Colin Merkel sent in his cool PIC 16F877a Microcontroller based Digital Effects Guitars Pedal. I don’t play myself but I can imagine how fun this pedal would be to jam with. Colin has provided the schematic and code so that you can also build your own if you’re musically inclined. “I used a number of ICs in the construction of this project, they are listed below. – PIC16F877a with 20MHz
There are lots of items out there that promote proper tooth brushing, you can get toothbrushes that play a tune for a few minutes, you can get toothbrush timers but there is nothing that can tell you how long you need to spend on each section of your teeth. That is where the Arduino based Toothbrushing aid called the Brushduino comes in. It knows when you are brushing by the
If you are a light sleeper and don’t need much to wake you up in the morning then this DIY Gentle Wake Up Alarm Clock by Michiel Spithoven might be the ticket for you. On the other hand if you can sleep through a thunderstorm then you may want to look into a real loud alarm clock instead. 🙂 “First I wrote some test code to check of a small
Our friend Bob Davis is working on an experimental device he calls an Ionic Spinner. It’s working but still needs some fine tuning. The first video he describes the creation but the demo doesn’t work too well, in the second video you can see the modified design and the spinner spinning away. Bob is using a TV flyback transformer in this experiment so use extreme caution if you attempt to
Here is an interesting Linear Clock that is driven by two Stepper Motors. It is using an Arduino Mega as the brain and an Adafruit motor shield to interface to two stepper motors. The stepper motors turn a lead screw that moves two nuts up an down to indicate the current time. Via: Adafruit
We have all seen the McDonalds Kids Meal Toys, they usually last about a day and a half before they find their way into the trash. David Cook from the Robot Room decided to take an Avatar McDonalds Toys apart to see what made it tick. Turns out there isn’t much for electronics since it uses an ASIC to get the work done. One neat feature is that the piezo
You may have seen the circuit board that is built into the headphones of the Apple iPod Shuffle. David Carne did a great job of reverse engineering what the iPod Shuffle Headphone circuit actually does. He also went as far as to emulate the circuit using a microcontroller on a bread board. There is an interesting frequency that is used at startup so that the iPod can determine what type
