At roughly $20 to build, this 9 digit pulse counter is an excellent example of home built tools. The builder, [Josh] found himself repairing a device and in need of a pulse counter. With the components cheaply available, he just built his own. He says that it has a few limitations, like display brightness, but overall it seems to do the job well. You can download the PCB from his site.
[via MakeZine]
If you can fabricate single-sided circuit boards at home you can build this digital oscilloscope. It uses mostly through-hole components with just a couple of surface mount chips to contend with. An ATmega162 handles the hardware end of things with a CPLD used to manage the sampling rate. Data is displayed on a 240×128 LCD display which will be the most expensive component to acquire. It’s still a lot cheaper than buying a commercially available oscilloscope, even if you get a base model and hack it to unlock all the features.
[Thanks Juan]
[Torx] wrote this instructable on how to convert a lawnmower to another useful tool. We’re not sure what language he natively speaks, but we doubt it is english, so you might be better off just looking at the pictures to figure out what he’s doing. To summarize, he has lowered the mower and reversed/bent the blade to scrape the ground. He has also added thick rubber edges all around to try to keep debris from coming out. You might be wondering why he would need something like this, but the last page sums it up pretty well. We could imagine this possibly getting some use in the garden as well. This one does look pretty dangerous though, so don’t blame us if you cut off a hand or lose an eye to some debris. Then again, a regular lawnmower looks pretty dangerous too.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tNVOhtvPEw]
[Kirov], a regular reader and one of our most notorious commenters, tipped us off about this lawn mowing hack. On one hand we’re wary that this is bait for a huge flame war, but on the other hand it’s a hack that brings a smile to our mischievous faces. By pounding a stake into the center of the yard and connecting a mower to it with a piece of rope, [Korey99] has achieve an automated lawn mower. He tied the self-propelled mower’s throttle bar down to make the machine run unattended. There’s no kill switch or any kind of remote control for the lawn mower so we wonder what happens when the rope gets all wound up?
[Rob] sent us some information on how he converted his flux-cored welder to a metal inert gas welder. He used a piece of DOM tubing as a collet with a side inlet tube that he uses to inject carbon dioxide. The gas is sourced from a 12 ounce paint ball CO2 tank and it looks like there’s a valve right at the junction with the collet. We wonder how long it would take to tear through one of those tanks, but if you’re not doing a lot of MIG welding this saves on the upfront cost of buying a separate setup.
If you’ve got a graphic LCD lying around you can build this four-channel logic analyzer with a couple handfuls of cheap components. [Ronald de Bruijn’s] design uses a PIC18F4580 to sample up to four logic inputs at a maximum resolution of 2 MHz. He’s included the PCB artwork so that you can etch your own board. Having a logic analyzer around can really make your life easier, allowing you to reverse engineer communication protocols and troubleshoot your own design problems.
[Thanks Juan]
While building some nixie clocks,[Blue_Metal] ended up destroying a few tubes. He found that having a tester sitting around would have been most helpful. Taking some pride in his tools, he put some major effort into building his nixie tube tester. It is quite visually pleasing, featuring hand cut brass framing, custom etched information panels. Scroll through his flickr set to see the build process in detail.
