 We have seen lots of interesting projects made for little money using scrap electronics like Microwave Ovens, for this project you will need a piece from another throw away item, a CRT TV. This CRT TV Flyback Transformer High Voltage Power Supply by Robert Gawron is cheap and easy to build since the main part can be found for free in a discarded old TV. It sure makes
If you have a UPS kicking around you can hack it to be used for all of your low voltage applications. The UPS has a battery and charging circuit in a nice case, by hacking out the inverter you can reduce the load when the power fails. Now of course you won’t have 110VAC available but these days there are so many things that need 12 volts. A handy
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
You may have seen The Batteriser in the news recently. Our friend Dave Jones takes a look at their claims and demonstrates why their claims are total junk. In their patent they use lots of generalization that are not true in reality. A good electronic designer will design a battery powered device to operate to a voltage much lower then they are stating. Dave had a ton of battery
Keeping track of your pills and when to take them can be easy to forget. There are all sorts of pill storage systems but this Atmel 1284p based Smart Medicine Box project by Mingyuan Huang and Jie Zhang from the Cornell University ECE 4760 program made a proof of concept that helps with this. “There are five major components for our device, including a pill box containing seven separate small boxes; a speaker module;
 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
This is part 2 of a many part Constant Current DC-DC LED Driver Design set that SDG Electronics has put together. He is using a PIC microcontroller and MPLAB-X with the XC16 C Compiler on the control side.
