Drinking games and digital logic

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For those of you who might have forgotten, let's go over the rules of Centurion. The object of the game is for every minute, for 100 minutes, drink a shot of beer. It doesn't sound like a lot, but after completing the challenge you'll have had 3 liters of beer (or about eight and a half 12 oz cans) in just under two hours. When [Peter] played Centurion, he found the biggest problem was - … [Read more...]

Clock display taller than you is just what your living room has been missing

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Sure, it's time to get the countdown clocks ready to ring in the new year, but why limit it to just one night? If you end up building a six-foot digital display you can count down trivial events; like the remaining seconds of freedom before you have to pimp yourself out in that drab cubicle. This seven-segment display is homemade and boasts six full-sized digits and two smaller digits with each … [Read more...]

CMOS logic clock tracks 24-hour time

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Here's an IC logic project that displays 24-hour time. Planning was the name of the game for this project. [Mattosx] took the time to layout his design as a PCB in order to avoid the wiring nightmare when build with point-to-point connections. Much of the complexity is caused by the display itself. Each of the six digits has its own binary-coded decimal chip and array of discrete resistors. … [Read more...]

Puncher tracks your freelancing hours, time spent in TSA patdowns

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[Raphael Abrams] does a lot of freelance work, but he has trouble accurately keeping track of the hours he has put in for his clients. After trying various applications and methods of logging his time, he finally decided to build a device that worked just the way he liked. He calls his device the “Freelance Puncher”, though it already has been nicknamed the detonator, as it looks like … [Read more...]

A simple, self-contained 7-segment display

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It’s no secret that seven-segment displays are an easy and useful way to relay data, so [Kelvyn Panici] decided to put together a minimalst, self-contained display for use around the house. The display itself is a 16-digit model he picked up from DealExtreme for under $10. He wanted to find a microcontroller small enough to fit behind the display’s footprint, so he chose an ATtiny85 to … [Read more...]

Going RGB with 7 segment displays

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We can order seven segment displays in red, green, yellow, or blue all day long. One thing we haven't seen is an RGB segmented display, so [Markus]' project is really interesting. He took a stock seven segment display and modded it into an RGB display. After taking a Dremel to the back of the stock display, [Markus] was left with a seven segment light mask. A few SMD LEDs were purchased through … [Read more...]

Keeping tabs on your pets’ busy lives

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[Stephen’s] daughter has a pair of mice she keeps as pets, who happen to be quite active at night. After they kept her awake for an entire evening by running like mad in their treadmill, they were moved from her bedroom. Since they were so active in the treadmill, [Stephen] thought it would be cool to try measuring how much the mice actually ran each night. To keep track of their activity, he … [Read more...]