Use a Nokia N82 TFT Panel with Your Arduino

tft-with-arduino

[Andy] has been hard at work reverse-engineering the Nokia N82 2.4 inch cell phone display for use with an Arduino. As pointed out in the article, this same 2.4 inch display can be found in at least seven other Nokia products, so they are readily available. The panels can be found for as low as 3 pounds (or a little less than 5 dollars) on Ebay. The results are quite good and can be seen in the … [Read more...]

Lite Brites fade, but LED clocks are forever

litebrite-clock

Ahh, the Lite Brite. What could be more fun than pushing dozens of little plastic pegs through a piece of black paper in order to create a pixelated, though colorful image? Well, I can think of quite a few things more engaging than that, and luckily so can [Lonnie Honeycutt] over at MeanPC. While contemplating what to build with a pile of LEDs, his daughter came into the room with her … [Read more...]

Making sure a baby is still breathing with lasers and a wiimote

baby

[Gjoci] just became a father, and to make up for not having to carry a baby to term he decided to make himself useful in another way. He developed a sensor to detect a baby's breathing, allaying the fears of nervous parents who are wondering why their child is so quiet. Unlike similar builds and products that rely on microphones or capacitive sensors, [Gjoci]'s build uses the camera from a … [Read more...]

Eradicating invasive species with quadcopters

wattle

That right there is Sydney Golden Wattle, a fast-growing invasive species native to Eastern Australia that has the possibility of covering 20 percent of the bushland in Western Australia by the year 2020. [John Moore], a researcher at the Department of Food and Agriculture, wants to put an end to this infestation by destroying large swaths of wattle with a quadcopter armed with weed … [Read more...]

Toorcamp: The Tesla Gun

Tesla Gun

We discussed [Rob]'s Tesla Gun in the past. At that time, the build looked very impressive, but had not been fired yet. Fortunately, [Rob] got the device working and brought it to Toorcamp. He took the gun out every night and demoed the handheld Tesla Coil by having volunteers catch the streamers with a knife. The gun uses a cordless drill battery for power, and a flyback transformer to … [Read more...]