Antique Phone Doorbell

doorbell

[Bryan] sent in this cool doorbell he made out of an antique phone. After seeing similar phones for $150 to $399, he picked one up on ebay for $10. After some cleaning and polishing, it was looking fantastic, but fairly useless. At this point, he broke it open and started hacking to turn it into a wireless doorbell. He picked up a cheap wireless doorbell and proceeded to gut it. The transmitter side got an aesthetic overhaul, a big fancy button and nice LED in a 50’s style  were added. The receiver side got hacked up as well. It was incapable of pushing the required voltage to ring the phone’s bell, so he had to do some searching for a better circuit. Since his knowledge of electronics was limited, he was looking for something that could be plugged in and work without much modification. Eventually, he found the Silvercom AG1170-s5. At $7, he swiped it up quick. It may be a bit of overkill, but he’s using an arduino to trigger the whole thing when it receives the signal. You can download the Arduino sketch on the site.

Techspansion Closes It’s Doors

Techspansion, creators of the popular media conversion programs VisualHub and AudialHub, have called it quits. Company founder [Tyler Loch] explains that the decision to stop the development of these popular Mac based utilities was due to personal reasons.

Unlike the numerous media converters available for Windows based computers, there are only a handful of good media conversion applications on the Mac and Techspansion’s applications were some of the best.

VisualHub makes it easy to convert one video format to another, while AudialHub does the same for audio files. We found AudialHub very useful when converting WMA files for import into iTunes as the Mac version of iTunes does not have the ability to convert WMA files like its Windows counterpart.

Registered users who don’t have a copy of the latest build will find direct download links removed from the Techspansion website. All is not lost as one very enthusiastic individual has made the downloads available at The Pirate Bay.

How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 2)


In part 1 we showed you how to build your own prototype RGB keypad. Today we’ll show off some new ideas we worked on to create the project and turn it from prototype to fully functional battle station er door lock.

Continue reading “How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 2)”

How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 1)


Part 2 can be found here

Putting a custom designed electronic lock on your space seems like a geek right of passage. For our latest workspace, we decided to skip the boring numbered keypad and build a custom RGB backlit keypad powered by an Arduino. Instead of typing in numbers, your password is a unique set of colors. In today’s How-To, we’ll show you how to build your own and give you the code to make it all work.

Continue reading “How-To: Make An RGB Combination Door Lock (Part 1)”

Ablative Power On My Doorstep


After months of waiting, emailing and waiting some more, I took the afternoon off to stay home and wait for this special delivery. (I had to wait an extra day due to a shipping issue!) I received three huge boxes in my workshop. Not only did I receive this (not so mini) Epilog mini 24, I put together a stand and unpacked a monster air filter.

Read on for the obligatory Hack-A-Day logo and my first impressions of this sweet piece of kit.

Continue reading “Ablative Power On My Doorstep”