February 2010

Coffee Can Clock

This Coffee Can Clock is a nice piece of work, there is a good build log and tons of details here at the Wise time with Arduino blog. “The electronics is based on Wiseduino (Arduino clone with DS1307 real time clock on board), with a LED matrix shield sitting on top. The shield is built with 74HC595 shift registers that drive two bi-color (red, green, and orange by subtraction) 8×8

Dennis Hong at TEDx NASA

This is an inspirational TEDx video of Dennis Hong of RoMeLa. If you think that you recognize his you are right, he was recently chosen as Popular Science’s “Brilliant 10” for his robotics. “Dennis Hong is an expert in the area of novel robot locomotion mechanisms, design and analysis of mechanical systems, kinematics and robot mechanism design, humanoid robots, and autonomous systems. He is the inventor of the three-legged walking

KUKA Robot Disassembly

The Geek Group has acquired a retired KUKA robot. They have made a series of videos about taking it apart to see what makes it tick. Lots of the pieces will be re-purposed into other projects that they have on the go. That is one massive robot, I would have preferred to see it brought back to life but it is also interesting seeing how all the bits and pieces

Microcontroller Temperature Controlled Pipe Heating keeps Pipe from Freezing

If you live in a cold climate freezing pipes is a common concern. A frozen pipe is more than an inconvenience since most pipes are copper and the expanding ice can easily burst the pipe. So even after the pipe is thawed out you have a big job ahead since you now need to repair your plumbing. Viktor from Karosium has come up with a cost effective solution to dealing

Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil uses a Capacitor Bank integrated into the Primary Coil

Daniel Eindhoven has designed an interesting new Tesla Coil, this Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil has a new coil design which has the capacitor bank integrated into the primary coil.  The new coil configuration has been dubbed the Eindhoven Primary. “A new composition of the primary coil for a Double Resonance Solid State TeslaCoil (DRSSTC). It is a combination of wire and capacitors. By making the coil like this you

Rotary Encoder and Shift Registers Explained

Chris Savage from Savage Circuits goes over the basics of Rotary Encoder and Shift Registers in the second of his new video series called Savage Circuits TV. You can see all three videos here. If you are wondering why there is lots of Parallax gear used in the videos, that is because Chris works for Parallax. 🙂 To read more about Rotary Encoders have a look at the Wikipedia page