The Arduino board has been the engine of many wild and wacky projects over the years, from bakery tweeting to various musical instruments . For its next trick, our man Steve Hoefer has taken his microcontroller and, along with a piezoelectric speaker, a gear reduction motor, and some PVC pipe, programmed it to listen for a preset sequence of knocks — a secret knock, if you will — and unlock the deadbolt upon hearing the right combination. Although this might not be the security system you want to put in place for your home, this definitely looks like a fun weekend project. Check out the read link for instructions and schematics, but not before you see the video of the thing in action. It’s after the break

A panel of space experts assembled by President Obama were expected to inform the White House today that unless they can round up some more cash, they won’t have the funds to make it back to the Moon before 2020. The UK Guardian says the report was apparently surprising to some inside NASA, who thought the project was more or less on track. Nine billion dollars have already been sunk into the Ares I rocket, which now risks becoming the most expensive pile of scrap metal ever seen. And thanks to a 1.3 trillion dollar deficit, the chance of that extra funding coming from the government seems unlikely. This also throws a bit of a wrench in the plans of the Constellation project, which aims to put someone on Mars by the middle part of the century. But again, without funding and the additional voyages (like that to the moon), the 81 billion dollar project will suffer some epic setbacks.

The Cloud Project is a tricky little concept that would spray flavored condensation and liquid nitrogen into clouds, “seeding” them, and forcing flavored snow to fall from the heavens. It’s pretty much straight of of a children’s book. The whole thing is purely conceptual for now; it involves certain bacteria and ice nucleation and a lot of other science-y sounding words and phrases I don’t understand. What I do understand is the phrase “It will snow ice cream ,” and what I wish I didn’t understand is “The technology is a long ways off.” Don’t be fooled by the existence of an actual Cloud Project van—it’s purely for illustrative purposes, and only functions as a regular ice cream truck /science information center. Next up: Spaghetti. With a chance of meatballs

Before he was the patron saint of electric cars and GPUs , Nikola Tesla invented the AC motor, the Tesla coil (or, as he called it, the “coil”), and demonstrated that power could be transferred wirelessly. A hundred-plus years later, companies like Solaren Corp are angling to beam electricity down to earth from outer space — quite possibly solving our energy crisis with science fiction means that would even make ol’ Nicky T. look twice. But why should the big companies have all the fun? You too can experiment with wireless power, albeit on a significantly smaller scale, with merely a square wave generator, some coiled wire, a 60 watt bulb, and a few other low priced thingamabobs

After the boundless Arduino-based inventions we’ve witnessed over the years, it was really about time Arduino did a little something for itself. Guilherme printed up his own paper Arduino designs, which do away with the regular printed circuit board and substitute a colorful combination of paper, cardboard and nerdy needlepoint. It’s almost precious enough to get us to pick up a soldering iron once more, despite the horrible disfigurement caused by our last run-in with melting metal. [Via Make ] Filed under: Misc. Gadgets Paperduino is like the cardboard fort version of every hacker’s favorite I/O board originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 May 2009 12:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds

This little project has been making the rounds as the “new Apple netbook ,” which, unfortunately, is way off. But the truth is pretty cool anyway: It’s a beautiful pencil-drawn, wooden model. Student Kyle Buckner made this 3/4 scale model out of wood, with real working hinges and everything, and hand-drew the Dock, icons, keyboard, trackpad, and even the little Philips screws on with a pencil. It also features a magnetically-attached “screen” that has a pull-tab underneath. When pulled, the tab shows a very cool film strip drawing with illustrations of the wonders of Mac

The tweenbot, a cardboard-bodied, cheerful little bugger, is equipped with a flag stating its intended destination. Since it can only move forward, it depends on the kindness of strangers to guide it and remove obstacles. Tisch School of the Arts student Kacie Kinzer created the tweenbot as a kind of art experiment. In her words: I wondered: could a human-like object traverse sidewalks and streets along with us, and in so doing, create a narrative about our relationship to space and our willingness to interact with what we find in it? More importantly, how could our actions be seen within a larger context of human connection that emerges from the complexity of the city itself? To answer these questions, I built robots