Todd takes a look at a blown HVAC control board. His sister’s HVAC stopped working and Todd being the nice guy he is decided to have a look to see if it can be fixed. Turns out the control board is controlled by a PIC microcontroller, there was also a blown darlington transistor DIP package. After replacing the transistor package it was determined that the PIC was also defective.
This is camping season, a Portable Solar Power Supply would come in handy this time of year. This one is small enough you can lug it around and it is simply to charge with the exterior solar panel. Leaving this out on your picnic table during the day will ensure you can charge all of your gadgets when you need to. Everything that is used are off the shelf
Chris Gregg made a an interesting Computer Printer made from a Typewriter, the typewriter is an old mechanical style and there is a bunch of electronics and solenoids attached to make the magic happen. The solenoids press the appropriate keys to type on the keyboard. One issue is that a microcontroller with enough outputs to drive this number of solenoids is not that common in the DIY space. Chris
Ben Heck shows up how he built his Pinball Portable project. The brain of the system is a Teensy microcontroller. He is using shift registers to lower the microcontroller pin count that is needed. This allows for a nice modular design. A output shift register is used to drive mosfets to drive high current devices such as solenoids, input shift registers are used to capture a bunch of inputs
Mike Szczys from Hack a Day built this great low res 1 Pixel Pacman game. If you had fun playing video games from the 90s you would love this. It is a classic game of pac man built around a 32X32 RGB Pixel display and is powered by a Teensy 3.1. Â “The hardware and software running the Smartmatrix made the display portions of the project really simple. First off,
 Vassilis Papanikolaou built this Motorcycle Gear Indicator Project that uses hall effect sensors to detect the movement of the shift pedal. The end project was put into a nice looking case and mounted in a way that it looks stock. The sensor was encapsulated in epoxy to keep the weather out. Most new vehicles have this type of indicator built in but if not this is a nice
There are lots of expensive Solder Paste Dispenser options but there will come a time that you just need to do more than is practical to do with a syringe and your fingers. That is when building a quick and dirty machine would come in. Good thing there is a system that you can model your endeavors after. The tricorderproject.org has a nice and simple DIY Solder Paste Dispenser
