September 2011

Puppy Robot

Russell Cameron built this Puppy Robot for his son to play with and after watching the video I can see that it was a huge success! “The robot is relatively simple to build and is made from robot parts and accessories available in many online robot shops. You only need a couple of screwdrivers and some pliers. No soldering required!.”

Dual Floppy Drive Music

Remember the days when floppy drives were all the rage. Well I don’t miss those slow noisy things, it’s hard to believe that a large floppy was one that held 1.44MB of data. You would need 10 of them to store a modern picture these days! Thankfully there is still a use for these relics, you can connect them to a custom microcontroller and have it play some music using

Arduino Ambilight

Don Howdeshell sent in this great Arduino Ambilight project. Sure seems like the Ambilight projects will continue to be popular. This one uses an Arduino at the core and ShiftBrite LED lights. You can see the effects here before the diffusion was added but make sure you watch the video below where the full effects of the lighting system are shown off! “The first challenge was to construct my own

Hard Drive Clock Kickstarter - Hard Drive Tick!......Tock POV Clock

We have seen lots of Hard Drive Clocks, my original one is now looking quite poor in the build quality zone.  Till this point if you wanted a Hard Drive Clock you would need to built one yourself by either taking inspiration from the other builds out there or making your own from scratch. Phillip Smith  is running a Kickstarter to hopefully change this and make a hard drive clock

Hollow Spiral Candlestick

If you have ever wondered how a Hollow Spiral Candlestick is made watch the video above. If this was my setup I’m not sure how long it would stay without some stepper motors running the show. 🙂

Wood Carved Computer Case

I have done quite a bit of CNC work with MDF but I didn’t know it could be carved with normal wood working tools this nicely. Andrew Espie-Whitburn from Espie Whitburn Design created this Wood Carved Computer Case over a period of 20 days and it looks great!

How to Interface a Microcontroller to a PS/2 Keyboard

Interacting with your project can be as simple as hooking up an IO pin to a button but if you need greater capability it might be time for a keyboard. In this tutorial Chris from PyroElectro demonstrates how to connect a PIC microcontroller to a PS/2 keyboard. One issue these days is finding a PS/2 keyboard, thankfully before USB came around they were a standard for a long time so