Pulse Jet Kettle

  We have seen some pulse jet builds before but this Pulse Jet Kettle has to be once of the funniest builds I have ever seen. You can see the kettle in operation at the 3:20 mark of the first video. It has an added bonus of waking up everyone in the house to get ready to have a cup of tea.  Via: Hackaday        

Ruler Tattoo

  Having a ruler on hand is a handy thing. I can’t think of the number of times I was in the home store and wish I had a tape measure on me. I do know that from the tip of my index finger to my knuckle is about 4 inches but it is hard to measure anything with any type of accuracy. This is where having something permaent with

XBox 360 Chatpad used in a Mini Computer Build

  Ben Heck shows us how he used an XBox 360 Chatpad as the keyboard input to a small computer. The Chatpad has only a few pins to connect to the external circuit (which is normally the XBox controller). Microsoft has been nice enough to provide a programming header on the circuit board. Ben flashes the integrated PIC chip with some custom firmware to allow the device to simply output

PandoraBar - DIY Pandora Player

  Check out this cool DIY Pandora Player called the PandoraBar that Jianyi Liu built. His inspiration was the Mighty Ohm radio that we saw back in 2009. The initial thought was to use a router as the main processor but in the end Jianyi used the Beagle Board since it had the processing power needed to run the device. The case looks great, and it looks like it works

Open Source Smartbike

  If you enjoy biking this Open Source Smartbike project will be of interest to you. Luis Cruz who brought us Eyeboards last year is now enrolled in the University of New Orleans and has started this new project. Luis will make the code and schematics available in December so you could make your own. If you would prefer to buy one you could support his Indiegogo. “The Smartbike is

Extra Special Word Clock

  We have seen lots of these word clock builds. Our friend Muris has just completed his word clock build, he is using a ATmega328P microcontroller to command the 248 LED matrix to show the time and a little something special (watch the video at around the 32 second mark). Atmel AT42QT1011 touch sensors add a nice way to interface with the clock and I am impressed by the professional

Speaker Manufacturing Tour

  Check out this cool tour through a speaker manufacturing plant. I am quite surprised to see how much manual labor is involved and how much wasted movement of parts and pieces goes on. With some thought behind the production line I think the process could be greatly simplified. Although with a high end, high price product I guess you don’t need to be as fast and efficient as other