Growing up I remember having fun with an old Van de Graaff Generator that lived in a friends basement (his dad was a high school science teacher). Dmitriy sent in his DIY Van de Graaff Generator Project that he just completed using some things around the house. The inspiration was from a popular M&M’S holiday ornament tin that can be found these days (probably on the clearance shelf today). Project details.
This Tweeting Cat Door Project uses the new Electric Imp controller. If you haven’t heard about the Electric Imp before watch the video that Engadget recorded at Maker Fair at their booth. The Electric Imp is a neat idea, the form factor is an SD card but that was just chosen since there are lots of cheap SD card connectors available. The Imp has been designed so that if it
Dave from the EEVblog did a video a few months back that I somehow missed. His new shop is in a building where they seem to through out a ton of stuff. So much that he regularly does some dumpster diving to see what interesting things he can find. This time around he was able to get his hands on two Samsung Syncmaster 204 Monitors. Samsung has a good
Some people love the sound of Bagpipes, others need to acquire a taste for the sound. If you want to practice your Bagpipe fingering without purchasing a set of pipes now you can use the Open Source Hardware Bagpipes to help you out. “OpenPipe MIDI-USB Shield can be connected to Mac, Linux and Windows without installing additional drivers. It can also be connected to iPad/iPhone using Camera Connector Kit
If you want to play with line voltage you need to be a lot more careful compared to working with 5 or 12 volts. Viktor has built a nice compact system for easily interfacing line voltage powered items to his DIY projects. Instead of trying to breadboard the line voltages or make a temporary rig to switch line power he gutted an old power brick and mounted a large
 Olivier St-Martin Cormier got into the Christmas spirit this year by bringing his tree to life with LEDs that can dance to the music. He is using a stm32 microcontroller to get the job done. You can see a video of it in action below. “Olivier St-Martin Cormier wrote: This is my Christmas tree, it has over 400 lights (exactly 404) that are all individually controlled by an
Jewi from Germany built this Jingle Bells playing Christmas Tree that will actually teach you how to play Jingle Bells. It uses an ATmega to play the song on a speaker and at the same time it lights appropriate LEDs on a keyboard display. You can see on the project page that Jewi used a bunch of SMD parts in the project where some large parts with some large
