November 2011

Mint Tin Alarm

Mint tins can be used for a lot of great projects. They are just big enough to be stuffed with some great electronics. This Mint Tin Alarm by Aaron from x2Jiggy is a great example of this. The video has a great beat and check out the cool schematic, no hard to read symbols here! Check out the Instructable Article for more details. “Combine a mint tin, piezo siren and

Nixie Tube Meter Clock

James Hartnett took an old nixie tube meter and converted it into a clock. By using an arduino microcontroller to interface to the clock he is able to get the time to display. It is a bit finicky and needs to be calibrated very carefully to get the right time to display. Read more.

Espresso Machine Microcontroller Temperature Regulation

Cameron Charles from The Adventures of Cameron Charles has a Saeco Aroma espresso machine and wanted a bit more control. Of course this means a custom PCB with an onboard microcontroller. 🙂 Have a look his Espresso Machine Microcontroller Temperature Regulation project where he shows how he takes over control of exactly how the espresso is being made. There is still a small amount of tweaking to be made but

Name the Thing Contest - 193

  Thanks to ideasbynet.com for sponsoring another of our weekly contests. They will be providing a iPad Travel Companion Folder to the winner. One thing about the iPad is that when you are holding it the aluminum body feels quite slippery and this is certainly not something you wouldn’t want to have accidentally slip onto the floor. The other thing about the iPad is that there is no way to

Ducted Fan Bike

Ducted fan vehicles haven’t exactly caught on yet but they look like tons of fun. Remember the Ducted Fan Scooter we featured earlier this year? Rich Olson from Nothing Labs has built this Ducted Fan Bike, it uses 3 ducted fans that are mounted to the rear of a bike, some controls on the handlebars are used to interface with an arduino. The arduino then controls the fan speed controllers.

Automatic Dogfeeder Project

If you have animals, feeding them is a boring daily routine. This Automatic Dogfeeder Project allows you to load a big hopper full of food and program when it should do your dirty work. Future plans for the design include adding wireless capability to the feeder. Via: Embedds “The plan was to make an autonomous dogfeeder using an Atmel AVR microcontroller, a cereal dispenser, a DC motor and some electronics.

Single Pipe Alpine Coaster in Mieders Austria

This downhill machine looks like so much fun but I would hate to see what happens if a deer walks across the path of the driver, those small brake levers wouldn’t stop it very quickly when you build up the type of speed we can see in the video. The video above is of a person who went right down not using the brakes at all. Via: TechEBlog and Buzzfeed