you were looking down into the machine, and they look like this:

There are 5 things which need to be connected here:

• Power switch
• Speaker
• Reset switch
• Power LED
• Hard disk LED (sometimes IDE LED)

+ve LED leads are coloured or red, -ve are black or white. These match up to the corresponding pins on the board. This can be immensely fiddly.

USB

Some cases have USB ports on the front, which need to be connected to the motherboard to be functional, the pins for which are situated next to the switch pins we just connected. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have a bundle of 8 cables which must connected one by one to the matching jumper.

A quick Google search for my “asus p5b usb pinout” led me to this helpful diagram:

Each USB port requires 4 cables, so the bundle of 8 can be split up into two sets of 4 cables. One USB port uses the top set of pins, one the bottom. The cables should be labelled with either a 1 or 2, plus something similar to the following:

• V on the motherboard = VCC or +5 cable
• - on the motherboard = D- on the cable
• + = D+
• G = GROUND

Power Supply

You may find your power supply doesn’t match up if your case is particularly old and you’re trying to use it with a newish motherboard. Older PSUs have only 20 pins, while newer ones have 24. You can see the difference in this photo.

There’s another 4 pin power cable next to the CPU that needs to be attached.

Before screwing in the PSU, verify everything is working. Connect the power suppy and try to power it on. Without a video card installed yet, there’s an initial error beep – but this is fine, it’s just to check the switch wiring, and the motherboard fan is spinning.

Video Card

Next up is the video card. They come in 3 types:

• PCI – the long white slots in the photo below. These graphics cards are the oldest you’re going to find.
• AGP – brown or blue slots (not pictured).
• PCI-Enhanced – the black slot in the picture below.

Motherboards from the last 4 years or so will likely have either AGP or PCI-E (not both). The two are not interchangeable.

Hard Drives

I won’t get into details here as I covered it quite throughly before in how to add a second SATA hard drive (and an IDE guide for older PCs). In this case I have 1 IDE channel and 4 SATA ports.

I have a few drives, so I dug out a 7,200RPM as the main bootable system drive, with some slower ones to act as data drives.

DVD-Drive

Most DVD drives need to be installed from the front, so that means taking the front panel off carefully and avoid pulling the wires for the power switch. It’s also better to connect any cables now before it’s slotted in, as things can get quite tight back there.

Power For Everything

Power for system components will come from either a regular molex 4 pin, or SATA style plug for SATA devices. Case fans will often come with daisy chain connectors for regular molex power plugs, like this.

Checking The BIOS

After connecting a keyboard, the first thing to do is access the BIOS setup screen. I’m looking first to see that it’s correctly recognised the three hard drives and DVD drive I put in:

All good. Then I examine the hardware monitor to see if the system temperature or CPU is abnormal. I leave this running for a while, just to check that they’re not rising which might indicate a fan failure somewhere.

Then once Windows is installed, I’m sure we can all agree that the most essential final step is to install Google Chrome!

That’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed this little visual build-log. If you’d like to try the same thing yourself, keep an eye on FreeCycle, or head down to the city dump and find old some old PCs to play with. Just tearing them apart fully, mixing a few components, and trying to make them work again is a fantastic learning experience. Comments are welcome, but I might not be able to answer any specific hardware related questions for your particular build.

A Hackintosh PC, as the name would suggest, is a vanilla PC (built by you or a retailer other than Apple) running a hacked (or patched) version of Apple’s Mac OS X operating system. OS X is specifically designed to run on Apple’s hardware line; a Hackintosh is simply non-Apple hardware using the operating system.

Although Apple opposes the practice of hijacking their OS for use on off-brand PCs, many technology-oriented people who don’t want to buy the hardware from Apple choose to spend a lot of time and effort in creating a Hackintosh.

It’s not easy by any means, but this guide explains to you what’s needed to get OS X running without a Mac.

DOWNLOAD Think Different: How To Build Your Own Hackintosh

The guide is free but password-protected. Gain access to the guide by:

1- subscribing to our newsletter (you may do this on the download page itself, link above). Existing subscribers will receive the password via email in the next couple of hours.

OR

2. Simply share the guide on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ on the download page. Quick and easy.

This free guide shows you:

• Where to research whether your computer can run OS X.
• Where to buy OS X compatible hardware.
• Patching OS X to install on your computer.
• Installing updates without breaking you OS X installation.
• Dual-booting Windows and OS X.
• Getting to know OS X, and finding tools to use in it.

