DIY Arduino Control Box With Computer Monitoring

Arduino-fanciers Oomlout have put together a neat control box for the popular prototyping board, complete with five potentiometers and three switches.  There's also a software app that can monitor the position of each of the controls.  In the process, Oomlout have (hopefully) tipped that their next product may just be an Arduino-controlled robot arm.Check out the demo video of the control box in action, after the cut

The control box came about after Oomlout's Stuart Mcfarlan grew tired of cobbling together controls from "poking switches and potentiometers through cardboard".  Constructed from acrylic (for the casing), together with commonly available controls, the clever part is the Arduino software that polls the switch box's state and sends it to a computer, via USB, once every 100 milliseconds. 

A second app displays the state of the box, and the source code for both – together with the wiring diagrams and box templates – are all available for third-party use.  If you're a regular Arduino tinkerer then this might be the handiest thing you've made all year.

[via Hack-a-Day]