Custom circuit drives a small round CRT display

[Svofski's] latest hack seeks to do no more than look cool on his desk. We’d say mission accomplished. He doesn’t even need anyone around to be proud of the small round CRT display unit he put together. Just having it hum away next to him will be more than enough to keep him going when regular work gets a … Read the rest

Two-player Tic-Tac-Toe from logic chips

Here’s another entry in the 7400 Logic contest. [Circuitchef] used gates and a few flip-flops to build a two-player electronic Tic-Tac-Toe game. The full details or shared in the PDF file he links to in his post. We’ve also linked to it after the break in case the Dropbox he is using becomes unavailable.

He provides a nice block … Read the rest

Building your own Fusion Drive

We missed the original announcement, but Apple unveiled more than just the iPad Mini at their last event. They’ve got a new storage system called Fusion Drive which is supposed to combine the access speeds of solid state with the storage density of platter drives. When you look just under the surface what you’re really seeing is a disc drive … Read the rest

Collection of Nixie bar graphs bump to the beat

This VU meter uses Nixie tubes as the display. There are a total of fourteen IN-13 bar graph tubes that map out the audio spectrum. The build uses purely hardware for the display; no microcontroller processing, or dedicated VU-meter chips were used.

Input begins with a dual Op-Amp along with a pair of potentiometers which allow the left and … Read the rest

[Lou's] haircut really sucks

Ah yes, at some point a brilliant inventor combined the electric trimmer with a vacuum cleaner and the art of cutting hair was never the same again. [Lou] is showing us how to give a haircut that really sucks up the waste. And he did it using rubbish he had lying around.

Most people will recognize this as a … Read the rest

Beginner project: Color Sensing with RGB LEDs and a photocell

I’ve seen the concept art for “real world eyedroppers” several times. I haven’t noticed any of the products come to market though. It isn’t the technology stoping them, color sampling can be done a million ways. I picked one of the easiest ways and tossed something together pretty quickly.… Read the rest

LED fun and Light Painting with the pyMCU

pymcu-led-pov-writing

Recently [Richard] at [pyMCU] was nice enough to send me one of their units to try out. As featured here before, this little board allows you to control physical things using your computer and the Python programming language. After evaluating it and making a LED blink, there were a couple other LED projects I wanted to try.

The … Read the rest