DOWNLOAD Think Different: How To Build Your Own Hackintosh

The guide is free but password-protected. Gain access to the guide by:

1- subscribing to our newsletter (you may do this on the download page itself, link above). Existing subscribers will receive the password via email in the next couple of hours.

OR

2. Simply share the guide on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ on the download page. Quick and easy

It’s also a key lesson in beginner Arduino programming, though if you don’t plan on actually using this as an ornament I’d strongly suggest breadboarding it out anyway.

Note: This is a very beginner level tutorial and we certainly won?t be breaking any new ground – it?s? just a device to teach the concepts of using Arrays and For loops to deal with a large number of LEDs (or other output devices).

If you haven?t already, now would be a good time to follow along with the other articles in the series:

• What Is Arduino & What Can You Do With It?
• What Is An Arduino Starter Kit & What Does It Contain?
• More Cool Components To Buy With Your Starter Kit
• Getting Started With Your Arduino Starter Kit ? Installing Drivers & Setting Up The Board & Port
• Fritzing, a free tool for drawing circuit diagrams
• A Closer Look At The Structure Of An Arduino App & The Example Blink Program
• My first Arduino project – The Traffic Light

For this project, you?ll need at least 8 or 9 LEDs in either red or green, a resistor for each of them, a breadboard and some hookup wires. The starter kit from Ooomlout, which I recently purchased myself and is pictured in this tutorial, offers great value for money and has more LEDs and resistors than you?ll ever need, as well as coming with a neat breadboard and Arduino case to keep things tidy.

Here?s the final thing:

And a video of it in action.

Here?s a view of the wiring from Fritzing. It?s very basic – just connect the positive lead of the LEDs to pins 2->whatever (up to pin 13), and connect the negative legs to the ground inline with a resistor. The value I?ve used here is 560 Ohms. That?s it for wiring.

On the software side, think about how you might write to all these LEDs in the code. You could go about it like this:

int led1 = 2; // first LED on pin 2
int led2 = 3; // second on pin 3
// etc etc
 
void loop(){
	digitalWrite(led1,HIGH);
	delay(100);
	digitalWrite(led1,LOW);
	delay(100);
	digitalWrite(led2,HIGH);
	// etc
}

You should be able to see that with 9 LEDs, this is will quickly get tiring. The answer lies with Arrays, which if you can?t remember our Programming 101 about basic datatypes – are basically just lists.

The syntax looks like this (place this as the first line in your code):

int leds[] = {2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10};

The square brackets indicate that the ?leds? variable is going to be an Array. The curly braces enclose the list of pin numbers that our array will hold.

Now, to use an Array, we need to address it by the index number. The index starts at 0, and will always therefore go up to 1 less than the total number of things inside it (so with 9 items, the last one would have an index of 8).

You write it like this:

leds[0]

Which in our case, would fetch the number 2, because that?s what?s at index 0 in our array.

Following so far? Great. That alone isn?t enough for us though – we also need some way to iterate over each element of our LEDs array For that, we will use a for loop. The syntax to do that is like this:

for(initial variable; condition under which we repeat again; change to variable each iteration)

For example:

for(int i = 0; i<9; i++)

Which says

• start this loop with a variable, i, which has a value of zero
• continue looping only while i is less than 9?(so: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8)
• each time, add 1 to i (i++ is a short way of saying i = i+1)

So basically, the loop is going to be repeated as many times as we have LEDs, and each time it?s repeated we will have a variable, i, which we can use however we like.

We?ll be using this structure twice to start with. Once inside the setup function to make all our pins turn to output mode, like this:

void setup(){
   for(int i = 0;i< 9;i++){
       pinMode(leds[i],OUTPUT);
   }
}

Can you see what we did there? Instead of writing 9 lines of code to declare each individual pin as output, we create a ‘for’ loop to repeat itself 9 times, each time setting another pin.

Now, you should be able to see how we could do the exact same thing in the main program loop to turn each LED on in sequence:

void loop(){
 for(int i = 0;i< 9;i++){
      digitalWrite(leds[i],HIGH);
      delay(100);
      digitalWrite(leds[i],LOW);
 }
}

Try that. You can download the full code for today’s project from here if you?d rather not type it out again (though I encourage you to, as it helps the learning process).

Okay, so now we have a fairly boring lighting sequence. Let?s program another one. Just for fun, let?s make it completely random. Replace the main loop code with this:

void loop(){
int randomLed = random(0,8);
  digitalWrite(leds[randomLed],HIGH);
  delay(50);
  randomLed = random(0,8);
  digitalWrite(leds[randomLed],LOW);
}

Instead of using a ‘for’ loop to iterate over each LED, we pick a random number from 0-9 instead, and flash that on.

