The Spherebot would be a great way to design some unique Christmas Tree Ornaments. “Our Spherebot is made of two stepper motors and a servomotor; as mentioned, a motor serves to rotate the ball on the axis, while the second motor allows to move the marker around the circumference of the sphere. The servomotor is used to raise and lower the pen. To allow anyone to easily edit the
Parallax just completed their Hack the Halls Contest. Ben Kenobi made a project called How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the user aims a laser at a Christmas scene and shoots things up. Sensors detect if a hit was made and gives the player some feedback. Looks like fun! “Materials – I picked up a few cheap Christmas decorations at the dollar store and walmart as well as cotton balls,
  We have seen a bunch of useless machines in the past but this Microcontroller based Useless Machine is a lot more fun since unlike the original versions there are almost endless possibilities on what will happen when the switch is toggled. Rest assured the machine will turn it off, but how it will go about doing it will chance every time! With the clicks and knocks as it
The µCurrent GOLD – Precision Multimeter Current Adapter Kickstarter by our friend Dave Jones form the EEVBlog is in full swing. This is a big upgrade from the previous µCurrent that Dave was selling. The price is more than before but on a previous episode of The Amp Hour Dave was talking about some of the precision resistors that were needed for the Gold version. If I recall correctly
In this project by Ben Harben an Arduino monitors some motion sensors which will activate as people walk by some trees on the sidewalk. The Arduino plays a tune using the Wave Shield and lights the appropriate tree using a power switch tail. It looks and works great, hopefully there aren’t any mischievous kids in the area who want some free electronic parts!
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
