Mark Csele has built a Laser Light Show Controller based on the dsPIC 30F6012 microcontroller. There is a good operational description that could spark some of your own project ideas. "In a basic light show, a beam from a laser is deflected by two galvanometer scanner heads, each of which moves a mirror to steer the beam in the horizontal and vertical direction independently. Given the high speeds
This is a cool video that goes over the basics of DIY Combat Robot building. Nothing very high tech but there is lots of interesting tips such as using cheap cordless drills as robot motors when you are trying to build on the cheap. "RoboGames founder and SFSU School of Engineering instructor, David Calkins, gives Patrick a primer on building a combat robot. From the wheel and controllers to
If you have ever been interested in huge telescopes this site is for you. There is a ton of details about this huge 22 Inch Binocular Telescope. Make sure you have a look at the right column of the site, many of the suppliers that were used are listed. This supplier list will give you a head start when you start your build. 🙂
I have seen a few articles about using these Fisher & Paykel Smart Drive washing machine motors as a starting point to make a wind generator. Once modified it looks to be a great inexpensive means to make electricity. Randy’s Workshop has some good documentation on how to modify these motors to be used as a generator. "This Fisher & Paykel Smart Drive Permanent Magnet motor is comprised of
Rob Miles has put together some software and complimenting hardware that lets to control some Christmas lights using software that is monitoring the internet. In this case it will turn on when a new post appears on his Web site. He uses shift registers to give the project the ability of controlling a ton of LEDs using a small number of controller pins. "If you know C# and love
If you are looking for GPS project ideas here is one that interfaces a serial GPS module to a PIC microcontroller and saves the data directly to a SD memory card. Schematics and code are available. "The data from the GPS is logged every second with the raw NMEA sentences being written to the SD card. The data written to the card is the GSA, GGA, RMC and GSV
If you ever wanted to mount a camera onto a model rocket this article makes for a good read. A custom mold was made to securely hold the camera in place. Project page. "So here is the awkward part. The camera must be TURNED ON when I install it in the rocket. It doesn’t need to be recording, that can be controlled with the poking stick. But it must
