June 2006

Top 5 LEGO Rubber Band Guns

1. Rapid Fire This rapid fire LEGO gun looks like lots of fun. This is what you need on your side when the next office battle breaks out. Well I guess the Nerf USB Cannon might still win the battle… 2. Remote Controlled Gun I need one of these for my front door. I can see who is there and get rid of them if I don’t want to talk

 Frequency Counter using a PIC

If you are looking to make a DIY PIC chip Frequency Counter check out this site. There is full instructions on how to make your own. “The circuit diagram is so simple that I didn’t make a complete Eagle schematic for it yet (other builders did, see links). The first prototype was built on a breadboard with round pads. A very similar design could be used for a single-sided printed

Toilet Paper iPod Holder

Well I think someone was thinking about selling a uinique product to a niche market. Someone better tell that engineer that the niche market needs to be greater than 10 people. “There isn’t much to say about Atech’s iCarta iPod dock and Bath Tissue Holder. No joke; someone actually made a speaker system for the iPod with a toilet paper holder attached. The iCarta’s sporting four speakers, a charging iPod

Top 5 Spinning LED Displays

1. 32 RGB LED Magic Ball With a bunch of RGB (Red Green Blue) LEDs you can make a real cool display. This one was made using a Microchip 16F628 microcontroller and serial to parallel converter chips since the 16F628 doesn’t have 32 outputs. 2. SPIN Talk about life size. The SPIN display is massive and has a nice effect. “We’ve all seen a train or a car whizzing past

Temperature measurement under Windows/Linux with DS1820 sensor

If you need to do some temperature measurement, this project will allow you to interface an inexpensive yet accurate sensor to your computer. “This small circuit can measure and on the Bildschirm/in of a log file spend/store a temperature exact up to 0.5 C° with a DS1820 Temeratursensor. That e.g. is. practically in order over Internet/Lan temperatures in areas to supervise (server area) or around the outside temperature on an

31 ports USB HUB

I hate running out of USB ports. Some manufactures think they know best and stick a bunch of ports in the back of systems and none in the front. Well with this hack your USB problems will be over for good. Via: Make

Gigantic 5 MB Hard Drive

This is the first hard drive made. It is a whopping 5MB in size, funny thing is that even though drive sizes have increased tremendously the underlying technology is surprisingly similar… “Information is stored, magnetically, on fifty disks which rotate at 1200 rpm. These disks are mounted so as to rotate about a vertical axis, with a spacing of three tenths of an inch between disks. This spacing permits two