If you have a UPS kicking around you can hack it to be used for all of your low voltage applications. The UPS has a battery and charging circuit in a nice case, by hacking out the inverter you can reduce the load when the power fails. Now of course you won’t have 110VAC available but these days there are so many things that need 12 volts. A handy
You might have seen the Plasma Speaker before, this is the Flame Speaker by TX/RX Labs might not be as practical as your speakers in your living room but it sure is cool. Via: Make
Now that quadcopters are getting really popular it was just a matter of time before we put them in a ring and let them battle, Aerial Sports League’s Drone Combat is the result. Just like BattleBots but in the air. I would like to see some autonomous designs that can seek and destroy. Â “The Game of Drones Aerial Sports League is the premiere drone sports competition, showcasing pilot skills,
  If you are a welder you might want to have a close look at the TIG Perfect project/product. It uses the Parallax Propeller chip which was designed by Chip Gracey (great interview here). This looks like the optimal fit for a Propeller chip, a low volume product that has high value to people that can get use out of it. The design looks great, nice use of the
Ben Heck shows up how he built his Pinball Portable project. The brain of the system is a Teensy microcontroller. He is using shift registers to lower the microcontroller pin count that is needed. This allows for a nice modular design. A output shift register is used to drive mosfets to drive high current devices such as solenoids, input shift registers are used to capture a bunch of inputs
You may have seen The Batteriser in the news recently. Our friend Dave Jones takes a look at their claims and demonstrates why their claims are total junk. In their patent they use lots of generalization that are not true in reality. A good electronic designer will design a battery powered device to operate to a voltage much lower then they are stating. Dave had a ton of battery
Using a Raspberry Pi Acmecorporation made this Automatic Pet Water Bowl Project. This project is designed to keep your pet bowl filled with fresh water and also gives you the ability to keep an eye on your furry friend. The designer is a native french speaker so there are a few spelling mistakes but his English is much better than my French. 🙂 “During the summer, when i leave at
