[alien x] has posted this peculiar hack for a PSP. He has gutted and splayed the PSP spreading its insides neatly and mounting them on a plexiglass back. Everything is easily accessible and ready to tinker with. It may not fit in your pocket, but adding mods and experimenting with ideas should be much easier like this. It looks pretty cool too, we want one for our office wall. That could be possible too, he’s selling it.
[thanks doodle]
Wow, how quickly the wearable electronics world has slid into the gutter. They’re now resigned to watching our nations finest natural resource, the butt crack. This project by [semiotech] uses a LilyPad Arduino to monitor the exposure of the wearer’s coin slot. It detects the presence of light with a photoresistor and alerts the user with the vibrations of a pager motor. This breakthrough in coin slot technology will prevent dryness and certainly reduce our exposure to domestic terrorism. We see plenty of room for future development; the Arduino is already capable of logging exactly how often your coin slot is exposed. Even if you feel this is more protection than your coin slot needs, we recommend Neutrogena’s Coin Slot Cream for general upkeep.
[Dane] sent us this super quick tape adapter project. Yes, we know we can go buy one of these for pretty cheap and it will probably sound much better, but really, wouldn’t it be cool to make one? Using a headphone adapter, a couple resisters, some wire, and an old cassette tape, [Dane] shows us how easy it is to build one of our own. You are basically pushing the signal from the headphones through a coil that is up against the tape read head. This is a perfect project to teach beginners about magnetic fields.
[Dane] has sent in some stuff before. You may recall his PWM adio generation with an AVR post several months ago.
This may not be an amazingly complicated project, but it is a very elegant and fairly cheap way of building a UV oven for exposing PCBs. [aris] started with an IKEA FIRA cabinet. He basically left the framework as an empty shell and made a make shift top hinged door to enclose it. Mounted in the top is an array of 35 UV LEDs powered by an HP printer transformer. He did not have a timer circuit, instead he just watched the clock and unplugged it at the right time. You can see from his pictures that his results were quite good.
If you don’t want that piece of furniture taking up room, and don’t mind using a little more elbow grease, you could follow our directions on how to make your own single sided PCB. If money isn’t an issue either, you can always just get your PCBs laser etched.
The Makers local 256 sent us this USB authenticated deadbolt prject. For roughly $60 these guys built an authentication system that reads the serial number off of the chip in a USB storage device. The actual content on the memory in the USB device is not used at all. They are using a Freeduino board to control its behavior. It has a magnetic sensor that keeps it from initiating the lock when the door is open. They mention that they are using Transparent Aluminum as an enclosure, we assume they mean the Star Trek variety, not Aluminium oxynitride. Be sure to check out the video after the break.
[aballen] wanted to light the jack-o’-lantern this year with something that didn’t actually require fire. After searching for a project that was cheap and yielded decent results, he ended up just making his own. This project utilizes an ATtiny13 and two LEDs, red and orange. The overall build is quick and simple with some very basic code for the flickering. If you really want it more enclosed, there is this similar project using a cheap electric candle. Of course, not everyone has the time or desire to make one that is this realistic. You could always just go the easy way, no microcontroller required.
Why limit it to just lighting up your pumpkin though? Lets take a stroll through Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories hallways and see the Snap O Lantern or the dark detecting pumpkin and the Cyclonolantern.
[Alex] sent us this slick little keyless entry system. He wanted a discreet way to trigger the door to unlock. Knocking was too loud, and would give away his secret access code. He decided that touch sensors would be the best. Initially he planned on using the doorknob itself, which would have been awesome, but it was just too much surface area for his touch sensor. Ultimately, he settled for a wire he could touch. An Arduino detects whether or not the correct code has been put in and initializes a high torque servo which turns the doorknob from the inside. In the video, after the break, you can see that it works fairly well.
