May 2009

Mechanical Digital Clock

  Mike Saunby got his hands on one of the most interesting old clocks I have ever seen. It does time and date which isn’t any great feat by todays standards but have a look at the complex electro-mechanical goodness that makes it tick. The big question here is who made the thing, there are no markings on the clock to give us any clues. Anyone know? There are some

Fireball V90 CNC Router Motor Driver Controller Build

  In the past post about the Fireball V90 CNC Router the assembly of the actual router was shown. This time you will see how to make the motor controller to drive the CNC machine. There are many options to choose from. I decided to purchase the motors and control electronics from Probotix since they know what goes best with the Fireball V90. The build details below describe the first

Pedal Powered Air Gun

  This Pedal Powered Air Gun must be tons of fun, no more pedaling the stationary bike in front of the TV. Get on this bike, burn some calories and shoot some targets! Check out the nice re-use of a spent shotgun shell as the projectile for this gun. Bill we need to see a video of this thing in action. 🙂 "The device is made from an exercise bicycle

Lightspeed Passive Attenuator using Silonex NSL-32SR2 Optocouplers

  I remember when taking electronics in college it was mentioned that you could order standard transistors, or you could order matched transistor pairs for high end audio use. A pair of transistors that were matched would work in perfect unison since even devices out of the same batch will have some slight variations. Have a look at the image below for an example of testing a ton of devices

Pole Climbing Robot

  The RiSE Version 3  robot looks freaky, it appears to be some type of small animal scampering up the pole. The University of Pennsylvania has some cool tech coming out of its Kod*lab. "Unlike RiSE V1 and RiSE V2, this newer version adopted a quadrupedal configuration, and was designed by Boston Dynamics, with input from the RiSE Project consortium. RiSE V3 uses brushless DC motors that increase power density.

Snoop on Pager Data Project Completion

  On Monday we featured the first part of Pager Data Snooping experiment. The video above demonstrates the completion of the experiment where the data is successfully retrieved from the device, conditioned and fed into a serial port, some special software allows a Windows computer to display all the messages that are being transmitted to pager clients.