The latest Inventgeek project is a 12 outlet control box. They decided to demo it using a giant bulb based VU meter. The control box has 12 individual outlets hooked up to two layers of six solid state relays. [Jared] notes that SSRs can be very expensive, but he purchased his on eBay for ~$10 each. Wiring and installation on this project is incredibly clean and they plan on using the control box for future how-tos. The simple audio circuit used for the VU is based on the LM3915. You’ll find full plans on the site or you can watch the overview video embedded below.

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[Jared Bouck] is on a roll this week. We just covered his Diamond thermal paste and now he’s got more for us. To celebrate the re design of his website, he has released the plans for the paintball turret. As you may recall, we absolutely loved this design when he originally showed it to us. Though he has had kits available for a while, he has finally put the plans up for download. You can cut your own parts and build it yourself. He mentions that version 2 is coming shortly, we wait with bated breath.

[Jared] has updated his paintball gun turret page with more detailed assembly videos. You can read more about the project in our original post.

[Jared Bouck] has been sending in his projects for a couple years now. We’ve enjoyed his heavy-duty DDR pads, LCD backlight repair, and ion cooling projects. His latest, an RC paintball gun turret, is our favorite though. He actually rates this as one of the easier projects he’s published; it just took a while to assemble. Several design decisions were made to keep the project simple. Two 32 Degrees Icon-E paintball guns were used. The guns already have electric solenoids for firing, so a special trigger mechanism didn’t have to be fashioned. Q-loaders were used to prevent any ball feed problems. The motors, driver boards, and RC components are all borrowed from combat robots for reliability. He’s hoping to produce a small number of kits based on this design.

Related: We’ve got quite a few sentry gun projects in the archive.

[Jared] sent along his latest on inventgeek. The most interesting piece of the project has to be the stainless steel/teflon pressure switch. Otherwise, it’s probably every DDR fan’s wet dream. Oh, and congratulations on geek 2.0 [Jared]!

[Jared] over at inventgeek.com remembers to think of us whenever he finishes up one of his projects. His latest is an USB Airsoft gun turret based on one of those USB nerf dart turrets. Hrm, this could make a decent base for a defconbots entry. It sounds like he’ll be building an even deadlier expensive version later on.

Don’t forget, December 25th is the deadline for your Design Challenge entries!