You’ll shoot your eye out, another coilgun

All we needed to read was 4x 3900uF capacitor bank to know we had yet another decently sized homemade coilgun on our hands. And for the math buffs, that equates out to 1.25kJ of potential energy (efficiency kills it down to 37j of kinetic, but large numbers are more fun) which is more than enough to break skin; of course … Read the rest

WiFi AP gets antenna augmentation

Feeling bad that his access point was being made fun of by models with beefier external antennas, [Customer Service] decided to do something about it. After cracking open the Asus wl-330ge he found it would be quite easy to add a connector. This access point has two internal antennas that are quite small and use a spring connection to … Read the rest

Analog Stylophone

[Doug Jackson] just finished building an analog Stylophone. We’ve seen this instrument a few times before, most recently with an Arduino-based controller, but this one makes use of 555-timer, resistors, and potentiometers to generate the waveform for each note. If you’ve got the copper-clad and the means to etch the board everything else should be pretty easy to … Read the rest

Codec2: GNU low-bitrate speech codec

Low bandwidth speech compression is a desirable concept for amateur radio enthusiasts. Unfortunately there isn’t a great open-source option out there, but that’s changing with the low-bitrate speech compression package called Codec2. It manages to transmit and decode at 2550 bits per second with results comparable to proprietary solutions like MELP and very near the initial goal of 2400 Read the rest

2-bit paper processor teaches how they work

Take a few minutes out of your day, grab your scissors, and learn how a simple processor works. [Saito Yutaka] put together an exercise to teach processor operations with paper. After downloading the PDF you can cut out the Address and Data pointer as well as two-bit data tokens for each. The processor has three instruction sets; Increment register … Read the rest

A fantastic collection of slapped together bots

[David Williamson] has put together some pretty amazing little robots from bits of stuff he laying around the house. What initially caught our attention was this drawing robot over at HackedGadgets. We were impressed by the construction, as it looks like almost all of it was scrap. Upon clicking through the link we found a small collection that kept … Read the rest