Hans Summers has an amazing collection of projects. His most popular project is the binary clock. It runs off of mains, uses a bunch of TTL logic chips and a binary counter. He has posted links to the many projects that have been derived from his original post. Warning: project uses LEDs. If the binary clock isn’t your thing he has lots of other clocks, radio, frequency counters, computer and other projects.
[thanks Alan Parekh]
[Ben Kokes] put together this guide for building an LED marquee. The design uses two 555 timers plus a bunch of shift registers. The first 555 handles the rate at which the LEDs turn on/off. The second controls how fast the sequence advances. The shift registers cascade through each row of LEDs. Here’s a CoralCDN of the video. The project is pretty simple, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. It does fit well with our “LEDs whee!” attitude.
Inspired by raphnet’s projection clock, imakeprojects decided to build their own version. The clock only turns on when a source of IR light is pointed directly at it (i.e. television remote). This would be good for a room that you would normally like as dark as possible, like a home theater. The clock uses a 38kHz IR detector to trigger a Luxeon LED. You need to rotate the polarizing filter on the clock so that an inverse image will show up on the wall. imakeprojects was able to get a clear image without a lens while projecting up to 6 feet.
[thanks trebuchet03]
[Alex Hornstein] was bored one Saturday and decided to do something with the large pieces of scrap acrylic he had found. He built a cube and attached 15 RGB LED clusters along with 4 GB LED sticks. It takes 50W of power. The controller is built from ATmega48 and is controlled via serial commands over a wireless link from Spark Fun. You can find schematics, pictures, and video on his site, Art is Wrong.
Seattle Airsoft has a great post on measuring BB velocity using a microphone. They use two pieces of paper separated by 10 feet with a microphone by each one. Audacity is their program of choice for recording. If you look at the waveform after firing you’ll see three distinct spikes: one from the firing mechanism and one from each paper strike. They compared the results from this method to those of an actual optical chronograph. The mic seemed to deviate far less.
[thanks aqua_scummm]
[Ladada2001] sent along a project link for building a VGA extension cable using CAT5. This particular project was for a projector with BNC connectors. This has been a particularly popular (and easy) topic in the past. We’ve seen an example from ElephantStaircase. The 5-in-1 cable featured in Make also had provisions for VGA. If you build one of these cables you should be able to get decent performance at 50 feet.
Hacked Gadgets pointed out this great peltier based beverage cooler. It has a pulse width modulation based controller driving a 12V 80W peltier. Alan also pointed out Hack-A-Day reader Chris Garrison’s peltier beer cooler from last summer. The Defcon cooling contest from last year also featured a peltier based cooler.
[UPDATE: Afrotech’s Snapple Cooler or How to enhance your beverage with iron oxide. Thanks liam]
[UPDATE: PeltierBeer cooler first seen on Slashdot [thanks Wiki Multipla]. Mattt’s Peltier Beer Cooler on Bit-tech [thanks dougedey].
