BlinkM gets upgraded to a USB mass-market device

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[TodBot] has a new piece of hardware on the way up. His Blink(1) is currently about 50% funded on Kickstarter. It's a USB nub that has an RGB LED inside of it. When plugged into a computer it can be used as a status indicator. At first that sounds like a let down, but his marketing is fantastic as the myriad of uses really caught our attention. If you're on the road you can use it to report back … [Read more...]

Gear indicator for Suzuki motorcycle

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This little board serves as a current gear indicator for a motorcycle. It was designed with the Suzuki V-Storm motorcycles in mind as they have a sensor built into the gearbox. Other gear indicators rely on sensors on the shifters themselves, but reading the voltage level from a gearbox sensor gives much more reliable information. The voltage measurement is handled by an ATmega88 … [Read more...]

The Spindicator

oooh shiny

[Harvey] wrote in to share the Spindicator with us. The spindicator is a hard drive activity activity indicator built in a ring to resemble a dekatron. Using the pulses from the hard drive activity LED, [Harvey] tested several different methods of interpreting that data for display. The final version, negative edge triggered with a lowpass filter can be seen after the break.  It is nice and … [Read more...]

Motorcycle current gear indicator

motorcycle-gear-status

[Vassilis Papanikolaou] just finished building a gear indicator for a motorcycle. This quite a simple implementation compared to some of the other vehicle information displays we've taken a look at. You should be able to build and install your own without breaking the bank. An ATtiny25 microcontroller reads data from a couple of hall effect sensors and the neutral switch, then displays the … [Read more...]

Open garage door indicator

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How many times has this one happened to you? Just coming home from work, you walk in from the garage, settle down, and pick up the newspaper. But wait, did you remember to shut the garage door? Presenting the open garage door indicator. [xjc2010] chose the simplest circuit possible, using only a switch to turn on and off the setup, an LED acting as the signal, and a transformer/resistor combo … [Read more...]

LED battery level indicator

[Kc7fys] came up with a this simple battery level indicator. It uses a single LED to display a battery's voltage; if the voltage exceeds 12V, it glows green. If it is below 11V, the LED glows red. Anything in between generates an orange glow. The meter is built around an LM358 chip per this schematic, but his actual build looks pretty sloppy because of the dead-bug assembly (check out NASA's … [Read more...]