Christmas is coming up pretty quickly. [tinkernut] shows us how to do a quick and dirty music activated Christmas light setup. Simply crack open a pair of old computer speakers and wire the speaker leads to a relay. Use that to power an outlet and you have music controlled lights. The section at the beginning of the video is a bit misleading as that kind of choreography would be rather difficult with this setup. This may look familiar as we mentioned an almost identical project back in 2006.
Airwick air fresheners come with an amazing feature. They spray air freshener every once in a while no matter what. It is extremely wasteful and obviously a marketing plan to force you to buy more. There is a solution though. You can hack them, to turn them back in to a manual release like they used to be. Two cuts and two soldered wires is all that is necessary.
yes, we know you could just buy an aerosol, but many of us just come home and find them in our bathrooms since someone else in the house bought it. If you’ve already got it, why not hack it? This is also a great project for teaching beginners how to improve hardware.
[thanks Asmor]
[OldGrover] bought a Weiser electronic lock. Only 6 months after installing it, the keypad stopped working. Instead of just accepting this, [OldGrover] built a better button pad for his lock. He decided to go with big push buttons instead of a similar to stock membrane system. After tracing out where the original buttons connected, he attached his new buttons and enclosure. Pretty simple really but it fixed the problem and kept the lock out of the landfill. Now, he has a unique looking keypad on his front door.
[mixadj] needed to run some video cable from one part of his house to another. He was lacking the proper amount of video cable, but had a bunch of cat5 laying around. so he built a converter to run his composite signal through the cat5. He states that he wouldn’t run it more than 70 feet without amplifying the audio somehow. Aside from that, the performance is supposedly decent. This just adds to the multitude of other uses for that Ethernet cable. We’ve seen voice, data, composite video, VGA, and power. What else have you seen run over cat5?
No matter what holiday you choose to acknowledge, you probably enjoy the thought of getting to put lights up everywhere. We know we do. Here are some instructions on how to make your own string of color changing lights. Sure, you can probably just buy a string of color changing lights for cheaper, but then you couldn’t arrange them however you want on the line, and you also wouldn’t get the satisfaction of doing it yourself.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSJz9-ImHo]
Add lights to your graphing calculator. Do it now. [Sil3ntP8nd8] added some, and seems to have done a decent job. They are spread around the back, supplying a nice even light on, well, on whatever is under your calculator. It may be difficult to see too much detail though on account of the water marks. You have to protect your intellectual property though. This almost compares to the DS LED monstrosity we covered recently.
Reader [Mike] was not too impressed by design in a recent post we did on an LED menorahs. Doing what any self respecting hacker would do, he designed and built a better one then sent it in to us. He just happened to have an AVR ATtiny13 sitting around, so he used that for the brains. It has single button operation, is powered by 2 AA batteries, and even simulates the candles burning out. His custom PCB turned out quite nicely as well, the power plug connects to the batteries in a way that uses them as a base. Check out his site for detailed plans and source code. Great job [Mike].
