Our friend Pyrofer wrote in about his new VFD Clock. “It sets itself via NTP and adjusts for daylight savings time so no buttons and it never needs adjusting. It can be monitored via SNMP for logging the temperature and checking system uptime. The entire SNTP stack was written from scratch and it all fits in one AVR 328P. For a screen I am using a salvaged VFD from
Looks like Itead is trying to get the Arduino clone price way down. They have setup an Indiegogo canpaign that has prices a low as $5 per board. The individual $5 boards have gone but you can still get shipped boards for $8 or 3 boards for $20. When you consider shipping is included in this the price is rock bottom. Itead is based in Shenzhen, China which is the
Dave from the EEVblog checks out the Sydney Mini Maker Faire which was held at the power house museum. Quite a few 3D printers and robots driving around. At 5:45 there is a guy who does a brain wave scan of people, combines it with weather data and 3D prints a design that combines the two. At 8:30 you can see some rockets on display outside and a demonstration
Sam writes. “An electromagnet levitates a ring of LEDs attached to a coil. The LEDs are powered using a wireless power transfer from another coil under the electromagnet. Â Levitation is achieved using a Hall effect sensor and a proportional controller implemented on a KA7500 SMPS controller. The wireless power transfer system consists a Class E DC/AC inverter operating at 800 KHz. Â The LEDs can be rotated to give a
Gauri Nanda, who is well known for her rolling alarm clock called Clocky has teamed up with her friend Audry Hill to build a new product called Toymail. It’s a fun way for people (parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc) to stay in contact with kids. The cute toy mailbox contains electronics which allows it to send messages back an forth to a smartphone app. If you hurry you
 Today we have lots of battery free electronic devices such as RFID which in most cases gets powered wirelessly from the reader. What would the world of electronics be like if our small electronics that only consumed a small amount of energy could be powered by the RF signals that are already around us. Ambient Backscatter does just this and has an endless number of interesting applications. Just
 Punch Through Design which includes Colin Karpfinger who has been featured here before have been working hard on the next project. They have come up with an interesting product concept called LightBlue Cortado that already has almost 1500 backers and has surpassed their goal of generating $20K in pre-orders by more than $66K. You still have 25 days to jump in at the pre-order price of around $20. This
