July 2011

Dangerous Prototypes Rockin the Open Source Hardware Project Space

Our friend Ian Lesnet from Dangerous Prototypes is sure Rockin the Open Source Hardware Project Space. As many of you know he is attempting to build a new open source project every month (well at least every month on average). Most of you probably didn’t know that Ian and I worked over at the AOL property DIY Life for a short time (Ian longer than me). Hot Hardware did a

Huge 8 foot tall R2D2

What does it take to make an 8 foot tall R2D2? Well if you are Darth Len it takes a bunch of cardboard boxes from refrigerators, air conditioners and dryers. Then you need lots of tape to hold everything together. It was about a 50 hour build and looks to be hard to move around since it wouldn’t be easy to squish into your 4 door sedan. Via TechEBlog, Gizmodo

The Verbalizer - Hardware that uses Google's Voice Search for Desktop

After I upgraded my Android phone I was pleased to see the new Google Voice Search options. It actually works quite well. The guys over at Breakfast had some great fun making The Verbalizer which allows physical world control over the Google Voice Search. Via: Make “Out of the box, the Verbalizer connects wirelessly to your computer via Bluetooth and when triggered, opens google.com in a new tab and activates

DIY Ikea Halogen Spotlight LED Upgrade

Electro Bob decided to upgrade his Ikea halogen spot lights into using LEDs so that he could run them all night. Bob removed the guts of the spotlight housing and installed his new high power LEDs which were mounted to two L brackets for heat sinking. I would have never thought of using orange LED like Bob did but he says that they are easier on the eyes at night.

Smartphone WiFi Garage Door Opener

  Last week we showed you a Bluetooth Cell Phone Garage Door Opener. This Smartphone WiFi Garage Door Opener by Tuxgraphics accomplishes the same thing but does it in a totally different way. This project uses a smart phone to interact to an ethernet board which is running  a web server, using the soft buttons from the page displayed you are then able to control outputs on the board. When

Name the Thing Contest - 179

The prize this week is a solar flashlight, if you want to use this as a flashlight you better charge it during the day and not hidden in a drawer. 🙂 I am thinking that the housing could make for a very small surface mount project. Not sure if the solar cell would have enough power to energize a very low current circuit but I would think it should. This

DIY TIX Clock

If you haven’t seen a TIX clock before you can see (or purchase) one from Think Geek. They are very cool looking, and in my opinion. I first saw them being used by Chris Pirillo. What is better than buying a TIX clock would be to make your own, that is exactly what Guido Seevens from Gweeds.net did. He documented the DIY TIX Clock build here and provided all of