Computer Controlled Multiple Light Dimmer

March 28, 2006 by 21 Comments

light dimmer

[SeBsZ] built this 16 dimmable lights controller based on his friend Christian N?g’s PC_DIMMER project. The PC_DIMMER project supports up to 128 individual lamps with 255 steps each. The controller boards feature an Atmel ATTiny2313 microcontroller that controls 8 lamps. Sebsz built two boards for his project and has status indicators mounted on the side of the box. Everything is driven by Christian’s free software through a serial connection. SeBsZ warns that this is a 230V@50Hz design and you will need to modify it if you intend to use it in the US.

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Email On The Cisco 7960

March 27, 2006 by 8 Comments

cisco 7960

The Cisco Unified IP Phone 7960G is becoming fairly common in corporate environments. The phone has a built in XML browser for navigating menus. [Nick] decided to hack together a PHP application that will let the phone display email messages in a POP3 account. In its current form it works with most text-only messages, but limited filtering means it could fail on some.

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$100 Hot Water Bottle Pendulum Rebreather

March 25, 2006 by 23 Comments

swampfox

Humans exhale a lot of oxygen along with their waste carbon dioxide. Instead of throwing out this oxygen, a rebreather uses a scrubber to remove the CO2 and replace it with pure oxygen from a bottle. Tom Rose built this rebreather for $100. When you exhale air passes through the scrubbing material and is stored in hot water bottle counterlung until you inhale. The system is only 15 pounds; a great savings compared to most dive equipment. You are definitely putting your life in your own hands so this should not be used without plenty of “couch-diving” tests. Tom has a ton of other diving related projects on his site.

[via Divester]

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UV Box For PCB Exposure

March 24, 2006 by 16 Comments

uv box

Hack-A-Day reader [Mindaugasu] built this box for exposing copper boards to ultraviolet light before etching them. It has two banks of four 20W UV lamps. The box is lined with reflective foil. The banks can be controlled separately and the exposure time is set by an Atmel AT90. You can change the time using button panel and LCD. He’s got some example boards in his ARM development section.

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Commercial-grade TIG Welder

March 23, 2006 by 7 Comments

tig welder

I use the qualifier “commercial-grade” here because this TIG welder project goes far beyond our junkyard TIG welder. The welder has a 180 amp capacity and has most (if not all) of the features of a modern welder. Instead of using a microprocessor, Dave Barrett decided to use discrete TTL and CMOS logic. That decision should make the design a lot easier to troubleshoot. Schematics and board layouts are on his site.

[UPDATE: I forgot to thank demmion for the tip]

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