Brian Dougherty has made this cool New Year Countdown Project for one reason. That is to let us ring in the new year with style! He will be broadcasting the results of the project for the world to see on his Ustream page (also embedded below for your viewing pleasure). Us in the electronic field love to use segmented displays to display numbers and Brian is the same, only thing
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
Dan Stahlke has built this AVR Based Power Usage Logger which uses an SD card to store the power usage data. It is similar to the DIY Power Consumption Monitoring System we saw last week. After seeing some of the charts I really want one, Dan shows where you can see the hot water tank cycling on and off and a bunch of laundry loads. I think once you see
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
If you have some old camera flashes in the closet that you can’t use with your new DSLR have a look at this project that Adapts an Old Silver Flash for use on a Digital SLR over at Rien que pour les yeux. There is a 5.1 volt zener diode in the circuit to protect the TTL fire circuit of your camera. Please follow the warning on the site that
This is a bunch of electronics that have been taped together to emulate a sentry gun. It is supposed to scan looking for the range of an object and when something moves it is supposed to stop and speak a command to what just moved. It doesn’t quite work properly but I am sure we will see it working a bit better in the future. The Parallax text to speech
