When working on your latest project you will eventually need to take it from breadboard to perf board. This is a fun step but unfortunately involves lots of smoke from the solder flux. There are lots of techniques to combat the smoke cloud, slowly blowing as you solder, holding your breath and turning away to breath, using a small fan to blow across your work and fume extractors (sucking
When leaving a parking garage have you ever wondered how the gate knows how to close only after you have pulled out? The magic lies below the concrete, there is an inductive loop in the ground under the gate arm. It sensed the presence of your car and lets the gate close only once your car can no longer be detected. You can also see these loops used in
If you want to know when your network is having issues and have some Arduino gear kicking around this Uptime Monitor Project by www.hackshed.co.uk allows you to get instant Twitter updates as soon as there are problems. Thanks to Steve for sending this in. “It was actually surprisingly easy; we had the Twitter posting code from the previous project and we found an Arduino ICMP library so that we
When you want to make a project small you might grab an Arduino Pro Mini instead of a full sized Arduino board but what if your project needs to fit into a blood vessel? F. Levent Degertekin, a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is developing some miniature technology that will revolutionize how medical doctors will look at the heart and blood
 Steve from the Big Mess o’ Wires blog has built a Home Made CPU called the Nibbler. Why the name? Because it is a 4 bit CPU (half of a byte is a nibble). Other than a creative name the project is quite an undertaking, it is built using 7400 logic all wire wrapped up for easy debugging. 🙂 “Some specs: 4 bit custom-made CPU 12 bit addressing,
 Smart Watches are taking quite a while to catch on. I think when the price comes down to the $50 range or they are included with your smart phone I think we will see mass adoption but until then I think they will remain rare. But if you want one now and have time for a new project why not build your own! With a few well chosen
This Open Bitcoin ATM might be a simply way to distribute Bitcoin in establishments that want to use it for sales. Just make sure no one walks away with the big box of cash. “Open Bitcoin ATM is the worlds first open-source automated teller machine for education and experimentation. Want to make one? Here’s a step by step tutorial. It takes about 7 – 10 hours to build with
