Author: Eliot

1332 Articles

Make Your Own Liquid Magnets

April 13, 2006 by 26 Comments

ferrofluid

Here is a nice followup to yesterday’s video: How to make your own ferrofluid. This guide comes from Dr. Anne Marie Helmenstine at About.com The fine folks at Sci-spot seem to have the original with pictures. The composition of ferrofluid by volume is about 5% magnetic solids, 10% surfactant, and 85% carrier. The surfactant is what keeps the particles from sticking together permanently. Ferrofluids are often used for damping speakers and in disk drives. This procedure doesn’t seem to complex and one of the main components is ferric chloride, a.k.a. PCB etchant. Thanks go to [Jason Uher] who sent in this tip and says that it has worked out quite well for him in the past.

[photo credit]

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Bawls Automatic Light

April 12, 2006 by 16 Comments

bawls lamp

[Alan] from Hacked Gadgets put this Bawls automatic light together pretty quickly. He used a photocell, transistor, LED, and a 9V battery to make it turn on automatically when the lights go out. It creates a nice eerie blue glow. You might remember that he isn’t the first Hack-A-Day reader to get lured in by the Bawls lamp. [Chris] made a cold cathode Bawls lamp last fall. I found this picture on ZapWizard’s photostream as well.

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Ergonomic Vertical Mouse

April 11, 2006 by 23 Comments

vertical mouse

I love waking up and finding a great project from a reader like this ergonomic mouse (cache). As you can see from the picture, the centerpiece is the massive scroll wheel made from a VCR head. He credits jpaturzo for the idea. The inertia of the wheel gives a lot better sense of how fast you are progressing through a document than methods like auto-scroll. The mouse is assumed to be more ergonomic because it keeps the bones in your forearm in line. The hand rest on the mouse is formed from Shapelock.

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Thermaltake Mini Fridge

April 10, 2006 by 23 Comments

thermaltake mini fridge

[Jared Bouck] has posted the latest project at Inventgeek: Thermaltake minifridge. Jared isn’t a big fan of the cost/reliability trade-off that comes with most overclocking projects so he decided to take on an entirely different cooling project. He found this Thermaltake case that resembled a refrigerator and took it the rest of the way. The cooling components came out of two 65W peltier camping coolers. After gutting the case, he mounted the power supply so that the intake and exhaust are external to the case. The peltier coolers were wired directly to the PS and the entire case was lined with foam. The last step was to add plexiglass ramps for the cans.

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Fan Controller

April 9, 2006 by 18 Comments

fan controller

Unhappy with commercial fan controllers Jos van Eijndhoven decided to build his own. The circuit supports three LM60 temperature sensors with pots to adjust the turn on temp. A PIC 16F676 microcontroller reads the temps and controls three groups of fans. A potentiometer is also supplied to control the minimum fan speed. To prevent oscillation the fan speed is reduced slowly in response to temperature drop.

[thanks Alan]

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DIY Surround Headphones

April 8, 2006 by 13 Comments

surround headphones

I was stumbling through HeadWize‘s project archive the other day when I came across Steve Connor’s Poor Man’s Surround Headphones. He used a pair of Sony MDR-CD60 for the base and added three pairs of ear buds. One pair is used for the front channel and two for the rears. The rears have their own amp with the bass turned up to increase the separation. He used a Sound Blaster Live! card for the source. If you are interested in amplifiers and other sound projects, you should definitely have a look at HeadWize.

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