What does it take to make an 8 foot tall R2D2? Well if you are Darth Len it takes a bunch of cardboard boxes from refrigerators, air conditioners and dryers. Then you need lots of tape to hold everything together. It was about a 50 hour build and looks to be hard to move around since it wouldn’t be easy to squish into your 4 door sedan. Via TechEBlog, Gizmodo
Electro Bob decided to upgrade his Ikea halogen spot lights into using LEDs so that he could run them all night. Bob removed the guts of the spotlight housing and installed his new high power LEDs which were mounted to two L brackets for heat sinking. I would have never thought of using orange LED like Bob did but he says that they are easier on the eyes at night.
Last week we showed you a Bluetooth Cell Phone Garage Door Opener. This Smartphone WiFi Garage Door Opener by Tuxgraphics accomplishes the same thing but does it in a totally different way. This project uses a smart phone to interact to an ethernet board which is running a web server, using the soft buttons from the page displayed you are then able to control outputs on the board. When
If you haven’t seen a TIX clock before you can see (or purchase) one from Think Geek. They are very cool looking, and in my opinion. I first saw them being used by Chris Pirillo. What is better than buying a TIX clock would be to make your own, that is exactly what Guido Seevens from Gweeds.net did. He documented the DIY TIX Clock build here and provided all of
Arthur Benemann who is an Electrical Engineering student sent in his picChess game which uses a DSPIC33F128MC804 Microcontroller. The PIC based game can communicate using a speaker to talk and a monitor to show the game board and chess pieces. If Chess wasn’t enough Arthur also added Conway’s game of life and a music player to the system “For the hardware the main challenge is to select a processor with power to
Eventually one of your projects will cause you to move from DIY PCB manufacturing to getting a PCB Fab company to make them for you. There are lots of them to choose from, Digital DIY has gone through a ton of PCB Fabrication House Options and provided some information to allow a good A B comparison. “Even in small quantity, having circuit boards made can be inexpensive, if you know
SeamusTheTinker built this Time Lapse System using a Parallax microcontroller, VEX Robotic Design System pieces and a bunch of other various bits and pieces. In the end the rig is capable of taking some great growing plant pictures. “The camera is a Casio QV8000-SX, using the built-in time-lapse mode. The motor controller is based on a Parallax BASIC Stamp 2 OEM module that I had left over from a previous
