BGA soldering with a paint stripper and stopwatch

Having just received a shiny set of PCBs from the fab-house [Devbisme] needed a way to solder the main chip in place. It has a Ball-Grid Array footprint which is notoriously difficult to populate in a home lab. But he makes it look pretty easy and decided to share a video tutorial of the process.

The main tool he … Read the rest

A desktop binary clock

This is the desktop binary clock which [Tim the Floating Wombat] recently finished building. He calls it the Obfuscating Chronoscope since it’s a bit more difficult to read than your traditional analog or digital timepieces. But the simple design looks neat and it’s a great way to learn about board layout and microcontroller code.

He started by solving a few … Read the rest

Reverse engineering a Syma 107 toy helicopter IR protocol

Half the fun of buying toys for your kids is getting your hands on them when they no longer play with them. [Kerry Wong] seems to be in this boat. He bought a Syma S107G helicopter for his son. The flying toy is IR controlled and he reverse engineered the protocol it uses. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen … Read the rest

Making images and videos using a diy fluoroscopic x-ray

[Jozef] has been playing around with X-rays. Specifically, he’s been using his own setup to make fluoroscopic images, a type of x-ray photography that allows for video images to be made. If you’ve ever seen those x-ray movies of someone swallowing, that’s fluoroscopy (we’re fans of the other oddities like this video of a skeleton playing the trumpet).… Read the rest

Build your own forge inside a gallon paint can

If you’d like to try your hand with the art of Blacksmithing but don’t want to go all-in on your first project this may be for you. It’s a forge which you can build for under $100. [Mike O's] creation has some great features, like the option of using the forge as a pass through, and he finds it’s … Read the rest

Control your house by moving your arms like you’re directing traffic

This home automation project lets you flap your arms to turn things on and off. [Toon] and [Jiang] have been working on the concept as part of their Master’s thesis at University. It uses a 3D camera with some custom software to pick up your gestures. What we really like is the laser pointer which provides feedback. You can … Read the rest

The shockerDrone; a shocking mod for the AR Drone

You’ve all seen taser like devices built from disposable cameras. We have seen them mounted to rubber gloves, finger tips, even potato gun ammo! We had not yet seen them on a quadcopter. This was quickly remedied once we had one to play with. Meet the shockerDrone, a Parrot AR Drone with built in shocker attachment.… Read the rest