I’m going to leave it there for today as you should now be armed with enough knowledge to program all new sequences and experiment with loops. To prove how easy this all is, I challenged my wife to think of a sequence she?d like to see, and then got?her to program it herself, given only the code and lessons you?ve had so far. She came up with this, so see if you can match that for homework!

Questions, suggestions, problems – please get in touch in the comments.

Seeing that there’s so much interest in this game, a good source for gifts this holiday season will probably be Rovio’s online shop. However, if you look around on the web, you’ll find plenty of tutorials teaching you how to create cool little toys and crafts. Here are 5 relatively easy projects that not only make homage to Angry Birds, but most importantly will probably make an Angry Birds-obsessed child, family member or friend ecstatic.

Snacks: Easy Cookies & Sandwiches

Sweetsugarbelle.com is a website dedicated to cookie decoration ideas, tutorials and recipes. On the site, the author modified a sugar cookie recipe for Angry Birds, using Easter cookie cutters bought from Target, and cutting the top part of the ears. From there, she used green, black, white flood icing to achieve this amazing rendition of the pig from Angry Birds. If you have a Hershey Kiss cutter, you can also make the Yellow Bird-shaped cookie with this recipe.

Another cool recipe that doesn’t involve much actual cooking is this amazing little open sandwich idea.

The recipe is here and requires mini-bagels, slices of salami, cheddar cheese, black olives, fresh mozzarella and shredded romaine lettuce. Though it only shows Red Bird, it’s still a fun, super-easy and quick way to make a sandwich. You could even have your kids help you making these goodies.

Christmas Ball Ornaments: Choose Between Painting Or Gluing

Here’s something that you can easily make for your Angry Birds-obsessed family members and/or friends for the upcoming holiday – a Christmas ball ornament. I’ve found two tutorials, one in text and another one in video form. For the first one, you’ll need plastic Christmas ornaments, some acrylic paint (the author of the tutorial even said some of the dollar store green and black paints will work fine), scraps of felt, a needle and white/red threads. The tutorial involves some painting and stitching but even if you’re that good at either of those skills, you can easily get away as they’ll look fabulous and fun either way.

For the second tutorial that doesn’t involve stitching or painting, you’ll need a glue gun, some red feathers, black pipecleaners, yellow foam or construction paper, black felt, googly (nope, they have nothing to do with Google) or wiggle eyes, and red Christmas balls. You can watch the complete Youtube tutorial from NICKandCHAPIN here:

Though the tutorial only shows how to complete an ornament for Red Bird, you can easily get creative to achieve the other characters in Angry Birds with some of the same materials.

Make Your Own Inexpensive (Polymer) Clay Figures

Polymer clay is a sculptable material used by artists, hobbyists and children that can be baked and hardened permanently. According to Wikipedia, it’s based on PVC and is only called “clay” because it resembles clay in texture and working properties. This type of “clay” seems to be very popular on YouTube as it’s flooded with polymer clay tutorials. Most of them show you how to make miniature Angry Birds for key chains, charms bracelets and so forth. The following tutorial by EvanTubeHD (narrated by the channel owner’s son) is one that shows how to make a bigger model of Orange Bird from Angry Birds 2012 – Hamoween:

The 3-minute video-tutorial features Sculpey III clay, which can be found on Amazon for less than $3 for 2oz or at your local Hobby Lobby, Michael’s or craft supply store. In the video, the artist wraps a ball of scrunched-up aluminum foil with orange polymer clay, and makes the eyes, teeth, beak and feathers from smaller pieces of black, yellow and white clay. After that, he wraps toothpicks with brown clay to make the eyebrows before putting the model on a foil-lined pan and into a regular oven for 20 minutes at 275 degrees F.

The tutorial seems easy enough that it makes you want to buy some polymer clay, doesn’t it?! After all, If you get all the characters in Angry Birds, you could end up having your own little Angry Birds game, like this boy from the same channel, EvanTubeHD.

Of course, if you’d rather buy unique clay models, there are plenty of expert polymer clay artists that sell their creations on Etsy, like this ornament:

Or these earrings:

Bonus (For Those That Can Stitch Or Crochet)

If you can stitch, there’s a tutorial from Obsessively Stitching that can show you how to make your own Angry Birds plush toys.

The tutorials from the same blog to make all the Angry Birds characters are here.

