Steve Marriott wanted to have some automated outdoor lights. They will be controlled by an Arduino that will monitor some PIR sensors to see what is going on and turn lights on based on activity. A few tictac boxes were used to mount the outdoor electronics in. The project changed over time based on community help. The end result is a a completely automated lighting system that looks
Louis Rossmann shows how he walks through a Macbook Backlight Repair. As usual the scale of the repair is tiny and work under the microscope is needed. Some tiny jumpers and a steady soldering hand come to the rescue.
w2aew demonstrates the use of decoupling and filter cap usage. We have all seen large electrolytic caps and tons of small capacitors near chips on most circuit boards. Why are they used and without them what does the circuit look like. The live demonstration on the scope with the test PCB does a great job in demonstrating the difference with capacitor placement and operating without capacitors.
Michael Reeves is a software developer at Infibit that has made a face tracking robot that is housed in a pizza box, it tries its best to find your eyes and shine a laser in them. The software that runs on a PC was written in C# and uses Emgu CV which is the .NET version of Open CV for the facial recognition portion. A web cam is
This DPS5005  Power Supply is a powerful compact unit. It has a ton of functionality as it is. Johan Kanflo wanted some more features though. He created an Open Source Firmware version for DPS5005 Power Supply to add those features.  Unfortunately the firmware was locked so it couldn’t be sucked out and examined / modified. The PCB has a serial port that is wired to the controller but is not
CubeAMSPro100 has completed a UNI-T UT61E Backlight Touch Mod which adds some interesting features to the UNI-T meter. With a wave of a hand over the top of the meter he can now command the backlight to turn on or off. This isn’t a simple hack and it involved installing a custom PCB to handle the magic.
AvE shows us that you don’t always need a complex expensive setup to drive industrial equipment. A simple Arduino setup is shown here to perform some simple stepper manipulation. The Arduino is connected directly to the Stepper driver which handles all of the complex microstepping etc. All the Arduino needs to do is enable it, chose a direction and pulse some steps at it. The result is a nice
