If you are looking for some DIY home automation and want to play around with Pi and Arduino have a look at heimcontrol.js. James Bruce used it for a simple setup and you can see his results in the video below. “heimcontrol.js was created to gain experience in Node.js, MongoDB, Websockets and a lot of other great technologies that were used in the project. Take a look in the package.json for
 If you need to squeeze a bit more speed out of your Arduino project Overclocking with liquid Nitrogen might not be the best way but it sure looks like fun! Via: Dangerous Prototypes. “Why CMOS microchips could work faster when cooled? CMOS speed is usually limited by how fast transistors could recharge parasitic capacitances (gate capacitance and interconnect capacitance) via parasitic resistance/inductance of the wires. When cooled wire
Check out this 555 Timer Chip Scroll Music Player, it uses scroll that has a bunch of slots cut into it so that metal fingers can selectively touch a contact under it. A rolling system pulls the paper past these fingers and plays music since each contact has a different resistor value connected to a 555 timer. The construction looks great since you can see all of the components.
 If you want your next project to have a wow factor why not make a glass PCB! You can see how CNLohr makes them in the video above. A glass microscope slide is what the circuit will be made on. He puts some UV activated glue on the slide and sticks some copper leaf on it. A UV eraser is used to cure the glue so that the slide
 Who knew you could use the guts of a power transistor as a solar cell! Steven fromRimStar even takes it a step further and chains five 2n3055 in a base to collector configuration to generate enough voltage to power a small calculator. Funny how some electronics form China are working fakes. The small calculator he got has a small solar cell in it already but once the case
The Pixy shows what is possible if you off load the complex task of video processing when it comes to vision processing. The kickstarter is already successful so we can already think of this as a product. I think this will change many of the portable projects that we see next year. Thanks to Rich LeGrand for the tip. Â “Pixy is a small camera about half the size of
 This Electric Imp Garage Door Opener is a great enhancement to your stock garage door opener. You can get some expensive garage doors that have lots of these features but with this project you are able to have it all. For example if you would like to get an alert at 10pm if you forgot your door open it would be simple to do. Or why not just
