2009

High Tech Roller Skates

  Roller skating got taken over by roller blading, what technology is next? Have a look at the next generation of wheels that can be attached to your feet and take your pick. They all look very interesting but I wonder how hard they are to use?        

Arduino Nano Drives 8X8 LED Matrix using Micrel MM5450

  When working with a microcontroller there are never enough pins to do the job. Sure you can move up to a hundred pin microcontroller and call it a day but you will have to pay a huge price for that chip, instead it is generally better to pass off the IO complexity to another chip. In this project Oscar uses the Micrel MM5450 is doing the heavy lifting when

Drill Motor used for RC Car

  Instead of spending big bucks on one of those high power RC car motors Rabbithazen was thinking outside the box and used a Ryobi drill motor in his RC car. It wouldn’t make sense to go and buy a new drill just to harvest the motor but there are lots of ways to pick these up cheap. For example, most cities have a warranty depot where non-repairable drills with

Name the Thing Contest - 93

The prize this week will provide you lots of rubber band fun, it needs a few servos to make it real fun though. 🙂 This week we have an old piece of equipment which might be hard to identify, lets see if anyone can identify it! This contest will run for one week (June 27 – July 2, 2009) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter,

Hampton Bay Air Conditioner IR Remote Control Reverse Engineer

  ElectronicsNerd shows us how to reverse engineer an IR remote control signal. By understanding what type of signal is being transmitted out of the remote control allows a microcontroller to simulate the code to control the Hampton Bay Air Conditioner. "In the NEC protocol, the initial start pulse prepares the receiver IC for a data transmission at a particular rate, adjusting its AGC circuitry for the signal level excursions

Pneumatic Bed Shaking Alarm Clock

  This is a bed shaking alarm clock on steroids! This is even more jolting than my Fire Alarm Bell Alarm Clock! It uses two sources of air, a huge air compressor under the basement stairs and air from the car compressor. A computer controls a valve which starts bed shaking action. See the video below where it is tried out at a radio station. Thanks for the tip Stagueve.