Now if you can crochet, there’s a popular pattern from theitsybitsyspider (and another one here) you can follow to get Angry Birds models like these:

This is a small selection of DIY projects that Angry Birds fans have come up. Have you seen other cool Angry Birds-inspired crafts or recipes out there? Tell us in the comments below!

Image credit: Screencap from EvanTubeHD‘s video

I’m going to assume you have an Arduino Uno board, because that’s the one that comes with most Arduino starter kits.

Installing Drivers

Mac OSX:

You have it easy on a Mac. Just download the latest Arduino package, mount it, then run the included FTDIUSBSerial Driver. When thats done, drag the application to your applications folder. You’ll need to restart though to get the new drivers to kick in.

When you first plug in the Arduino, OSX will tell you it’s detected a new interface. Just click Network Preferences and hit Apply – there is no configuration to do there.

Windows 7

Nothing is ever easy in Windows, especially when it involves drivers. Start by downloading the latest package and unzipping it, preserving the folder structure. It’s quite a large download – 85MB when I checked, fully expanding to 230MB, so it may take a while to download.

Plug in the Arduino with the included USB cable. It may try to search for drivers, but fail. Just close down the wizard and open up the device manager. The quickest way to do this instead of trying to navigate Windows’ confusing set of Control Panel multilevel menus, is just to click start, and type in devmgmt.msc . Hit enter and you’ll open the device manager directly.

Under Other Devices you should see an Arduino Uno listed, with one of those yellow “problem” marks. Double click, select Update Drivers, and choose Browse My Computer for Driver Software.

Choose the options of Let Me Choose a Driver, click All Devices, Have Disk, and navigate to the download folder. In the drivers folder, you should see an Arduino Uno file. Choose that. The driver install process will recognise it as a “Communications Port”, and will cause an “unsigned driver error” to appear when you install. Ignore that, and install anyway.

If you’re using XP, the process is a bit more involved and involves two sets of drivers. Read the full instruction set on the Arduino page.

Set Up The Board & Port

Launch the Arduino application from either the download folder or the applications folder. The first thing we need to do is to set up the port and board. On either system, you should have a tools menu. Click that and make sure that:

• A matching board is chosen. The Uno is the default and was already selected on my installation, but it’s always good to check.
• The serial port is chosen correctly. On Windows, I found I only had one option (see the screenshot) and it was unselected, so the choice wasn’t difficult.

• On a Mac, the port names are a little more convoluted, but basically it’ll be in one of the two USB ports listed. cu-USB was the correct choice on my machine, but it may be different for you.

Test It

Let’s take a quick look at the toolbar.

From left to right:

- Play symbol: This compiles your code to check it without actually uploading it to the Arduino, but clicking the upload button will perform this too.
- Stop symbol: This will stop the COMPILE of your program, not stop any running application already uploaded to the Arduino.
- New file: Starts a new code project
- Up arrow: Open – loads an existing project. There’s hundreds of example programs included, but leave this for now.
- Down arrow: Save
- Right arrow: Upload the current code to the Arduino.
- Serial Monitor: This allows you to check communications coming from the Arduino when it’s connected to the computer, but don’t worry about it for now.

OK, time to run your first application. Click Open, and from the dialog choose the example app from 1. Basics -> Blink. You should see the following code:

To check your Arduino board is working and connected correctly, go ahead and click the Upload button. After a short moment compiling the app, some orange lights labelled TX / RX on the Arduino should start flashing. This means it’s transmitting or receiving something – in this case the code you are uploading. When the process is done, the code will be run immediately.

This app is incredibly simple – it will just “blink” the on-board LED labelled L (while the board is plugged in, there will a green LED that stays on, this just indicates power and will not blink). You can use your own LED too if you like – just stick the longer of the two legs into the hole number 13, and the shorter leg (the LED should have a flat bit on the head on this side) into the neighbouring GND hole. The LEDs will both flash together now.

That’s as far as we’ll go this time. You’ve now set up the Arduino and figured out how to upload apps to it, confirming that it works. That’s a good start, and at this point you might like to look over the Blink app code, and try to figure out what, or how it is doing it. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it yet, as I’ll explain the code in detail next time, as well as explaining the various bits on the Arduino board.

Thanks for reading, and as ever we welcome comments. If you having problems getting the board set up, feel free to ask away in the comments, but if your question relates to an outdated version of Windows or some obscure Linux distro then it’s unlikely I’ll be able to help. You might get a better response by crowdsourcing the problem at MakeUseOf Answers, where anyone can ask or respond to technical problems and there’s a massive community waiting to help.