Chainsaw/flashlight Overkill

August 8, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 45 Comments

[Robbtoberfest] has earned our admiration with this crazy chainsaw powered spot light. It looks horribly dangerous, extremely inefficient, and woefully under engineered. We absolutely love it.

This could be plucked from a video game or a movie and seems to be one UV bulb away from being the ultimate post apocalyptic zombie vampire Armageddon weapon. He has taken apart a chainsaw and attached it to a DC treadmill motor using a couple of bike sprockets and a chain. That DC motor then feeds a car headlight directly. As you can see in the video, when he cranks the gas, it shines pretty brightly. The unfinished nature of this is due to a deadline for a contest on instructables, so he plans on adding a protective cowl, some fancy paint work, and a voltage regulator down the road.

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Building A Glue Stick Flashlight

June 9, 2010 by Mike Szczys 29 Comments

Building an LED flashlight is simple, right? Take a battery, connect it to an LED by way of a resistor. Alright wise guy, now make one that steps up the voltage for multiple LEDs and don’t use a boost-converter IC to do so.

[fede.tft] shares a flashlight built inside of a used glue stick case. It’s the perfect size for one AA battery (we’re always on the lookout for good battery cases), and a shape that we’re familiar with as a flashlight. The problem is that he wants two white LEDs but with just one AA cell he’s never going to have more that 1.5V available. He licked that problem, getting to 7.2V by designing his own step-up converter using one transistor, an inductor, and three passive components. To get the inductor he needs, a stock part is disassembled and rewound to suit. Maybe you just end up with a flashlight when all is said and done, but then again, the Sistine Chapel is just some paintings on a ceiling.

Switchmode LED Flashlight Upgrade

June 1, 2010 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

When [Neelandan]’s cheap flashlight’s internal rechargeable battery died, he scrounged for a replacement. Ultimately, the brightness of the light suffered with his new battery, taken from an old cell phone since he had dropped the voltage a bit. Upon inspection he saw that he would have to swap the individual resistors for each lamp to get the desired brightness again. This wasn’t really acceptable as he would have to repeat the process if he used another re-purposed battery with different specs. Instead, he added a new circuit to supply constant brightness until the voltage drops below 2.7 volts. We love to see hardware resurrected, even if it is just a cheap LED flashlight.

That’s A Big Flashlight

March 26, 2010 by Mike Szczys 57 Comments

Going camping? You’ll need an extra backpack to carry this flashlight along the way. On the business end you’ll find 500 five millimeter super-bright white LEDs, on the opposite end there’s ten times the number of controls you’d expect on a flashlight. At full power, the LED array pulls down 50 Watts, making us question the battery life of the unit. Check out the walk-through after the break. The LEDs are mounted on proto-board, making for some extreme point-to-point soldering. During the control demonstration there’s a background noise like a jet powering up, what’s that all about?

While this terrific torch brings a grin to our faces, we wonder if it wouldn’t do better as a vehicle mounted illuminator. Or if a microcontroller was tossed into the mix some creative code could make this a pretty powerful yet non-lethal weapon.

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Raid The Dollar Store For An Illuminated Umbrella

November 12, 2009 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

diy-illuminated-umbrella

Here’s a quick and easy illuminated umbrella that [Mikeasaurus] built. How’s this for economical? He found an umbrella that someone left on the bus, and used an LED flashlight and clear poncho from the dollar store for the rest of the parts.

The scavenged LED circuit board is the perfect diameter to fit inside the handle of his umbrella. He removed the middle LED and drilled a hole in the board for the shaft to pass through. Although not well detailed, we gather he managed to shoehorn two CR2032 3v batteries underneath the PCB to power the device. The poncho is wrapped around the shaft to diffuse the light. This is a clever solution as the flexible plastic still allows the telescoping shaft to collapse down to its most compact size.

[Mikasaurus’] umbrella doesn’t make noise or emulate the weather but it is a clever idea. The low difficulty level and availability of parts makes this a great project to do with the young ones who don’t get included in your more intricate hacks.

Underwater Laser, Just Add Shark

October 12, 2009 by Mike Szczys 30 Comments

underwater-laser-beam

[iskor12] put together a blu-ray laser that is waterproof and packs quite a punch. At 182 mW there is enough power here to pop dark colored balloons (see the video after the break). To make this happen, he found an LED flashlight that has rubber o-rings for waterproofing. Although small, there is enough space in the case to house the battery, driver, and laser diode. A thick ring of aluminum is placed around the laser diode to act as heat sink.

We’ll admit, we don’t know that much about lasers. This is probably the wrong question to ask, but now that he has this what do you do with it? Leave us a comment about your plans for this diabolical creation.

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TV-B-Gone-zilla! Rawr!

October 7, 2009 by Phil Burgess 34 Comments

tv-zilla

TV-B-Gone: antisocial nuisance or harmless prank? Whatever your feelings, there’s no denying this device has become a staple of the DIY hacking crowd, as evidenced by the countless derivatives since hatched. This latest mutation crushes them all.

[manekinen] from the Polish electronics blog Elektroda (“Electrode”) wasn’t satisfied with high-power TV-B-Gone designs using multiple 5mm infrared LEDs, so he created his own using a single one-Watt monster. The device is concealed in an ordinary flashlight casing, making it somewhat inconspicuous. A custom PCB containing an ultra-minimalist version of the TV-B-Gone circuitry sits just behind the reflector. The choice of reflectors determined maximum distance vs. coverage…they opted for distance. Specific figures aren’t given, but we estimate this thing could shut off televisions on Mars.

The original article (Polish or Google-ized English) includes construction photos and an archive (.rar) of project files including Eagle schematics and C source code.

Would it be totally irresponsible to mention there’s now a 3-Watt version of this LED? We’re just sayin’.

[thanks RicoElectrico]