Cheap biquad antenna extends LAN between apartments

[Danilo Larizza] is sharing a network connection between a couple of apartments. They are not far apart, but they are also not right next to each other so a set of external antennas is necessary. He built this 2.4 GHz biquad antenna on the cheap (translated) just to test if it improved the signal before he tried to … Read the rest

Wireless speaker made using Arduinos and 2.4 GHz tranceivers

[Texane] picked up a 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver pair for transmitting sensor data wirelessly. After using them in a project he wanted to try pushing them a bit to see what the limits are when it comes to higher bandwidths. He ended up building a wireless speaker that transmits audio at about 90 KB/s. That link leads to a subfolder … Read the rest

EVE radio breakout board for the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is an excellent tool to build the ‘Internet of things’ we’ve been hearing about, but there’s still the issue of connecting the Raspi to other devices. The EVE Alpha – a breakout board for several wireless radio modules for the Raspberry Pi – hopes to change that with their Kickstarter campaign.

The idea behind the EVE is … Read the rest

Emulating a student clicker with an Arduino

When schools and universities have hundreds of students in a lecture course, they need a way to tell alumni and other potential benefactors that faculty/student relations are just as good as they were in the 1960s, when enrollment was just a fraction of current levels. Technology solves all problems, apparently, so administrators of these universities turn to ‘clickers’ – radio … Read the rest

Roomba and virtual walls make up this theme family Halloween costume

It figures. You spend a ton of time making a cool set of costumes and then you can’t get your kid to pose for a picture. It’s okay though, we still get the point. This themed set of costumes dresses the little one as a Roomba vacuuming robot while mom and dad are suited up as virtual walls (modules that … Read the rest

Directing an alarm system straight to the Internet

[Scott] has a pretty nice alarm system at his house – it will give the operator at his alarm company enough information to determine if it’s a fire alarm, burglary, or just a cat walking in front of a sensor. [Scott] wanted to cut out the middle man and receive notifications from his alarm system on his phone. He did Read the rest

Building a tilt rotor UAV

We see a lot of quadcopters, and even the occasional octocopter around here. But this build does it with just two propellers. It’s a tiltrotor build which allows the two upward-pointing propellers to tilt forward and backward. The real world equivalent of this UAV design that pops to mind is the V-22 Osprey.

The motors are mounted on a … Read the rest