Disposable Camera Nixie Tube Driver

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Disposable cameras are quite cheap, and include circuitry that produces very high voltages. Because of this, they have been harvested for many projects. We’ve seen them used for coil guns and large high voltage power supplies, even for fixing rechargeable batteries that won’t charge. The latest in the long list of uses is to create nixie tube drivers. [the_don125] shows us how to use a single disposable camera to power 2 to 3 medium sized Nixie tubes. Be careful, as we said before, this project deals with high voltage.

Baby Twitters Via Kicks

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[Corey Menscher] built the Kickbee while attending ITP this Fall. It monitors his pregnant wife’s belly and updates Twitter, a microblogging service, every time the baby kicks. The device makes everyone aware of the baby’s movement, not just the expectant mother. It can also log the baby’s activity to monitor development. The sensors are piezos held in place with an elastic band. They’re connected to an Arduino Mini which connects to a host computer using a BlueSMIRF bluetooth module. The host Mac does the logging and twittering.

This is one of the many projects on display at the ITP Winter Show.

[Thanks, @readiness via Boing Boing]