Jeff Buswell, Clifford Chou and Andrew Knauss from Cornell university made a cool Ultrasonic Range Finder with Haptic Feedback called The Bat Hat for their ECE 4760: Final Project. “For our ECE 4760 final project, we designed and implemented an ultrasonic range-finding hat that uses haptic feedback to alert its wearer about obstacles in his or her path. The hat is equipped with an ultrasonic transmitter/receiver circuit, which is
Sam writes. “An electromagnet levitates a ring of LEDs attached to a coil. The LEDs are powered using a wireless power transfer from another coil under the electromagnet. Â Levitation is achieved using a Hall effect sensor and a proportional controller implemented on a KA7500 SMPS controller. The wireless power transfer system consists a Class E DC/AC inverter operating at 800 KHz. Â The LEDs can be rotated to give a
Gauri Nanda, who is well known for her rolling alarm clock called Clocky has teamed up with her friend Audry Hill to build a new product called Toymail. It’s a fun way for people (parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc) to stay in contact with kids. The cute toy mailbox contains electronics which allows it to send messages back an forth to a smartphone app. If you hurry you
 Today we have lots of battery free electronic devices such as RFID which in most cases gets powered wirelessly from the reader. What would the world of electronics be like if our small electronics that only consumed a small amount of energy could be powered by the RF signals that are already around us. Ambient Backscatter does just this and has an endless number of interesting applications. Just
The prize this week is an Arduino Pro Mini. This contest will run for one week (November 30 – December 6, 2013). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item above and what it can be used for. Please note the image above is a side view of the thing. Please do not give the answer in the comments. Send an email to contest
 Punch Through Design which includes Colin Karpfinger who has been featured here before have been working hard on the next project. They have come up with an interesting product concept called LightBlue Cortado that already has almost 1500 backers and has surpassed their goal of generating $20K in pre-orders by more than $66K. You still have 25 days to jump in at the pre-order price of around $20. This
Lots of things are programmable these days. If you hop into most modern cars you will see switches for things like ride comfort, traction control, performance style etc. When you hop on a bike you would expect the ride to stay consistent. John Brack, David Dang and Broc SommerMeyer from Colorado State have built this Arduino based Bike Shock Project which Allows the Shock to be Programmable. It uses
