On the shortest day of the year wouldn’t it be nice to wake up to a bright room? This alarm clock with an integrated wake-up light is one way to do just that. It has some nice features, like a wood veneer that allows the seven-segment display to shine through, but hides it when the display is turned off. There’s also a feature to adjust the color based on ambient room temperature (another way to dwell on how cold it is in your bedroom).

A CC1101 RF chip came to the party, but we can’t figure out what it’s purpose is in this circuit. If you can shed some light on its involvement please do so in the comments.

[Thanks Eric]

[Bill Porter] has joined in the pursuit of an inexpensive yet effective way to monitor his power usage. He calls his project the Not So Tiny Power Meter, and shared both his successes and follies involved in seeing it through to implementation. There are problems; sizing issues with enclosures and his PCB, issues with noise when measuring low-current signals with the clamps, and even some wireless communications issues. But it looks like he’s got the system running despite these hurdles. Right now it streams data wirelessly so that he can display the current energy consumption, but he plans to add Google Power Meter functionality next.

We’ve seen commercial units using the same sensing principles that have been hacked to show data online.

Yep, if you’ve got a button that needs pushing, this is one way to do it. [Travis] combined an old alarm clock with a car door-lock actuator and minimal logic circuitry to make this happen. When the alarm time is reached, the adjustable actuator comes down to press whichever button has been placed under it. In the video after the break he’s using it to schedule the start time for his Roomba, make his coffee, heat his pizza, or pointlessly press the clock’s own snooze button (classic). We think this is just begging to be used with a Rube-goldberg setup, perhaps to topple to dominos that other robot took the time to set up. Oh wait… that shows up in the video too. Fantastic!

Read the rest of this entry »

[Aki Korhonen] wanted to tighten up his macro photography setup. He already had the camera for the job, but wanted a fully adjustable target platform that he could easily light. What he came up with is a jig to hold the camera and fine tune the subject of each photo. It uses a frame with a piece of glass whose distance from the lens is adjusted by turning a knob. Below the glass a reflective surface redirects light from an LED flashlight up through the platform, lighting the snowflakes he’s shooting. A fixed LED source is in the plans for the next rendition.

Take a look at the overview of his setup in the quick clip after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, this metal suit might not make you a dinosaur, but it would be perfectly possible for you to play one on your computer. Retailing on eBay for a mere $2,397.99 OBO (plus Freight for a 350 pound box), this device was made and used for the motion capture of Ugobe’s Pleo Robot. With the right external components (no word on what those are), it would be perfectly possible to get this suit up an going back on Motion Capture as all the onboard electronics are included. This setup would be perfect for anyone planning an animated dinosaur movie that needs some reference movements, or for any mad scientist engineer who needs a control rig for a 40 story robotic dino of death. The possibilities are endless!

[eBay via Engadget]

This electronic scarecrow keeps the birds away and makes your neighbors hate you at the same time. That’s because its way too loud, even if the next house is far away. The conrad.de folks that brought us the climbing bike storage device are at it again, putting together car audio and strings of lights as part of the bird-shoo-ing technology. In the video after the break you’ll see that they’re using a PIR motion sensor to switch power to an automotive amp and head unit. The speakers, strings of lights, and spinning doo-dads are all hidden under a black cape. When an unsuspecting bird tries to feast on the crops, the scarecrow unfolds its arm Dracula-style and raises a ruckus. We don’t expect to see this at a local farm, but maybe for next Halloween?

Read the rest of this entry »

[Peter Skaarup's] been re-living the past by playing old-school games in DOSBox. He’s using a mouse as the controller but longed for the auto-fire button that many joysticks used to have. Instead of looking around for a gamepad with this feature he decided to add an auto-fire button to the mouse. He incorporated a PIC 10F200, along with a momentary push switch and a transistor. The push switch enables the autofire feature, causing the transistor to short the left mouse button about seventeen times a second. Problem solved, and with a couple of other pins on the microcontroller there’s room for this project to grow.

Interested in an auto-fire feature for your gaming console? Perhaps this Xbox 360 rapid fire mod will give you some inspiration.

Professional tape delay units are great fun, but often expensive. You’d think that with so many derelict cassette decks filling the world’s dumpsters someone must have figured out a way to make a cheap tape delay… not only in the interest of saving money (sometimes quality is worth paying for) but also in the interest of re-using otherwise wasted resources.

Forosdeelectronica forum user [Dano] has made just such a device from used cassette decks and miscellaneous parts (translated). First he investigated the operation of the playback, erase, and record mechanisms and broke out the tape heads. The playback head is on a plastic rail so that the delay time can be changed, while the record head is fixed. [Dano] encountered some difficulties in ensuring good quality for the recording and erasure, which is an important consideration when working with magnetic tape.

Read the rest of this entry »