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.
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
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
Monitoring how much power we use is getting quite popular, most of us have seen the Kill a Watt device before and there are also whole house versions of the Kill a Watt. If I ever get around to it I would like to build a whole house monitoring system that can show me some simple stats of power use, something like how much power was used today and in
This Ruler Clock looks like it would have been tons of fun to build. It uses a few stepper motors that are driven by a motor shield that is connected to an Arduino. Nice thing about these small steppers that are used in this project is that they can be found for free everywhere you look. Next time you see one of those disposable $50 printers being tossed out because
The Department of Homeland Security has something they call the Threat Advisories, these come in 5 levels. Turns out some people would like to have one of these hanging on their wall so that they can crank up the threat level when they want to. Michal Zalewski thought it would be a good idea to make a display of his own, the display uses the same concept as the Word
iFixit has taken apart one of the coolest toys I have ever seen. The Parrot AR.Drone you can see by the electronics inside that this is no ordinary toy. I am thinking that the guts of this system could be used to fly the SkyFly. Nice thing about the AR Drone is that it is made to be used, broken and repaired. This is one piece of gear that will
