Instructables member Fatratmatt has posted in his blog an amazing concept of building a Steampunk analog clock. The clock not only displays the time, month, date and day of the week but it is even equipped with an option of playing a video of the correct moon phase for the current date and time. You can create your own audio effects with the selectable volume controls when the moon phase
Check out this Pulse Sensor which monitors Heart Beats and easily interfaces to an Arduino. This could be used for lots of creative applications. Think of cool clothing that blinks to your heart beat. It would be neat for fitness instructors to be able to look at the ear lobe of their students to determine their approximate heart rate and if the exercise plan should be altered to optimize
Instructables member Dimovi shares a wonderful hack where you can turn your old LCD monitor into a privacy monitor! The crazy thing with this privacy monitor is that it  looks all white to everybody except you, because you are wearing “magic” glasses! People might think you are crazy, staring at a blank white screen wearing sunglasses! But I guess that makes it even more fun! Materials required for this build are: An
Researchers at MIT’s Media Lab have developed an imaging system that can capture visual data at a rate of 1 TFPS. With such a speed of visual data acquision, the researchers were able to create virtual super-slow-motion videos of light particles traveling and scattering through space. The technique to create the videos relies on what’s called a streak camera. The complete virtual slow-motion movies are created by stitching together each scan
Ben goes over some basics of CPLD and FPGAs. If you need a ton of power and a microcontroller just won’t cut it, it might be time to move up to a CPLD or an FPGA. Watch as Ben shows us some results of the first few Hello World like programs he runs on an Altera CPLD. Looks like there would be a steep learning curve to become proficient in
If you have taken some CS courses you have no doubt seen Conway’s Game of Life, if you are a kit builder you have probably seen some nice Conway’s Game of Life kits also. Where the basic kit version has 16 elements Cornell University student Cooper Bills wanted to design a system that had 307,200 elements. What this boils down to is an incredible looking visual effect that requires a
It was a great day when we could start our cold car remotely. A bit of trivia, the first remote car starter was produced by Canadian company here in Winnipeg called Kraus. Times have changed! In this hack Brandon Fiquett uses Siri in his Apple iPhone 4S to command his car to start using voice commands. Lots of the heavy lifting has been done by Viper in this case
