If you have a Raspberry Pi sitting on the shelf looking for a purpose have a look at this Raspberry Pi Dog Treat Machine project for some inspiration. The box allows you to feed Judd (a friendly and hungry dog). All you need to do is send an email to Judd and the box will dispense a treat to Judd, take a picture and email the picture back to
Mike from Mike’s Electric Stuff has a pick and place machine that he uses to assemble some of his projects. A short in the wires going to one of the stepper motors caused one of his motor drivers to fail. When he swapped one of the different drivers in place of the blown one it also blew. Most pick and place users would toss both of them in the
 If you are looking for a new remote platform Carambola might work for you. The Carambola Core is a small module that is only 35×45 mm (larger if you use the development board), open-source and Linux friendly. It allows for simple wired and wireless networking capabilities to connect to everything around you. This Remote Controlled Car takes full advantage of this to allow this car to be driven
 Pendulum clocks are wonderful works of art but they aren’t always the most accurate time keepers. Keith, who we featured back in 2009 for his Servo Guitar has built an automated solution to keep pendulum clocks in time. He uses a hall effect sensor to monitor the pendulum swings. An Arduino circuit is configured to count the number of transitions on the AC power supply that feeds the
David Prutchi has just put together a DIY Gamma-Ray Probe using a Philips XP5312/SN photomultiplier tube and a piece of scintillation plastic. A paint can was selected as a nice solid enclosure, the tube and plastic are supported by some foam on the inside to protect them from damage. “The probe yields a background count of approximately 1,000 counts/minute (cpm) in our lab, and 7,400 cpm from a 137Cs
You might remember a few years ago when I shared how I monitor my running CNC machine. Looks like Dave from Plastibots has added a cool twist to the idea. Dave uses a wireless IP camera to monitor his equipment but he also came up with a way to wirelessly e-stop the machine by remotely pressing the escape button if the system is acting up. Instead of coming up
 If you like to dig through your bag of skittles to eat all of one color before moving on to the next this Skittles Sorting Machine might be just for you. It uses a BASIC Stamp 2 to control the system. A few sensors and actuators get the job of sorting done. The main thing at work here is a TAOS color sensor, this sensor allows the stamp
