This shiny little box was made from a soda can. You don’t need much to pull this off; an aluminum can, sand paper, scissors, a ballpoint pen, a straight edge, and some time. The embossing is done with the tip of the pen, but there’s a bit of a trick to it. The designs are first pressed into the metal from the underside of the aluminum. It is then flipped over and the outlines are traced, with one last tracing of the shape from the underside once that is completed. We think you’ll agree that this results in an impressive relief of the design.

This would make a nice project for that wedding ring you’ve been carrying around sans-case. Or perhaps this is just what you needed as an enclosure for your next project. You’ll find an instructional video after the break.

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Here’s a guitar wah-wah pedal that [Christian Munk] built. Inside you’ll find a circuit board that he etched and populated based on this design but he chose to build the housing out of LEGO. The video after the break gives you an idea of what it sounds like, but for those who’ve stepped on a LEGO piece with bare feet, his pedal pounding might make you cringe!

To manipulate the sound the pedal rocks forward and backward on a center pivot shown above as a grey “nut” sticking out the side of the frame. Inside there’s a system of LEGO gears that turn a trimpot to alter the sound. This might go along nicely with that guitar amp you hacked together.

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[Tristan Chambers] picked up an old speaker box some friends acquired at a yard sale. It didn’t have any inputs, and there weren’t any tuning knobs like a radio would have, so it’s a mystery what this was originally used for. [Tristan] traced out the circuit and figured out where he could input audio signals which allowed him to hook up an iPod, but it was mono and not very loud. He ended building his own vacuum tube preamp from a schematic he found on the Internet so that he could use it with an electric guitar. As the video after the break shows, the box not only puts out some pretty good sound but it’s nice and loud too.

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[Nulluser's] Zipit was fine, but it couldn’t go anywhere on its own. Adding some motors and a microcontroller fixed that issue, and now he’s got a little robot called the Zipitbot. That’s a dsPIC board on top which communicates with the Zipit over an I2C bus. Four servo motors provide plenty of power to the wheels,with some extra battery packs nestled between them.

Since the Zipit is running Linux, and already has WiFi hardware, it’s not too hard to add Internet control. With this in mind there’s a webcam on the front to broadcast a video feed for use when controlling it remotely. See a couple of videos of this hack after the break.

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We never really thought about it before, but this post about Rapatronic Shutters answers the question of how to photograph an atomic bomb detonation. The post includes an MIT video where [Charles Wyckoff] explains how he and [Harold Edgerton] developed the Rapatronic Camera. It is designed to snap a photograph based on zero time, marked by the X-ray transmission emanating from the bomb before it actually explodes. This pulse is picked up by a light sensor on a delay circuit, allowing for very precise exposure timing. Many of these cameras were used at the same time, all with slightly different delays so that the images could be viewed in order to show what happens during each stage of detonation.

[Thanks Petrus]

[Simon Inns] has put together a lesson in digital logic which shows you how to build your own gates using transistors. The image above is a full-adder that he fabricated, then combined with other full adders to create a 4-bit computer.

Don’t know what a full adder is? That’s exactly what his article is for, and will teach you about binary math and how it is calculated with hardware. There’s probably at least a week’s worth of studying in that one page which has been further distilled into the five-minute video after the break. Although building this hardware yourself is a wonderful way to learn, there’s a lot of room for error. You might consider building these circuits in a simulator program like Atanua, where you can work with logic gate symbols, using virtual buttons and LEDs as the outputs. Once you know what you’re doing with the simulator you’ll have much more confidence to start a physical build like the one [Simon] concocted.

Finding this project a little too advanced? Check out our Beginner Concepts articles to help get you up to speed.

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[Don't stop the clock] is doing some work with a projector, a camera, and the Kinect. What he’s accomplished is quite impressive, combining the three to manipulate light with your body. The image above is a safer rendition of the Hadouken from the Street Fighter video games, throwing light across the room instead of fire. This comes at the end of the video after the break, but first he’ll show off the core features of the system. You can hold up your hand and wave it to turn it into a light source. In other words, the projector will shine light on your hand, moving it, and manipulating the intensity based on hand location in 3D space. Since the Kinect is sending fairly precise data back to the computer the projected image is trimmed to match your hand and arm without overflowing onto the rest of the room until you touch your hand to a surface you want illuminated or throw the light source with a flick or the wrist. It may seem trivial at first glance, but we find the alignment of the projector and the speed at which the image updates to be quite impressive.

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For those out there who would enjoy a quick and interesting weekend project, this odometer made by [PeckLauros] is for you. Featured on Instructables it is made from the simplest of materials including some cardboard, a calculator, wires, glue, hot glue, magnetic drive key, an old CD and a reader, and a rubber band.  The magnets, when attached to the CD work in a calculation to add 0.11m to the calculator when a magnet closes the circuit. [PeckLauros] points out that since it is a homebrewed device, it does have flaws such as adding 0.11m twice when the CD is rotated too slowly.  It is easily fixed by simply running faster.  The video is below the break.

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