Cheap and cheerful Arduino breadboard basics

For those less experienced folks looking to move their Arduino projects to more permanent installations, this is just for you! [Martyn] Posted a three part series, VeroBoardUino, over at his blog about moving your Arduino project to a soldered breadboard.

Part one kicks off with the appropriate breadboard requirements, modifications, and a simple 7805 power supply. In the guide [Martyn]  … Read the rest

Archaeopteryx: a large, colorful MIDI controller

This is [Robert Jarvis'] new MIDI controller which he has christened the Archaeopteryx. It makes its home (quite nicely might we add) in a discarded wooden cutlery case. This provides a strong and stable base for the controls while keeping the electrical connections close at hand for any rewiring or repair work.

The interface is made up of several … Read the rest

Kickstarter Roundup: Wednesday, June 1st

We have been getting tons of emails lately recommending we take a look at various Kickstarter projects. We used to ignore them since they all boil down to a request for project funding, but since there are so many cool projects out there, we figured we might as well share a couple. Some of these projects have already met their … Read the rest

Sinister Tone Generator brings the bass

sinster_tone_generator

[RichDecibels] wrote in to share a new device he built called the “Sinster Tone Generator”. It’s basically a bass drone synthesizer that uses two pairs of heterodyning oscillators to generate the output. If you swing by his site, he has a long audio demo of the device in action with a bit of reverb and filtering applied to … Read the rest

GPU password cracking made easy

The power that a Graphics Processing Unit presents can be harnessed to do some dirty work when trying to crack passwords. [Vijay] took a look at some of the options out there for cracking passwords and found that utilizing the GPU produces the correct password in a fraction of the time. On a Windows machine he pitted the Cain Read the rest

[Jeri's] dress lights up when someone invades her personal space — step back nerds!

[Jeri] threw down the geeky fashion gauntlet by building this LED enhanced dress. She chose to assemble the project for her trip to BarBot 2011, and we can’t think of a more appropriate setting for such a garment. It uses a motion sensor to set off a delayed pattern of blue lights hidden underneath the fabric.The best part of … Read the rest

Buying, selling, and bartering hacking hardware

Regular reader [Grenadier] wrote in to let us know about his newly published hacking hardware trading post called The Junkbox. Apparently when he’s not blowing up capacitors or building his own high voltage ones, he makes time to code up a website where you can buy, sell, and barter leftover components.

We have something like this right here at … Read the rest