Turning music into a light show

[nickinoki] Made a light show using some amplifiers and an arduino. First he created a microphone circuit based around a LM386 Audio Amplifier. After amplifying the output of the microphone a second time, he uses three bandpass filters to block all but a few desired frequencies from reaching the arduino.  By only letting a few frequencies through the arduino is … Read the rest

Reverse Engineering a PCB

Occasionally when a device breaks, the defect is obvious. Whether it is a blown fuse or a defective capacitor, generally the easy to see stuff is easy to fix. When a problem is more subtle, or when doing some more advanced tasks like adding functionality to a device, greater knowledge about a circuit board is required. While there might be … Read the rest

High Voltage Etch a Sketch

What do you get when you mix a simple X/Y plotter, a Flyback transformer, and an unhealthy disregard for safety? Possibly the worlds most dangerous jumbo Etch a Sketch! [Kalboon] started off by making an imprecise X/Y movement device, similar to a CNC machine setup, but with less emphasis on precision. This rig is powered by some commonly salvagable … Read the rest

No more blurry pictures

Say goodbye to ruined images thanks to this add-on hardware. It measures the movement of the camera when a picture is taken and corrects the image to get rid of motion blur. Above you see a high-speed camera which is just there for testing and fine-tuning the algorithm that fixes the photos. Once they got it right, the setup … Read the rest