February 2015

Completed Working Nokia 3310 Phone Multimeter Project

  Remember the Nokia 3310 Phone Multimeter that we saw last month? Looks like there has been some massive work on the project. It is complete and looks like it works great. It’s fantastic to see a resistor plugged into the bottom of a phone! Link with steps to build your own.    

Name the Thing Contest – 269

    The prize this week is a ESP8266 Serial WIFI Wireless Transceiver Module so you can add WIFI to your next project. This contest will run for one week (Feb 9- 13, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Don’t need a make or model, just what what the thing is used for. Please

ESP8266 – Low Power Sleeping

    The ESP8266 is quickly becoming a very popular chip, I am sure this is mostly due to the dirt cheap price point. If you are adding this to a battery operated application you might want to drop the power consumption as low as possible. There are many things that can be done to do this, removing the indication LED is the first obvious step. Jagenberg.info has done some work in

Automated PCB Drill Press

  Making a custom PCB is one thing, drilling a ton of holes for a bunch of through hole devices is still a pain. ACIDBOURBON shows us how he made a Automated PCB Drill Press that solves the issue. A Proxxon MICRO compound table KT 70 was automated by connecting some stepper motors to the hand crank mechanism. Some software magic was then all that was needed to finish things off.

Laser Engraver Made of Silhouette Blade Cutter

  If you have anything that can move in XY directions chances are you can hack a cutting laser onto it and make a quick and dirty laser cutter. Check out this Laser Engraver Made of Silhouette Blade Cutter, a 500mW laser was mounted to a blade cutting machine. Using Robocut allows the computer to control the cutter.  

Open Source Talking Multimedia Clock

  This Open Source Talking Multimedia Clock looks like a fun clock platform that could be developed into many interesting projects. “The processor is based on the Arduino Uno platform, the display is a LoL Shield and the speech engine is the SpeakJet chip. Various analog sensors and audio circuits have been cobbled together. The firmware has been developed in C using the AVR gcc compiler.”  

Name the Thing Contest – 268

    The prize this week is a ESP8266 Serial WIFI Wireless Transceiver Module so you can add WIFI to your next project. This contest will run for one week (Feb 3- 6, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Don’t need a make or model, just what what the thing is used for. Please