If you love the look of the Philips Ambilight system but would like to build your own? Have a look at this DIY Ambilight system that Instructables user Yonsje built. The biggest limitation it has is that it is for use with your computer and not a TV. These days this might not be much of a limitation though since many of us watch most of their video content on
RobotGrrl (Erin Kennedy) has been working on RoboBrrd for a long time, she has now made an iPad app which lets you feed the bird various fruits, the app communicates with the bird via a Redpark serial cable. The on-board Arduino deciphers the commands to perform the appropriate actions such as flapping its wings or chewing on the fruit. The Redpark cable comes with an iOS SDK which allows the
Greg from Electronicsnerd will be building some RF projects over the next few days. Today he presents an AM Broadcast Band Rejection Filter for Shortwave Reception which is based on the work of Joseph J. Carr. You can find the circuit in this article (PDF). With only 7 components it’s a simple circuit that could be built in a short time. “With an eye toward proper RF construction techniques, I
If you are dealing with LiPo batteries it is wise to use some commercial built charger since they have some special charging needs which is harder to pull off with a dead simple circuit like we could do with NiCad cells for example. Dane had one of these special charging units but has now hacked it to allow him to stream out the serial data from the unit so he
If you are also sad at the death of the Google Power Meter have a look at this Pic Power Meter project over at Pyrofer’s Projects. “The Pic board counts rotations of the disc in 1 minute increments. Every ten minutes it connects to the server over serial (to ethernet UDP) and uploads all ten readings The server saves these into a mysql database. I wrote some PHP code to
Stynus saw the Drill Battery Charger Repair article and sent in his drill repair to Make a Cordless Drill with a Dead Battery a Corded Drill. In his case he had a battery for his Bosch cordless drill die and with the cost of a replacement being so high he decided to adapt the drill into a corded drill for bench work. He still has the ability to use it
Before you toss your broken tools in the trash it’s worth a bit of time to see if it’s repairable. In a day when even the manufacturer just replaces boards and doesn’t actually troubleshoot and repair their own equipment it can be a bit tricky though. In the not so distant past you could find lots of schematics inside the back cover of user manuals that came with electronics, those
