Need a radio? Why not build your own! The materials that are needed are probably in your house already. H. P. Friedrichs has an interesting design available on his Web site. “If you’ve studied the subject of crystal radio for any length of time, you’re already aware that these instruments appear in an endless variety. The diversity found in vintage commercial sets is intriguing enough, though I have a special
Looking for an interesting LED project? Why not make an LED Throwie… LED Throwies are an inexpensive way to add color to any ferromagnetic surface in your neighborhood. An LED, a battery, some tape, a magnet and lots of fun! Total cost would be under a dollar each and they seem to gaining popularity. Check out this cool video of them in action! read more | digg story
Nathan True constructed a neat color shifting orb project. He was inspired by a Ask Slashdot question and looked at the Ambient Orb for design ideas. His initial idea of using a Parallax Basic Stamp was discarded since color mixing needed a faster processor. The solution was to go with a Microchip PIC16F84A, the 16F84 still has a large following since there are vast resources available on the internet for
Want to use your Power Glove as a mouse? Look no further, this is an interesting project to do just that. “The first step in making the pMouse is, of course, taking all the goods apart. I started with the component of the powerglove on the back of the hand. Once the black plastic casing is removed you can see the circuit board inside with lots of wires going to
The Superpositioned site has an interesting article about making a battery out of some pennies, an ice cube tray and a few paper clips. The battery is shown powering an LED. “In order to turn pennies into batteries, another electrode and an electrolyte are needed. In this case, dimes (zinc) are used as the positive electrodes and salt water is used an electrolyte. Copper wire, galvanized nails, and lemon juice
Big Clive has taken a dollar store fiber optic display and converted it to run off of LEDs. He has built an interesting circuit that allows the low voltage LEDs to operate from 220VAC (yes Clive is not from North America). He demonstrates his circuit board fabrication process and provides a schematic drawing so you can build your own.
Mac Cody wanted to use the optical sensor of a standard optical mouse. He basically removed the built in processor from the system allowing him to interface directly to the Agilent (Avago) HDNS-2200 Solid State Optical Mouse LED Assembly Chip. He has plans to interface this in his robot designs. “The animated GIF image to the right shows a sequence of three images taken with the mouse sensor sitting on
