Just when I thought I’d seen most of the CNC mods out there, [Steve Ciciora] (who happens to be one of the driving forces behind the killacycle) sent in his diy solder paste dispenser *and* his diy pick and place machine. Both are extensions of his CNC taig mill. Hopefully [steve] will put up some more details of his mill mods.
[Juergen] sent in his catcam project built. He used an inexpensive 1.3mp keychain camera with an ATTINY2313. The controller keeps the camera shut down until it’s time to take a picture. Then it powers it up, takes the shot, and returns to low-power mode. The cat adventures are actually kind of interesting. It wouldn’t work from under the car, but anyone feel like gps tracking their cat?
This is sort of a follow up to the diy A/C zone control post. It’s a pretty simple circuit, but now they’ve posted schematics for building your own 1-wire controlled servo actuators. It requires external power – so they’re supplying 15v via cat-5/RJ-45s. This isn’t limited to home automation, this could lead to some interesting 1-wire robotics projects.
[john] sent in his version of a power meter monitor. It’s designed to monitor the blinking light on the meter to monitor the current power usage. The light flashes in proportion to the amount of power being used, so it was a matter of using a ldr/photoresistor to capture the output and feed it to the parallel port of his computer. To finish it up, he used a shell script to feed the data into MRTG.
I was looking for some interesting ideas for using lithium polymer cells and stumbled across this diy flashlight. (It’s on geocities, so hit the cache.) Flashlights aren’t usually that interesting, but this one uses a pair of li-poly cells and a PWM signal generated by a pic controller to regulate the power to the lamp using a IRL1404 MOSFET. It still requires an external li-poly charger, but looks like a nice project to get into li-poly and PWM applications.
If you like to freak out your neighbors, you’ll love this one. [jake] had a run-in with allergies in his wood shop, so he built his own positive air pressure respirator. He used a surplus gas mask, scsi squirrel cage fan, and an automotive air filter. My old TDI VW Beetle used an activated charcoal filter for the cabin – I’d suggest one of those for more effective air filtration.
