If you like to see some real backyard hacking have a look at this video by kurtscottage. He is spinning an old car alternator with a gas motor and with a bit of rewiring and connecting through some home made transformers he is able to generate 120 VAC. Now the frequency is not always 60 HZ so I am not sure I would connect my laptop charger the the
The prize this week is a HMC5883L Triple Axis Compass Magnetometer Sensor so you can add some directionality to your next project. This contest will run for one week (June 27 – July 3, 2015). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to
 We have seen lots of interesting projects made for little money using scrap electronics like Microwave Ovens, for this project you will need a piece from another throw away item, a CRT TV. This CRT TV Flyback Transformer High Voltage Power Supply by Robert Gawron is cheap and easy to build since the main part can be found for free in a discarded old TV. It sure makes
If you shop is in need of a new toy a Pocket NC 5 Axis CNC Mill might be just the thing! I have had so much fun with the Laser machine and the CNC machine that I have but none of the equipment I have is well equipped to work with metal. Also a basic CNC machine can only move in the X and Y axis and drop the cutting
Julian Ilett has a look at a AD9833 Waveform Generator.  It looks like a nice device. Connect a microcontroller to it and use SPI to interface to it. You can set it up for square wave, sign wave or triangle wave all through SPI.  The AD9833 looks like it could be very useful whenever you need to easily generate specific frequencies. The module that Julian is using was under $7 with free
Photoinduction has taken apart his Nd YAG Laser. This is a complex beast of a system, I wonder what this thing cost new! He goes over some of the theory behind how the system works and demonstrates some of the parts from his huge laser system. There is some damage to this system, looks like there was probably a water cooling issue or just a loose electrical connection that
Have a look at the great video of this Vinyl LP under an Electron Microscope. Using an Electron Microscope isn’t as easy to use as a normal microscope, in this case the vinyl needed to be metal coated to be viewed. The scanned data was captured with a DSO and processed into a short video. It looks amazing, I didn’t realize how Vinyl Records LPs encoded the 2 stereo
