Cool Gadgets

Cost-effective replacement for CdS Light Sensor
Cool Gadgets

  CdS (Cadmium Sulfide) photo-resistors are fairly cheap and widely used light detectors. Since CdS cells contains Cadmium, a toxic heavy metal, has now become hard to find. The reason is because of the RoHS directive. Electronics-lab has reported an excellent alternative for CdS that is more versatile and cost-effective. The idea is that when you are building a micro-controller based circuit such as a PIC or Arduino, then you can use a simple LED

Sensing 3D surfaces with Gelsight
Cool Gadgets

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  GelSight, a new 3D surface sensing material can be used to visualize and measure surfaces. Zedomax member reports that GelSight is a pretty top-notch stuff that can detail at even microscopic levels. “The optical property of the material is making it very complicated to see the surface structure”, said Johnson, co-founder of GelSight, Inc. For more information, you can read the paper presented at SIGGRAPH 2011 named: “Microgeometry Capture using

Open Picus Dancing Twitter Santa
Cool Gadgets

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  If you want to drive the guys over at Open Picus nuts send a tweet to their dancing santa! Check out their Open Picus Dancing Twitter Santa project to see how they connected the santa with a few bits of electronics to their system. I have a feeling that this will be a fun gadget on the desk until it keeps dancing non stop for a few hours… “I

BLINKY - Pinhole Camera Kit
Cool Gadgets

If you are a camera geek wouldn’t it be cool to say that you have built your own camera? The BLINKY Pinhole Camer Kit might be just the thing for you. The kit looks like lots of fun to build but don’t expect this camera to replace your existing DSLR. As you can see below the picture quality is what you would expect from a camera you build yourself in

Twine - Listen to the Objects around you
Cool Gadgets

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  Origin of Cool member shares a crazy gadget developed by David and John that can get the objects around you texting, tweeting or emailing. With this gadget, you can get an SMS when your laundry is done or an email when the fridge breaks down. Web-based application is also developed from where you can directly set up the scope of work of this gadget. You can watch here the highlights of this

Ben Heck goes over some CPLD and FPGA basics
Complex Hacks

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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

DIY Camera Crane
Cool Gadgets

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This DIY Camera Crane by Unitips.ca lets you get some amazing video shots and best of all there aren’t any expensive parts needed since the system is based around cheap metal conduit. Watch the video below to see what the results look like and get some build details. There are some spot welded brackets which might be a bit hard to recreate since most of us don’t have a DIY