June 2014

Scratch Built Cargo Dropper RC Plane

  With a top speed of 58 MPH this Scratch Built Cargo Dropper RC Plane that ExperimentalAirlines built is no slouch. There is a video camera in the cargo bay so you can watch the cargo drop, there is also a camera mounted on the cargo so you can watch the cargo falling from the plane. Nice to see that the plane is primarily built from cheap foamboard and looks like

Portable USB Charger Teardown

    This video was going to be a repair of this Portable USB Charger but as it turns out there wasn’t anything electrically wrong with it. It didn’t work out of the box but I think that must have been caused by some oxidation on the USB contacts. It seems to work like a champ now. The control chip for the DC/DC converter looks to be this DHMF chip.

Name the Thing Contest – 253

  The prize this week is an Arduino SD Card Reader. This contest will run for one week (June 7 – 13, 2014). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Please note the image above is a side view of the thing. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest

Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 Teardown

  Dave Jones from the EEVBlog does a Sony Mavica MVC-FD7 Teardown. I remember playing with one of these things in the store when it came out. Can’t remember what they cost but it wasn’t cheap. It is funny to think that it stores pictures on a 3.5 inch floppy drive that only holds 1.44 MB! These days you would be hard pressed to store one or two pictures from

Printable Self Assembling Lamp

     This Printable Self Assembling Lamp is an interesting concept. It starts out as a flat sheet and folds up into a box with an overhead light. The light turns on using a touch sensitive area. This is what Ikea needs to implement. 🙂 “The thing that comes out of the printer (it’s a rather special sort of printer) is a flat multi-layer sandwich of shape-memory polymers (they take

Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopter

    Looks like this out of the box HD Vision Quadcopter could make you a photography genius in no time. Why rent a helicopter or a boom when you can get these amazing shots with one of these Phantom 2 Vision Quadcopters. You might not be able to hunt with them or fly them in all areas though. Update: JJ mentioned some other fantastic video creators using these quadcopters.

Submersible Thruster

  If you are looking to design some underwater propulsion Dane from Transistor Man has completed a well documented Submersible Thruster build to get some pointers from. “The goal here is to design a submersible motor assembly that is able to accomplish the following: Able to operate, submersed, up to 1 meter underwater while not transfering more than 10ml of coolant into the surrounding water per hour (not leaky) Capable of