Decades old TV gets sleep function thanks to 7400 family of chips

[Viktor] dredged up a hack he pulled off years ago. His grandfather likes to end the day in front of the TV, but he falls asleep soon after sitting down. Rather than tick away the electricity meter all night, [Viktor] built an automatic shutoff which is akin to a modern TV’s sleep feature.

At the time microcontrollers were not … Read the rest

A desktop binary clock

This is the desktop binary clock which [Tim the Floating Wombat] recently finished building. He calls it the Obfuscating Chronoscope since it’s a bit more difficult to read than your traditional analog or digital timepieces. But the simple design looks neat and it’s a great way to learn about board layout and microcontroller code.

He started by solving a few … Read the rest

Lucid dreaming mask marries economy with comfort

Here’s an effort to make a cheap lucid dreaming mask that is also comfortable. The idea is in response to the goggles we saw in April (which would not be too comfortable to sleep in) and the wildly successful Remee (which has an $80 target price).

The mask itself is sewn from a child’s fleece blanket. Inside is a … Read the rest

Motion activated monitor wakeup

This hardware is used to keep a computer monitor awake when there is motion in the room. The monitor displays important information for firefighter in the vehicle bay, but only needs to be on when they are getting ready to go out on a call. The solution is a simple one, a PIR sensor combines with a mouse for motion Read the rest

Grinding down your computer to just 8.5 watts

What can you do to make sure your system is running as efficiently as possible? Take a page out of [Mux's] book, who went to great lengths to measure and adjust his system for ultimate efficiency (translated). What he ended up with is 8.5 Watts of consumption at idle and about 50 Watts under load. Luckily he posted … Read the rest

PC monitor sleep mode using iPhone

[Mike Silverman] rigged up a way to make his monitor sleep from an iPhone. Working with a Windows system, he installed QuickPHP and NirCmd to add PHP and command line controls. Some quick PHP code writing and this has the effect of creating a sleep button toggled via a network address. He loads up the IP and port information … Read the rest

The Happillow project

[Harandi] wrote to us to let us know about a project he’s working on to improve our nightly rest. This is the Happillow. The Happillow is an alarm clock, as well as a snore relief system. We’re not sure that the snoring bothers us so much, but we’re sure our significant others appreciate that part. While pillows exist that … Read the rest