August 28, 2013 – Hacked Gadgets

Calculator Powered by a Transistor Solar Cell

Alan Parekh August 28, 2013 3

Â Who knew you could use the guts of a power transistor as a solar cell! Steven fromRimStar even takes it a step further and chains five 2n3055 in a base to collector configuration to generate enough voltage to power a small calculator. Funny how some electronics form China are working fakes. The small calculator he got has a small solar cell in it already but once the case

Automatic Stair Lighting

DIY Strip Light Stair Lighting Design and Install

Alan Parekh August 28, 2013 4

This DIY Strip Light Stair Lighting Design and Install over at Speedy Signals looks nice. The project uses a ATmega328P which is very common in the Arduino scene. The microcontroller interfaces with some shift registers to power the lights. Some 2N7000 mosfets are used to drive the actual LED lights. By using the Arduino ShiftPWM library he is able to have individual control of all the steps. Beam sensors were