Beginner concepts: electronic Jack-in-the-box

Behold the electronic Jack-in-the-box. Open the lid or enter the wrong combination and you’ll set off an alarm.  But if you get the right 6 combination code entered using the three buttons you’ll be rewarded with a little ditty and the appearance of the Jack (who lives in the box). [Jeremy Blum] designed this as part of his introduction Read the rest

Internet radio player wins Propeller Design Contest

It’s got a NIC, a remote, a character display, and can record and play back streaming audio. Thumper is [Harrison Pham's] contest-winning Internet radio player.His finished board is roughly the same size as the 16×2 character display and piggy-backs the device for a small form-factor. It can be controlled via an infrared remote control, or through a remote web … Read the rest

Program your own mayhem-causing USB dongle

[Adrian Crenshaw] is up to no good with this programmable USB device. [Adrian's] creation identifies itself as a USB keyboard and can be programmed to do whatever you want. That’s because it’s based around the Teensy board which sports an ATmega32 that will cost you only $18. He’s added a set of DIP switches for easy in-field changes to … Read the rest

USB host for Propeller micros

[Micah Dowty] has implemented full speed USB host control on a Propeller microcontroller. He’s motivated by the thought of using USB based WiFi and Bluetooth dongles in his projects as ready-made solutions.We’ve seen USB host control with the Arduino and it really opens up the flood gates for advancing your projects through storage, wireless connectivity, and user interface.

So … Read the rest

Photographing splashing droplets

When doing those cool liquid droplet splash pictures, you need to time not only the camera, but the droplets themselves. This project takes you through how to build the system to time the droplets and work with camera axe to get the right pictures. PCB files and schematics are available. As you can see, the results are quite nice.… Read the rest