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[Mahesh Venkitachalam] wanted to light up the dark recesses of his desk. What good is all that storage if you can't see a darn thing in there? His solution was to add LED strips which turn on automatically when the door is opened. The design is quite simple. A 2N2222 NPN transistor is responsible for connecting the ground rail of the LED strips mounted under each shelf. The base of that … [Read more...]
[Steven Mackaay] added a simple user interface that implements a shutoff timer for his desk lamp. His project log comes in two parts, the breadboarding and the actual implementation. He wanted a few things out of the build. The first is an LED that would help him find the lamp in the dark. The second feature is a shutoff timer with different delay options. To get everything working he used a … [Read more...]
This is a great hack, and it's an advertisement. We wish this were the norm when it comes to advertising because they've really got our number. Skittles enlisted a few engineers to build a web interface that moves robot-powered candies. When we started looking into this we figured that a few robots were covered with over-sized cases that looked like Skittles. But that's not it at all. What you … [Read more...]
A group of researchers have figured out how to produce graphene using a DVD drive. This discovery helps clear the path for mass production of the substance, which was discovered in the late 1980's. More recently, the 2010 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to a team that produced two-dimensional graphene; a substance one just atom thick. One method of doing so used Scotch tape and is mentioned in … [Read more...]
[Paul Mandel] just finished building this knock box project. It's a familiar concept that uses a solenoid to tap on the side of the box. The Arduino driven setup monitors vibrations on the lid. When you knock on the box, it records the pattern and plays it back using the solenoid. He was inspired by a knock-detecting door lock. Using that code as the starting point he implemented a system that … [Read more...]
Over on the Parts People blog, [Nathan] created his own Raspberry Pi laptop. It's got all the bells and whistles, including a keyboard, trackpad, battery, and even a 3D printed case. Of course [Nathan]'s laptop contains a Raspi, but the other included parts are where this palmtop computer is turned into something useful. For powering the Pi and 3.5" composite LCD, [Nathan] took apart the … [Read more...]
As the year draws to a close, we must look back and look at the advances in amateur radio this year. The RTL-SDR tuner hack, a USB TV Tuner to create a software defined radio receiver, is one of the greatest hacks of the last 12 months and a great justification for 2012 being the year of software defined radio receivers. 2013 is shaping up to have even more advances in the state of software … [Read more...]
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