Even if you have no interest in making these yourself, you might enjoy this educational instructable about making your own glow sticks. Comprised of a very short list of chemicals, all available online, the process is fairly simple. If you’re feeling like you want to take on a little more complicated chemistry project, you can also make the TCPO component your self, possibly saving some money as the individual components are cheaper than the final product. As they note, it is just cheaper and easier to buy a glow stick, unless you are making mass quantities.
This board is [Eric Seifert's] venture into working with AVR microcontrollers. He has worked with PIC microcontrollers in the past and used the goal of developing a servo controller board as his motivation to try the grass on the other side of the fence. He found he likes the AVR line for its ease of development under Linux, a feature we also appreciate. What he ended up with is a tiny board that controls up to eight servo motors. If you’ve got a project that is spilling over with servo-controlled limbs, maybe this will save you some development time.
It seems everybody has a different interpretation of the perfect alarm clock. [Loic Royer's] alarm clock is not the loudest, or the smartest, but does have some interesting features. By monitoring several environmental factors like temperature, air quality, humidity, dew point, and your own sleep patterns, this alarm clock can determine the best moment in the morning to wake you up.
The main sensor is a wireless accelerometer with the theory being: the more you move in your sleep, the closer you are to a conscious state. The other sensors assist in picking the perfect moment, and awaken you with the sound of birds chirping.
For now all we have is the source code and the list of hardware, but for anyone wanting to try, a circuit diagram wouldn’t be too hard to figure out on your own. Check after the rift for some more videos. Read the rest of this entry »
The Seagate FreeAgent Dockstar aims to make all of your stuff available online. It serves that purpose but sometimes you just want more options for controlling your hardware and running some scripts. [Eric Cooper] put together a guide for installing OpenWRT on the Dockstar by building your own kernel and loading it onto the internal storage. Once you have a kernel that will play nicely with the hardware, you can install it by tunneling in through SSH; the same method you would use if you wanted to run Linux on this hardware. If you have problems along the way, [Eric's] also included a guide for cracking the Dockstar open and connecting a serial cable.
When faced with having 2 cats with different dietary needs, [Landmanr] had to decide between manually stopping the cat on a diet from eating normal food, or building a dietary robot overlord. [Landmanr] chose the robot route. Using an old cd rom for the opening/closing mechanism, and RFID to distinguish between felines, [Landmanr] no longer has to stand guard while each cat eats. We particularly like the design of the antenna, so that the cat has to stick its head through it to activate the food opening. You don’t see that version in the video, but it is in the instructable.
[Greg] managed to clone a SEGA Genesis using a field programmable gate array. He used a Terasic/Altera DE1 board, which will set you back about $160, during development. The onboard push buttons are currently used as the controller with VGA for the display. Who knows, maybe there’s enough programming space left to drive a PSP screen and turn this into a handheld?
You can see some gameplay footage after the break. If SEGA was never your thing don’t forget that there is an NES FPGA hack out there too.
[Josiah] said ‘no’ to LEDs and instead used blue-phosphor neon lamps to build this binary clock. The ATmega328 inside uses three 8-bit shift registers to control the display. Each lamp needs a high-voltage NPN transistor in order to switch on the 150V necessary for proper illumination. A simple circuit was used to pull a 60 Hz clock signal out of the incoming 16VAC power. Unfortunately it was a bit too simple and didn’t provide a clean signal. [Josiah's] workaround is something of a debounce subroutine in the firmware to prevent multiple interrupts on the falling edge.
The last project we saw from [Josiah] was the Coachella Lamp. That was a show piece of antiquated technology and this is another show piece with a minimalistic style. We also liked seeing the protoboard work on the inside. That’s a pretty jam-packed circuit board and keeping everything in the right place while you build up each trace with blobs of solder is no small feat.
[James] is interested in reverse engineering some integrated circuits. One of the biggest hurdles in this process has always been just getting to the guts of the chip. He used acetone to dissolve the plastic case but had trouble getting through the epoxy blob. Commonly, the epoxy is soaked in nitric acid for a few minutes but [James] didn’t have access to that chemical. Instead he popped into the local music store and picked up some rosin (used to make violin bows sticky enough to grab the strings of the instrument). After boiling down the rock-hard rosin and the chip for 20 minutes, he got a clean and relatively undamaged semiconductor that he can easily peer into.
