Freedombot explores your fridge

Freedombot is a neat little robot designed for exploring magnetic surfaces. It has two whiskers for detecting objects in its path and two rare earth magnets which allow it to stick to your fridge.

Overall Freedombot may not be anything revolutionary but its builder [skater_j10] does a good job of covering topics which my be interesting to robotics beginners. For … Read the rest

Reverse engineering the PSP

The original PSP may be old news but there is an interesting relic of a website (translated) dedicated to the reverse engineering of a PSP (and exploring Saturn?). To determine the true capabilities of the PSP they desoldered most of the ball grid array chips and then hand soldered 157 jumper wires to allow for direct memory access. … Read the rest

Nintendo 3DS Teardown

The Nintendo 3DS has been out for a couple days now (in japan) and the folks over at [tech on] were nice enough to do a teardown. Besides all the regular teardown goodies you can also get a good look at the 3DS’ 3D screen with a microscope. Turns out its a parallax barrier display which means that there … Read the rest

DIY lightning special effects

Halloween may have come and gone but thats no reason not to take a look at this neat little special effects setup.  Basically it uses an analogue circuit to monitor an audio signal and triggers some camera flashes using 5V relays.  The idea is that you can play lightning strikes and other spooky sounds, and the system will trigger camera … Read the rest

The interstellar clock

[Alexander Avtanski] has put together a nice clock to meet all your interstellar travel needs. Besides being another PIC based timer, this is a neat little project because it incorporates pretty much every feature you could think of when building a clock for our solar sytem.  For example, it has 16 independent timers and alarms, it can  simultaneously give … Read the rest

Fingertip heart rate monitor

[Embedded lab] has a nice tutorial on building your own heart rate monitor. The monitor works by shining infrared light into the fingertip and looking at the changes in the reflected infrared signal caused by a heartbeat.  The IR detector produces a very small AC signal so a couple of op-amps are used to filter and amplify the signal. … Read the rest

Imploding Vacuum tubes for science

The researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory are looking for a way to harden photomultiplier tubes. In order to make a more durable tube the researchers decided it would be a good idea to first observe how the tubes are failing. So they got their hands on an old torpedo test bay and smashed some bulbs inside of it. Check … Read the rest