Alan Parekh

Dead Macbook Pro Logic Board Diagnosis

  Louis Rossmann shows us how he troubleshoots a Dead Macbook Pro Logic Board. He goes deep into the diagnosis using his microscope and a nice big monitor to nicely view the schematic. You can tell that he has been through this circuit many times since it seems to be a familiar as the back of his hand.  “Here I diagnose a board that has issues on PP3V42_G3H which caused issues with the

DIY Mini Gimbal Project

  There are quite a few camera gimbal projects around. They allow for smooth fluid video capture even when hand held or mounted to things like quad copters. You can purchase kits and fully assembled systems but by looking at a few and getting an idea of the basics you should have enough knowledge to build your own.         

DIY Animatronic Puppet Head

  The Ben Heck Show has a cool DIY Animatronic Puppet Head project. This project listens for speech and moves the puppet mouth accordingly.  “In this episode Ben sets out to help Backflip films with their upcoming puppet movie The Princess Knight. The film requires its actors to memorize prerecorded dialogue in order to match it with the mouth of a puppet. In this episode Ben sets out to create an animatronic

Name the Thing Contest – 278

  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 (April 19- 24, 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 contest @

BB-8 Robot

   The BB8 Robot looks amazing, there is a lot of discussion how it is done. My bet is that there is a heavy drive mechanism in the marge sphere with an arm that can turn and tilt, This is them magnetically coupled to the top piece which simply sits on wheels.      

POV Globe

    Antonin Martin-Schouler had created a nice POV Globe. IR is used for position detection, a slip ring gets power over to the globe, it is packing some serious processing power with the ARM processor running the show. “For building the device using this tutorial, you’ll need the following material: The Zybo board from Digilent The Neopixel LED strip from Adafruit A 12 wires slip ring like this one

Make a Emergency Phone Charger from a Pencil

  Language Warning on this video by AvE. If some swear words turn you off this video isn’t for you. This is the type of project that could come in handy when you find yourself stuck in the bush with no stores in site. We are shown how to use the resistive properties of the pencil lead to act as a voltage divider and drop the voltage to a save level for