Year: 2009

Pictures From Space For $150

September 13, 2009 by 47 Comments

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Ever wanted to be able to launch a balloon into space, track its location via GPS, take some photographs of the curvature of the earth, and recover the balloon, all for the low low cost of $150? [Oliver Yeh] sent in his teams project, Icarus, which does just that. The group of MIT students found that they could use a weather balloon filled with helium to reach heights of around 20 miles above the earth;  their particular balloon achieved 93,000 feet (17.5 miles). Then, utilizing only off the shelf components with no soldering, conjured up a GPS tracker using a Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone. They then used a Canon A470 loaded with the chdk open source firmware to take pictures. After seeing the results of their launch, the team hopes that this could rejuvenate interests in science and the arts.

Beer Brewer’s Temperature Controller

September 13, 2009 by 12 Comments

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Steady fermentation temperatures, usually at about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, are an important part of brewing beer. Because of this, the wort (unfermented beer) is often temperature controlled during fermentation. [android] needed a temperature controller for fermenting beer in a chest freezer. Much like the energy efficient fridge hack from last month, the chest freezer is switched on and off to achieve the desired temperature. Instead of buying a controller, [android] built around an existing design. His project uses a solid state relay to switch an outlet on and off.

The temperature is controlled by a home thermostat. He removed the thermistor from the unit and extended it with 24 gauge wire so that it can go inside of the chest freezer. Utilizing a junction box, the freezer is plugged into one switched outlet and controlled by the thermostat via the relay. The other outlet is unswitched and provides DC power for the relay using a wall wort transformer. Although this thermostat cannot be set cold enough for lagering, it is perfect for keeping kegs at the correct beer serving temperatures when not being used for fermentation.

How To Build A Life-sized Electronic Game

September 12, 2009 by 9 Comments

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We’re very impressed with [Steve’s] Electronic Snowball Fight game. It consists of two life-sized players standing opposite of each other. Each can throw a snowball or duck, the object is to hit the other person and not get hit yourself. He’s utilized a lot of good building techniques that could be easily adapted to other types of game play. Continue reading “How To Build A Life-sized Electronic Game” →

Tube Amplifier In A PSU

September 12, 2009 by 17 Comments

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[Niclas] sent us his home made tube amplifier. For the case he used a computer power supply unit, took out the guts and replaced them with the amplifier board. He based this build off of an existing design but took a more minimalist approach. The wooden face plate has an on/off switch, an audio jack, and volume control. Apparently, the tubes are floating loose inside of the case. We’d recommend a more secure mounting method for these delicate parts.

Dot Matrix Clock On The Way

September 12, 2009 by 25 Comments

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[Kevin] sent in his almost finished open source dot matrix clock. Sporting a hefty 40 x 16 display powered by a PIC 18F he has complete pixel by pixel control of the graphics. Combined with with a triple buffer he is at least able to output 15fps, with planned 30fps. While this has great potential for a clock, what about going further? Twitter updates, chat messages, weather updates, the current airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow; it will be tough to beat the competition without some more features. Either way, its an awesome project and we can’t wait to see it completed.

Controlling An R/C Car With A Pic16F84

September 12, 2009 by 27 Comments

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[GuySoft] sent in this project. He doesn’t normally mess with electronics, but decided to give it a try. He chose a fairly complicated project to be his first, but seems extremely comfortable with it. This project was to control his R/C car with a pic16f84. That chip was chosen simply because it was the only one available at local stores. Though we’ve seen much more complicated projects in the past, he does a great job of showing exactly what has been done. He shares his thoughts and source code with us as well. He has express a little frustration about the closed source compiler he was using, so if anyone has any suggestions for him, he would probably appreciate it.  The funny part is that he mentions that people would just tell him to “get an AVR”. We think the readers here will probably be happy with how he pulled it off.

Homing Pigeon Email

September 12, 2009 by 49 Comments

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Yes, you read that correctly: electronic mail carried by birds. [Ferdinand] tipped us off to this story, which involves combining new and old methods in transferring data. The Unlimited Group, a firm in a remote section of South Africa, transfers loads of encrypted documents to a second office 50 miles away. A pricey broadband connection would take between 6 hours and two days to transfer a standard load (4GB) of data between these locations. On the other hand, Winston (seen above) can complete an equivalent flight within 45 minutes. A memory card is strapped to his leg, and using his wit and instinct, Winston finds his way home. For those without their calculators on hand, Winston’s bandwidth is between 7x and 63x faster than what they had before. If his flash card were to be upgraded to 16GB, that would be an instant fourfold increase on top of current gains. As [Mark] pointed out on the Daily Mail website, homing pigeons still need to be taken back to their departure point.

This solution still has its advantages over a courier: they are lower in cost, they work over longer hours, and have potentially faster delivery speeds. Multiple pigeons can be transported back at once, and released with data as needed.