Coin slot detector

October 24, 2008 By 33 Comments


Wow, how quickly the wearable electronics world has slid into the gutter. They’re now resigned to watching our nations finest natural resource, the butt crack. This project by [semiotech] uses a LilyPad Arduino to monitor the exposure of the wearer’s coin slot. It detects the presence of light with a photoresistor and alerts the user with the vibrations of … Read the rest

Filed Under: Arduino Hacks, classic hacks, security hacks, wearable hacks Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

LED Life and Charlieplexing

October 24, 2008 By 7 Comments


Yesterday, we featured [Andrew]‘s orientation aware camera. We want to highlight another one of his projects: LED Life. It’s a 6×5 LED matrix playing Conway’s Game of Life. He used the low power MSP430 like our e-paper clock. The best part of the writeup is his explanation of how Charlieplexing works. Microcontroller GPIO pins generally have three … Read the rest

Filed Under: led hacks, misc hacks Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Vertical axis wind turbine update

October 24, 2008 By 14 Comments

[Faroun] sent in his updated vertical wind turbine. After running his previous one for a while, he felt that the motor he was using was inadequate, it required too high of RPM to produce what he wanted. He didn’t want to gear it up, fearing that the light construction couldn’t sustain rotation.

He built a new version that has … Read the rest

Filed Under: home hacks, news Tagged With: , , , ,

Interactive touch capable mirror

October 24, 2008 By 34 Comments

[Alpay Kasal] of Lit Studios and [Sam Ewen] created this patent-pending interactive mirror after being inspired by dielectric glass mirrors with built-in LCD panels, and wanting to add a human touch. The end results look like a lot of fun. You can draw on the mirror and play games. According to [Kasal], mouse emulation is essential. The installation features proximity … Read the rest

Filed Under: home entertainment hacks Tagged With: , , , ,

Quick cheap cassette adapter

October 24, 2008 By 17 Comments

[Dane] sent us this super quick tape adapter project. Yes, we know we can go buy one of these for pretty cheap and it will probably sound much better, but really, wouldn’t it be cool to make one? Using a headphone adapter, a couple resisters, some wire, and an old cassette tape, [Dane] shows us how easy it is to … Read the rest

Filed Under: classic hacks, digital audio hacks Tagged With: ,