I remember playing with my Lite Brite when I was young. What looks better than sticking solid plastic pegs into fixed holes in a grid of plastic? The answer is the beautiful glow of individual LEDs soldered into a perf board! There is of course some added complexity that comes with that choice. These days I am answering lots of questions on LED applications from our LED customers, what
Ever wonder how those cheap devices at Walmart sense you walking by so they can play the cricket sound or meow like a cat? Have a look at the circuit for these Spooky Halloween Eyes for some details. A slight change in ambient light is all it takes for the small device to "see" that someone is close. "The schematic is quite simple, each of the devices (LED’s, phototransistor,
Hans Scharler has been busy making a DIY Steampunk Pumpkin that is sure to please anyone who sees it. He squished tons of parts in there from some of the best DIY providers. His own ioBridge, some sensors from Adafruit, some ThingM (designed by Tod Kurt) parts from Sparkfun. "Using the ioBridge IO-204, I rigged up the fog machine to trigger when someone walked in front of the pumpkin.
If you played with a Meccano set when you were younger as I did this MicroRAX mini T-Slot Construction system may bring back some of those construction ideas. I have seen a larger version of this system used in industry for constructing modular systems that are very rigid and simply to modify. It looks like it could be an ideal solution to building a robot platform where the end
Our friend Carlos Asmat has built a Panoramic Camera with lots of build details. You can find the code that runs the system here and more results of the camera system here. "Materials Hitec HS-785HB Winch Servo Motor ServoCity SPT200 Direct Drive Pan & Tilt System Pololu Micro Serial 8 Servo Controller Hitec HS-425BB Servo Motor A digital camera Small plastic container Battery holders (Rechargeable) Batteries A piece of
Here is my latest creation, it’s a Gear Clock. It consists of a bunch of wooden gears, a PIC microcontroller and a stepper motor. The heart of the clock is a PIC 16f628A microcontroller. This microcontroller has an internal oscillator however an external 20MHz crystal oscillator is being used since it will have to accurately keep track of time for weeks and months. The microcontroller is interfaced to two
Bob Davis has made another can crusher with a huge 5 thousand volt power supply eBay score. A 100uF capacitor doesn’t sound that big, heck I have ones that are 10 times that size in a tray right beside me as I type this. Well the big difference is the one that is beside me has a voltage rating of 50 volts. That is a far cry from the
