If you have a Christmas costume party to go to this Steam Punk Arm by William Jakespeare might be a fun costume to build. Some silver and black paint makes some plumbing parts instantly look very steam punk. You don’t need a ton of parts of tools to make it.
Ian Johnston hacked his CSI3003X5 Bench Power Supply to provide for a useful feature that he wanted. The stock system has a up/down push button that adjusts the max current when the power supply is in constant current mode. That is all well and good but there is no indication what you have it set to as you happily click away on the buttons. Of course you could put a
The new Cornell University ECE 4760 projects are out! This  Clap Follower Robot will sit and wait until it hears a loud clap like sound and immediately turn and move towards it. Tejaswini Srinivasa and Asmaa M’nebhi designed it to ignore normal room sounds such as people speaking but as soon as a sharp sound like a clap is made it immediately senses it and jumps into action. They are
 When you don’t want to drive your robot wouldn’t it be nice to just point in a direction and have it go there? Well the issue is that every little bump and wheel drag will slowly adjust the direction so where it ends up after 50 feet will most likely not be where you intended. Iron Jungle from Whiskey Tango Hotel used a LM303DLHC which is a Micro
Jack Minardi hacked a remote control to allow it to be controlled by an electronic signal rather then a push button. This remote allows him to take control over the remote that can turn on 110 volt outlets. Of course you could simply use a relay and control the AC itself but there would be no Rube Goldberg aspect there… Although this system is nice that it is wireless
Our friend Pyrofer wrote in about his new VFD Clock. “It sets itself via NTP and adjusts for daylight savings time so no buttons and it never needs adjusting. It can be monitored via SNMP for logging the temperature and checking system uptime. The entire SNTP stack was written from scratch and it all fits in one AVR 328P. For a screen I am using a salvaged VFD from
mikeselectricstuff gives us a one hour video describing how he goes about reverse engineering. He was trying to see how easy it would be to use the tiny LCD displays which are normally used in the iPod Nano 6. It is often good to look to see what very popular components are used in mass produced electronics since they are often available inexpensively as a repair item. Mike suggests
