DIY Hacks

DIY Credit Card System

Accepting credit cards can be expensive. If you have a permanent selling location with a phone line or data connection you can use a standard credit card terminal. Or if you are on the go you can use a mobile credit card terminal just like the pizza guy when he comes to your door. With both of these options you need to pay for the equipment and pay some steep

Quadcopter Prototype

Starlino is building a Quadcopter,  the design is based around the Acc_Gyro Board that he designed and is being sold by our friends over at Gadget Gangster. It uses PID along with a simplified Kalman Filter. “I did some tests on the lift force potential of this frame+motors+props, and was surprise to find out it performed better than some entry-level brushless motors. The lift force of this platform is up

DesignSpark PCB - Free PCB Design Software

Next time you are designing a PCB you might want to try the new kid on the block. DesignSpark PCB is a free PCB design tool from RS. I am currently using Eagle for my PCB designs but I think this software is good enough to give a try on the next design. I still remember making my first design many years ago with Express PCB, I was surprised that

Wind Turbine powers WiFi-Repeater

If you have ever been in a remote area and pulled out your laptop I bet you couldn’t find any open WiFi hotspots. Well with this Wind Turbine powers WiFi-Repeater that Dan Lampie and David Brenner from the Rochester Institute of Technology built that problem has been solved on a tiny budget. A highly directional antenna is used to send and receive the WiFi data from a location with internet

Spinning Mirror Laser Project

Spiral Brain (who was a recent contest winner) has made an interesting Spinning Mirror Laser Project. At first when I watched the video the beginning looked like someone was spinning a few bright LEDs in their hands on a dark night. The patterns that followed show off the capability of the system to make some nice looking complex pattens. “The main hardware setup consists of a Laser and two motors.

Microcontroller Temperature Projects

Andrei Mehiläinen from the  Tampere University of Applied Sciences has completed a number of interesting projects. Two of the most interesting ones are the Temperature Logger and the LCD Thermometer. The temperature logger uses a PIC18F4550 microcontroller and a Microchip MCP9701 for sensing the temperature. I used the LM35 in PWM Fan Controller project but based on what I see I think I will need to look at the MCP9701

11.3 Kilojoule Capacitor Bank

Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts found a great price on some huge used capacitors. These capacitors normally cost around $90 each, Daniel was able to pick them up for around $2 a piece! That is one hell of a huge capacitor bank on a nice budget. He also designed an interesting mechanism to tie the batteries together. Instead of using wire or busbars he designed a few laser cut