July 2011

PCB Fabrication House Options

Eventually one of your projects will cause you to move from DIY PCB manufacturing to getting a PCB Fab company to make them for you. There are lots of them to choose from, Digital DIY has gone through a ton of PCB Fabrication House Options and provided some information to allow a good A B comparison. “Even in small quantity, having circuit boards made can be inexpensive, if you know

Name the Thing Contest - 178

The winners of all the previous contests have been announced and the items have all been added to the old contest pages. The contest this week will be a bit different, you still need to name the thing but the winner will be the first one to correctly identify the item above in the comments. Images of the item will be added above from time to time until someone guesses

Amateur Logic Field Day

I first heard about Field Day on Ham Nation which is a new show on the TWIT network. Field Day is a day where ham radio operators run emergency preparedness exercises. If there is a large event that causes major communication channels to be disrupted many of us will rely on the transmissions of these ham radio operators to spread information. Watch the video below to see how the guys

DIY Time Lapse Camera Systems

SeamusTheTinker built this Time Lapse System using a Parallax microcontroller, VEX Robotic Design System pieces and a bunch of other various bits and pieces. In the end the rig is capable of taking some great growing plant pictures. “The camera is a Casio QV8000-SX, using the built-in time-lapse mode.  The motor controller is based on a Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 OEM module that I had left over from a previous