Mayor is a hacker and wants to use DIY parking meters

diy-parking-meters

The Mayor of Silverton, Oregon is a hacker and wants to use roll-your-own hardware in the town's parking meters. It's not that he thinks he can do a better job than companies selling modern meters (although there have been notable problems with those), but he wants to retain the sentiment of the 1940's era parking meters that are being replaced. Those meters are known as penny parking meters, … [Read more...]

More EL chemistry: Luminescent ink

making-EL-ink

[Jeri Ellsworth] continues her experiments with electroluminescence, this time she's making EL ink. The ink she's looking for is Zinc Sulfate in a solution. The process she chose is to re-dope some glow powder so that it can be excited by the field around an AC current. In her video (embedded after the break) she talks about the chemical properties she's after by detailing a cubic lattice of … [Read more...]