[Alan] noticed that his external hard drive was getting quite hot to the touch after a few hours. He says that it was probably designed to handle the heat sufficiently, he thought it would be fun to beef it up. He’s using a pic 12f675 microcontroller as the brain and an LM35 temperature sensor. The Fan speed is varried in 8 steps from 35 degrees C to 45 degrees C.
[Ytai Ben-Tsvi] wanted a rapid prototyping tool that could be easily and cheaply built at home. He came up with the PICMAN, a breadboard compatible PIC based board that has everything you need to get the ball rolling. He’s using a PIC18LF4553 which has built-in USB support that can be used with a bootloader for programming. The board also features a voltage regulator for non-USB power sources, some indicator LEDs, a user-defined button, and a reset button. The chip is on the underside and a combination of through-hole and surface-mount parts make for a one-sided PCB that can easily be etched using the toner transfer method. You will need a PIC programmer to burn the bootloader firmware the first time but once that’s done this becomes a self-contained package.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbOlG7THecM]
Thinking of buying a new bandsaw? Stop it. Make one instead. Not only could you save some money, you could customize it to be exactly what you need. There is a step by step breakdown of the entire construction with tons of great pictures. He even has some great info for general bandsaw use if you’ve already got one.
[via makezine]
[Luciano] didn’t want to drop a lot of cash into a flux and solder paste applicator so he built his own for about $5. He re-purposed a hot glue gun which you can usually find at a dollar store. After removing the heating element he inserted the body of a syringe. The plunger has been modified to use a knitting needle inside of some plastic tubing. After taking the picture above he made an improvement by adding a milliliter scale to the plunger, allowing you to meter out the paste and also gauge how much remains.
[Riley Porter] has been working on several different custom enclosure designs. Above, you can see his Proto Desk which holds a breadboard, Arduino, and has two recessed boxes with sliding tops for components and patch wires. He’s got a miniature version that gets rid of the breadboard, as well as slick-looking cases for the Bus Pirate, tinyISP, and face plates for word clocks.
Well, if you’ve got a laser cutter you should be using it right? We’ve seen [Riley’s] wares in the past; he wrote the guide for laser cutting solder stencils.
[Thanks Brian]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jznl8U9zzKM]
Need to monitor not only if a fan is running, but if it is running fast enough? Check out this PC fan failure alarm circuit. After several failed attempts using various circuits, they settled on a Schmitt trigger. They even show a couple variations including a manual reset and a relay instead of a buzzer.
[via HackedGadgets]
At first we thought this looked hastily thrown together and quite possible useless. Then we watched the video, embedded after the break, and realized it is quite a handy bench sander. [Mhkabir] opened up an older hard drive, removed the read head, and added a piece of carefully cut sand paper. When you hook it up to your bench supply you’ve got a small sander ready to use. We can’t wait to try it on some small PCB edges. Now that we’ve seen a sander and a chop saw, we wonder what’s next?
