electronics

179 Articles

Things To Hack: Sub 100$ Toy Night Vision, Projector, And Tv Game

June 22, 2009 by 14 Comments

projector

Ars Technica writes about three new toys coming out this year: a sub 100$ projector, tv game, and night vision goggles. The projector runs at standard TV resolution, takes standard composite in, and outputs an okay picture. The night vision goggles are monocular but focus both eyes on a single RGB LCD. The goggles uses an array of IR LEDs instead of amplifying ambient light to see in the dark. Lastly, they have a standalone implementation of the arcade game Big Game Hunters. The rifle uses a sensor bar to do the motion tracking and features a 32MB rom to hold the game files.

Induction Furnace

June 22, 2009 by 19 Comments

induction furnace

[Tim Williams] made his own induction furnace. A copper tubing coil forms the primary winding, as the material to be heated becomes the short circuited secondary. The load material is subject to high power magnetic fields operating at radio frequency. The rapidly changing field induces current flow within the material, creating a great deal of heat. The brute power required a cooling system to match. In the video below, the induction furnace can be seen melting common table salt.

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Homemade Toroid Winder

June 20, 2009 by 17 Comments

[eclipsed78], built an automatic toroid winder (Internet Archive). The drum splits in order to load the toroid. Then wire is wound on the drum, much like any other coil would be wound. The drum rotates as a slider pulls the wire off the drum, while revolving in and out of the toroid. A side tension keeps the slack out of the wire during operation. The winding coil is stepped as the drum rotates, in order to control the turns ratio. [eclipsed78] created a stepper driver from a schematic, so he could drive the motors. You can watch the winder in operation  as a series of videos. The first of which is embedded below. If you have ever needed to wind a massive toroidal transformer, this is the project for you.

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USB Reader For SNES Game Carts

June 19, 2009 by 82 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pwq6vRM8U7k]

Reader, [Matthias_H], sent in a video about his USB adapter for SNES game carts. All you have to do is plug in the SNES game cartridge and USB cable, then a ROM file of the game shows up as an external storage device on your computer. After that, you can play the ROM with your choice of emulator. We emailed [Matthias] asking for more information, and he quickly replied with a very nice writeup about the hack that is pasted below.

Update: [Matthias] launched a site for the “snega2usb” with updates on the development of the board and a FAQ.

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Through-hole Bus Pirate Kit From Fundamental Logic

March 31, 2009 by 24 Comments

bpv1ath

Fundamental Logic is selling a Bus Pirate kit and bare PCB based on our universal serial interface tool. They started with our serial port-based v1a hardware, and modified it to use all through-hole parts.  8pin DIP LP2951ACN/-3.3 switchable voltage regulators replace the surface mount TPS79650/33 that we used. The PIC is pre-programmed with our latest firmware, version 0f, which includes a bootloader for easy firmware updates through the serial port. Documentation includes illustrated assembly instructions.

Speaking of Bus Pirate goodness, we’re busy working on hardware V2. As astute readers may have already noticed, the final version of the Bus Pirate incorporates an FTDI USB->serial chip, and draws its power from the USB port. We also tackled the software-controlled pull-up resistor feature, and reduced the overall part count and cost. Best of all, we’re working to make assembled PCBs available with world-wide shipping. The how-to should be ready in a few weeks.

Tools: Smart Tweezers

February 13, 2009 by 52 Comments

We’re big fans of surface mount parts. SMD components are cheaper, take less board space, and don’t require drilling; all the coolest new parts are only available in SMD packages.

Smart Tweezers are an advanced multimeter tool specifically designed to test and troubleshoot SMD circuits. It automatically identifies resistors, capacitors, and inductors, and displays the relevant measurements. Advanced Devices sent us a pair of Smart Tweezers to review. We used them while building our last few SMD projects, read about our experience with this tool after the break.

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Parts: LTC2631A I2C Digital To Analog Converter

February 9, 2009 by 9 Comments

ltc2640

Linear Technology’s LTC2631A-LZ8 is an 8bit digital to analog converter (DAC) with an I2C interface. This DAC can output 255 different voltages, spaced evenly between 0 and 2.5volts. We previously demonstrated the LTC2640 with a three-wire SPI interface, but this version is controlled with only two signal wires.

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