2010

New Year Countdown Project

Brian Dougherty has made this cool New Year Countdown Project for one reason. That is to let us ring in the new year with style! He will be broadcasting the results of the project for the world to see on his Ustream page (also embedded below for your viewing pleasure). Us in the electronic field love to use segmented displays to display numbers and Brian is the same, only thing

Expressive Machines Musical Instruments needs a Kick

We love the weird and crazy around here. If there is a healthy dose of tech that is even better. You might remember the Multi Mallet Automatic Drumming Instrument that we featured last year. They are adding robots and lots of smarts to the musical system they are making. The music sounds great and Expressive Machines Musical Instruments are going to open source the creations. Check out the Kickstarter page

AVR Based Power Usage Logger

Dan Stahlke has built this AVR Based Power Usage Logger which uses an SD card to store the power usage data. It is similar to the DIY Power Consumption Monitoring System we saw last week. After seeing some of the charts I really want one, Dan shows where you can see the hot water tank cycling on and off and a bunch of laundry loads. I think once you see

Guess what this isn’t Contest - 8

This week we are doing another fun guess what this isn’t contest. The prize is a cool transformer knife to take camping and a hard drive enclosure. Simply reply in the comments what the device pictured above isn’t. Come up with something that is remotely plausible but not what it really is and sell us on it. Make your entry funny, crazy, weird… Just use your imagination. You can enter

LED Christmas Tree

Merry Christmas everyone! I hope this holiday season finds you in good health and in the company of friends and family. Mauricio Martins has the Christmas spirit. He took a plain old acrylic tree and added some bling to it with some LEDs and a simple circuit. “For this hack, I used the following components that you can buy for less than 8 euros. MUJI Red Acrylic Christmas Tree Resistors:

micro Drum - Arduino Based MIDI Drum System

If you play with MIDI instruments and have an Arduino kicking around, the micro Drum which is an Arduino Based MIDI Drum System might be of interest to you. It is currently under development and should be available soon. If you want to help out in the development of the device you are not too late since it is still evolving. Check out the gallery for more images of the

DIY Power Consumption Monitoring System

Monitoring how much power we use is getting quite popular, most of us have seen the Kill a Watt device before and there are also whole house versions of the Kill a Watt. If I ever get around to it I would like to build a whole house monitoring system that can show me some simple stats of power use, something like how much power was used today and in