Rolling your own minimal USB to serial Arduino programmer

usb-to-serial-programmer

[Hans Peter] wanted to move away from using full Arduino boards in his projects. One of the components he rarely used after the development stage is the USB hardware. Once the firmware is flashed to the chip he didn’t need it any longer. So he tried his hand with some really small SMD parts by building this USB to serial Read the rest

An EQ display for a pedal board

EQ

There are a lot of tinkerers out there who got their start in electronics with musical hacks. Surprisingly though, we don’t see many submissions to our tip line covering boost circuits for electric basses, rewiring guitar electronics, or even more complex effect pedals. [Deadbird], though, is bucking that trend with an EQ display stomp box that fits neatly on his … Read the rest

Hammond Organ sends messages which can be decoded by a Spectrogram

hammond-organ-encodes-messages-spectrogram

Here’s an interesting use for an old organ. Let it get in on your Ham radio action. [Forrest Cook]  is showing off his project which uses a Hammond Organ to encode messages which can be displayed by a Spectrogram. We’ve seen this type of message encoding before (just not involving a musical instrument). It’s rather popular with Hams in … Read the rest

Atomic skull clock reminds us we’re dying

atomic-skull-clock

Whether you like it or not, every second that passes brings you one step closer to your own demise. It’s not a comforting topic to dwell upon, but it’s reality. This art installation entitled ‘Memento Mori’ is a haunting reminder of just that. Even with all the advanced technology we have today, we still have absolutely no way of … Read the rest

Adding fireplace control to your home automation

fireplace-automation

[James] has an admirable home automation system which he’s been working on for years. It does things like monitor the state of the garage door, control the lights, and it even notifies him of a power failure. One thing that wasn’t on the system yet are the fireplaces he has in his home. The hardware you see above is how Read the rest

Enabling an unused touchscreen overlay on a consumer LCD

uncovering-an-unused-touchscreen-on-a-consumer-lcd

When [Andrei] first got his Raspberry Pi he wanted to make it a standalone computer right away. This means the normal input devices like a mouse and keyboard, but also some type of display. To avoid waiting for shipping he ended up using a cheap vehicle backup camera screen from the local big box store. It worked great, and recently … Read the rest

Deploying an open source pollution monitoring network

pollution-monitoring-network

[Kasey] and [Guyzmo] have been working for the past couple of years on a side project that lets them monitor pollution using a network of sensors. They’ve just decided to make the project open source, both hardware and software. The details of the system are available at their GitHub repository.

There are two main components to the system. On … Read the rest