If you think about the technology in the 70s and wonder what a home made calculator would look like this is exactly what I have in mind. A wooden box is used to house multiple small circuit boards and reams of colored wires connect everything together. I remember hearing about the Woz designing many of his creations on paper rather than with actual electronics since the parts were so expensive.
Not sure why car manufacturers held onto bulbs for so long. LEDs are the dream solution to the high vibration hard to get to locations that these car bulbs are normally found. Our friend Pete Mills had one of his map lights go bad, the fix for him cost a few dollars and the parts were easily harvested out of a cheap LED light. Benefits of this cheap fix is
The prize this week is a loupe magnifier, this will let you get a close look at whatever you are working on. This contest will run for one week (January 1 – January 7, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it. Please do not give the answer in the comments.
If you are wanting to build a speaker that will make your friend with the 10,000 home theater envious you need to build one of these Plasma Speakers. Teravolt has made a second version with lots of improvements and it sounds great! There is a full schematic provided so you can easily build it based exactly on this design. I prefer to read a normal schematic diagram but have a
Brian Dougherty has made this cool New Year Countdown Project for one reason. That is to let us ring in the new year with style! He will be broadcasting the results of the project for the world to see on his Ustream page (also embedded below for your viewing pleasure). Us in the electronic field love to use segmented displays to display numbers and Brian is the same, only thing
We love the weird and crazy around here. If there is a healthy dose of tech that is even better. You might remember the Multi Mallet Automatic Drumming Instrument that we featured last year. They are adding robots and lots of smarts to the musical system they are making. The music sounds great and Expressive Machines Musical Instruments are going to open source the creations. Check out the Kickstarter page
Dan Stahlke has built this AVR Based Power Usage Logger which uses an SD card to store the power usage data. It is similar to the DIY Power Consumption Monitoring System we saw last week. After seeing some of the charts I really want one, Dan shows where you can see the hot water tank cycling on and off and a bunch of laundry loads. I think once you see
