October 2010

DIY Digital Bench Power Supply

A bench power supply is a must for any hardware tinkerer, this DIY Digital Bench Power Supply by Microsyl is a bit high end and much more than you need but in the end you will have a great system to enhance your bench. If you would like to make one from parts you probably have laying around you can make a cheap bench power supply from a spare ATX

Human Theremin using Infrared Light

The guys over at Nerd Kits have made a cool Human Theremin project that uses Infrared Light. IR light from an infrared LED is bounced off someones hand and some of the light is reflected back onto an infrared transistor. The closer the hands are the more IR light is reflected back onto the IR transistor. The output of the IR circuit is fed into a Nerd Kit microcontroller and

Inside the Apple TV 2nd Generation

iFixit has cracked open the Apple TV version 2. It is much smaller than the version 1 of the device. Looks to be a nice hackable box. We will soon see what cool applications that can run on this new platform. There is sure to be some additional non-hacked capabilities on the future since there is a large amount of memory which is certainly not all needed for the current

Old Computer Data Center

I love looking at old tech. Year after year the technology around us increases in power and shrinks, could you imagine if this happened in other areas of our life? If engine technology followed the same evolution we would have a 1000 HP power plant in all of our cars and it would be filled up with a cup of fuel. It’s hard to believe that within our lifetime computer

Medical Mirror monitors your Vital Signs using a Camera

Ming-Zher Poh who is a MIT student studying  Electrical and Medical Engineering has created a Medical Mirror using a cheap camera as the medical sensor. The camera doesn’t have to be anything special, the cheap webcam in your laptop would do just fine. It is looking for a person and tracks their face. Once it is locked onto the face it monitors the slight changes caused by blood flow. “Public-domain

3 Phase Rectifier Basics

If you are making a Hard Drive Wind Generator you will need to wire up a bunch of coils. This tutorial video from The Geek Group goes over some 3 Phase Rectifier Basics. See this page for more details. “For three-phase AC, six diodes are used. Typically there are three pairs of diodes, each pair, though, is not the same kind of double diode that would be used for a

Jumbo Nintendo DS Screen

This Jumbo Nintendo DS Screen is insane. With the help of a FPGA this simple Nintendo DS is supersized! It can now be enjoyed on two massive screens, and to top it off you can still interact with the games using the screen touch interface. Via: Coregamer “The closest match I could find to the DS LCD is Sharp LQ030B7DD01. You can find a datasheet Here. Aside from RGB, the