Brighten up your PCB drilling station

Being able to see what you’re doing can be the hardest part of drilling the through holes in those freshly etched printed circuit boards. We don’t know why we didn’t come up with this, but [Markus Gebhard] solved his shadowy woes with his 20-LED Dremel light ring. Honestly, how many times have we seen lights rings in photography without … Read the rest

Moving speakers to mix audio tracks

These speakers play different audio tracks depending on which orange square the sit atop. They’re RFID aware and the orange tiles are tags. If you get tired of a track just move the speaker to a different one, or place the speakers next to each other to play the same song. We’re sure there’s a project for us here, it’s … Read the rest

Parallax RFID Reader for Ten Bucks

We  received a tip about Radio Shack putting Parallax’s RFID reader on clearance for around $10. The only reference we could find that indicated Radio Shack sold the reader was a review page. The reader originally sold for around $50 in the stores, so getting it for $10 made it worth a curiosity trip to a local Radio Shack. … Read the rest

SPRIME controlled AC outlets

Reader [Tim Upthegrove] sent in a novel take on powering and monitoring AC outlets and devices called SPRIME, or Simple Powerline Remote Interactive Monitor and Enforcer. Compared to previous hacks, such as 120v switching or Quick cheap remote outlets, that only turned an outlet on or off; SPRIME allows not only control over outlets via the internet, but … Read the rest

Hoverboard comes to life

This installation by artist [Nils Goudagnin] is a recreation of the hoverboard from Back to the Future II. We would like to see inside that plinth. We’ve seen levitating magnets before, but this is particularly stable. He says he is using lasers and a control system of some kind to stabilize it. Just to guess, we’d say that the … Read the rest

Home DNA lab tools

[Jeri Ellsworth] stopped by Pearl Biotech’s booth at Maker Faire and took a look at their open source DNA sequencing work. It is by no means a grab-and-go solution for anyone, but from what we’ve seen in the video they’re breaking down those laboratory walls and letting us in to dabble at this work (assuming you’ve got a few … Read the rest

2010 sees new lock impressioning speed record

[Jos Weyers] tipping us off about this lock impressioning video. It shows his final round of the lock impressioning championship at this year’s SSDev conference. Even though he shaved about fifteen seconds off of his 87-second single-lock record from last year he came in third overall because the competition averages times over several rounds.

This method of opening locks … Read the rest