Cheap as chips Arduino Ethernet shield

It’s no secret that Ethernet shields for the Arduino are a little expensive. With the official Ethernet shield selling for about $50 and other options not much cheaper, there’s a lot of room for improvement for Arduinofied Ethernet. [Boris] over at Open Electronics has a solution to this problem: his Ethercard powered by a $3 Ethernet controller.

The Ethercard uses … Read the rest

Laser-charged glow in the dark message board

This entry in the Red Bull Creation contest uses a laser to charge up a glow-in-the-dark message board. The concept is something we’ve seen several times before. Since light can excite a phosphorescent surface, moving pixels of light over that surface leaves a fading trail. Most recently we saw a spinning ring message board. This contest entry is … Read the rest

A look inside what makes cruise control work

[Todd Harrison] took a look inside the business end of the cruise control system from his 1994 Jeep Grand Cherokee. We were a bit surprised at how the system operates. The parts seen in the image above make up the throttle control, using a trio of solenoids to vary the level of vacuum inside the device.

We categorized this … Read the rest

Raspi contest to get the kids programming

The Raspberry Pi was originally conceived as an educational platform. Much like the BBC Micros and Apple ][s of yore, the Raspi is designed to get kids into programming by giving them a very tiny but still useful computer. Truth be told, we haven’t seen any educational hacks involving the Raspberry Pi, most likely because makers and tinkerers like us … Read the rest

Bricking a Seagate drive while trying to make it work in an Xbox 360

If you’re looking to replace the hard drive in your Xbox 360 without just buying an official unit, you may be out of luck. There is a tool which will let you do it if you are using aWestern Digital drive as the replacement. But if your new drive is a Seagate this tool will not work. [Darth Circuit] set Read the rest

Exercise bike actuates your download speeds; messes with music playback

We’re not featuring this project because it involves the tiniest exercise bike in the world. It’s on the front page because the speed-control features which this dynamic duo added are hilarious. They call it the Webcycle and it’s actually two hacks in one.

Way back in 2009 [Matt Gray] and [Tom Scott] slapped an Arduino on the bike and … Read the rest

RA 3D printer controller board does everything, has disco lights

3D printers are getting far, far more complicated than a 4-axis, plastic-squirting CNC machine. These days, you really haven’t earned your geek cred unless you’ve hacked an LCD and SD card interface into your 3D printer, or at least experimented with multiple extruders. There’s a problem with the controller boards everyone is using, though: most boards simply don’t have enough … Read the rest