A ShiftBrite Christmas

[Garrett] took 30 of his ShiftBrite modules and mounted them to his front fence for Christmas. The ShiftBrite is a serially addressable high output RGB LED. The individual modules are quite adept at applications like this where you’re stringing multiple lights together. They have identical buses on either side, specifically for daisychaining. The installation above looks great.… Read the rest

Year in Ideas

kneebrace

The New York Times has published their 8th annual Year in Ideas. It’s a collection of interesting research and policy changes that have happened in the last year. They cover several projects that we’ve found noteworthy in the past. Pictured above is [Max Donelan]‘s power generating knee brace. It generates power as you perform mundane daily activities. Another … Read the rest

Make: The Resistor

Embedded above is a short segment produced by Make about one of our most fundamental circuit components: the resistor. Although brief at just five minutes, it covers resistor basics and the historical development of Ohm’s law.… Read the rest

MINI’s augmented reality ad

miniaugmented

We were surprised last month when we saw augmented reality being done completely in flash. It hasn’t taken too long to go mainstream though. MINI has incorporated it into a recent German language magazine ad campaign. The fiduciary marks actually work quite well with MINI’s established ad format. Visit the ad’s URL and hold the magazine up to the Read the rest

Cordless drill overhaul

drill_upgrade

[Alexander.m] shows us how to do a major overhaul on a cordless drill, replacing pretty much everything but the case. He needed some more power, but found the price tag of the bigger drills to be prohibitive. He opted for a more hacked together approach and used a  24 volt 1.4 hp hobby motor as a drive. He had … Read the rest