Spark-Up Your Halloween Party With This Double Helix Jacob’s Ladder

October 31, 2013 by Todd Harrison 35 Comments

Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory wouldn’t be complete without some electrical sparks. So for [Rick’s] final Halloween DIY hack this year he gives us just that, but with a twist. This time it’s a double helix Jacob’s ladder. The sparks are flying as they twist and turn their way up this unique design, powered by a standard neon sign transformer. If you can get your hands on a 15,000 V 30 mA transformer, you might have just enough time to build one for Halloween.

The build is quite simple. Other than the transformer, you will need a few feet of ¼ inch flexible copper tubing and a piece of ¾ inch PVC pipe. After twisting the copper tubing around the PVC pipe to form the double helix, [Rick] mounts the tubing to a block of wood and removes the PVC form. In his video, which you can watch after the break, [Rick] demonstrates a standard Jacob’s ladder, as well as his double helix design. The double helix version has a much nicer and slower traveling arc even stopping at times.

You don’t want to set this up anyplace someone might touch it as it can be quite deadly or cause burns. [Rick] mentions not to use wood to mount your ladder because the wood will burn as it did during his testing. And do not operate unattended. Otherwise, it adds some spark to your great Halloween fun.

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Playing MP3s From An FPGA

March 13, 2012 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Building an audio player is a fun project. It used to be quite a task to do so, but these days the MP3 decoder chips are full-featured which means that if you know how to talk to other chips with a microcontroller you’ve got all the skills needed to pull off the project. But that must have been too easy for [Ultra-Embedded], he decided just to build an MP3 player out of an FPGA.

It’s not quite as difficult as it first sounds. He didn’t have to figure out how to decode the audio compressions. Instead he rolled the Helix MP3 decoder library into the project. It had already been optimized to run on an ARM processor, and since he’s using a RISC soft processor the translation wasn’t tough at all. He’s using a 24-bit stereo DAC chip to bridge the gap between the audio jack and the FPGA output. Clocking that chip with the FPGA isn’t ideal and causes 44.1 kHz audio to run 3% too slow. He says it’s not noticeable, which we believe. But if you try to play along with a song the pitch shift might end up driving you crazy.

If you’d prefer to just stick to the microcontroller based players this one’s small and inexpensive.

How To Grow Your Own EL Wire DNA Helix Lamp

December 22, 2011 by Mike Nathan 11 Comments

el-wire-helix-lamp

[LucidMovement] was looking for some crystal-based artwork and just couldn’t seem to find anything that fit the bill, so he decided to build something himself.

The inspiration for his desk lamp came from something we’re all familiar with, a DNA double-helix. To grow the crystals he built a helix-shaped growing substrate out of nichrome and EL wires, submerging them in a warm alum solution. Once he had a nice set of crystals, he mounted it in an acrylic tube, filling the air space with clear silicone to seal off the display. He then mounted the silicone-filled tube on top of a rotating acrylic stand that he had cut for the project. The stand is made from several sheets of acrylic and contains both the gearing for movement as well as RGB LEDs to light the display from the bottom.

The lamp looks great when sitting idle, but when he powers it on it really shines (no pun intended). [LucidMovement] put a ton of work into the lamp, and offers up all sorts of tips, tricks, and considerations for anyone looking to build their own. Be sure to check out his writeup for plenty more details, and stick around to see a short video of the lamp in action.

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Helix V2.0 Released

October 2, 2008 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

Helix 2.0 has been released. Helix is a collection of various tools for electronic forensics. Just like on TV, you can use this to find all kinds of information on a computer. Some of the useful tools added were Winlockpwn a tool for breaking windows security, Volitility which processes data out of the raw memory, and several other tools that are beyond our comprehension.

You’ve undoubtedly noticed that the title says Helix V2.0, but the image and header of the Helix site say 3. We have no idea why. Look at the download info to see that it says V2.0.

[Via Midnight Research labs]