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
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 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.
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.
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
If you haven’t seen part 1 you should watch some of that video to get caught up. This is part 2 of Hacked Gadgets following the techniques that computer scammers called Global PC Protection use. Part 1 was called Hacked Gadgets has fun with Computer Scammer called Global IT because at that point they were just calling themselves Global IT but through this investigation they revealed their main website. Their
Collin Cunningham from Make gives a good introduction to what an electronic schematic is and how to properly read them. You can read more about schematics here, to see lots of practical examples this is a good start. “Schematics are the functional diagram of electronic circuits. With so many designs available on the web, understanding how to read schematics can unlock a world of possibilities for the electronics maker”
