I probably shouldn’t find this as worthy as I do. It’s the optical recognition equivalent of wiring up a LED to a switch,, but it just appeals to me. [Ashish], one of our favorite optical recognition hackers of late, sent along this product of his boredom. If only he’d give us some source and a wiring diagram…
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[Alberto] sent this along. [Jose Pino] put up a nice how-to on modifying a cheap quartz clock to be used as a 1Hz (1 second) pulse generator. I can think of a number of past projects where this would have been really friggin’ handy.
[Peter] sent in his latest Tesla coil experiment. He calls it the “Eye of Sauron” effect. It was created by adding a rotating breakout to an already powerful Tesla coil. It isn’t quite the same as the old evil eye of Tolkien’s dreams, the picture is a 22 second exposure of two rotations of the 7 foot aluminum tube.
Our own Hack-A-Day emeritus took some time out from his showgirl pursuits to pass this along. The ECG was built to pad a resume, but it doesn’t make it less useful. Be warned, too much power could stop your heart. If you build one, triple check everything before wiring yourself up. Basically, an electrical differential is generated by the contraction of muscles in the heart. This slight signal is amplified by an op-amp and sampled with an A/D converter.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any new antenna hacks. On the lumenlab forums, [pitman2] started with a measurements from a commercial antenna and drew up a set of plans for making a decent antenna for OTA HDTV signals. Pictured is an antenna built by [squeeto] – it’s made from copper wire, synthetic building wood and cheap cooling racks. Thanks to [Protcron] for the tip.
