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Homebrew solar light
To give his pepper plants some extra light during the winter months, João Silva decided to set up a solar-powered light that would charge during the day, then light a lamp after dark. Rather than simply scavenging a circuit from an old garden lamp, though, he designed his own SolarLamp circuit from scratch. It looks like a fun project, and he has a good explanation of the issues that he ran into when designing a circuit to work at low voltages. As a bonus, he used the open source circuit toolkit gEDA/SPICE/ngspice to design and simulate the circuit. Excellent work!
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Posted by Matt Mets | 6:00 PM in Electronics, Green | | Discuss (0)
EmbeddedSPARK 2010 Challenge
Microsoft is running another contest for 2010 centered on embedded systems and their embeddedSPARK platform, the Windows embedded software for hobbyists. The grand prize this year is a $15,000. The theme is "Fun & Games." See the embeddedSPARK website...
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A breadboard for your groaning board
The folks at Sparkle Labs have put up a cute project on their site. It's a simple LED circuit on a breadboard (built with their Discover Electronics Kit), with some Turkey papercraft attached, to create a Thanksgiving table decoration....
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Jonathan Wolfe's puzzle acorns
My buddy Jon makes these awesome little puzzle boxes from acorns. There are four shown in the video: one pair consisting of a smaller hinged acorn that nests, matryoshka-style, inside a larger one with a wire spring latch; a larger, locking nut that is opened by removing a small pin; and, finally, a large hinged version that is unlatched by knocking it against a surface from a certain angle.
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Make: Holiday Gift Guide 2009: DIY photography
Know someone that is interested in photography? Or a tinkerer who wants to present their work in a better light? Then we have a guide for you! Here are some project and gear recommendations to help you find the...
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Dance of the Christmas Robots
It's still way too early for holiday music and decorations, however this was too good to pass up. Robobuilder made this RoboBuilder Xmas Dance Routine to demonstrate the capabilities of their 5720t 'Huno' robotics kit.
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SPARK Project #3, Post #2
Blinking an LED and transmitting text to a serial terminal is not the most exciting thing in the world, but it's very cool to breathe life into a balky computer, even at the most basic level. Also, I have...
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Sparkfun's free day January 7th
Sparkfun is giving away things for free on January 7! You can blame it on Chris Anderson's book Free. After reading his book, I started kicking around the idea of what we can do that's 'free'. Sure, we have...
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DIY capacitive pressure sensor tile
usbddr is firmware for the Atmel ATMega8 which implements a usb controller ("dance pad") for games such as stepmania. In contrast to other homebrew dance pads, it uses capacitive sensing, eliminating mechanical wear and allowing adjustable sensitivity
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Paxtruder
Charles Pax is working on a new MakerBot extruder he's aptly calling the Paxtruder. It makes it super easy to change out the plastic filament, and can even be butted up against another one of itself for potential support...
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Make: Gift Guide 2009: Gifts that will inspire your kids
The holiday season is a great time of year, especially for the kids! This year I came up with a list that I think will really inspire your kids, and let you have a little fun too! A lot of these gift recommendations are inspired form my own childhood. I remember making a lot of kits as a child, and I have included some of my favorite kits in this list.
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Working handcuff made with Makerbot
From the MAKE Flickr pool Flickr member Giant Eye created a handcuff mechanism with his Makerbot Cupcake CNC -3d printers are incredibly boss, cool, fantastic, and other words that mean they make me tingle. I designed these handcuffs (okay...
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Amazing origami mushroom video
I'm not sure if this isn't more rightly called "paper sculpture" than origami. True it uses only one sheet of paper and there are no cuts, but, well...watch the video and you'll see what I mean. Besides getting to see the mushrooms themselves, which are almost photo-realistic, it's worth it to see how a master with 20 years of experience moves his hands. [via Boing Boing]
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Science gets auto-tuned
A refreshingly different kind of mash-up -"We Are All Connected" was made from sampling Carl Sagan's Cosmos, The History Channel's Universe series, Richard Feynman's 1983 interviews, Neil deGrasse Tyson's cosmic sermon, and Bill Nye's Eyes of Nye Series, plus...
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3D scanner using standard webcam
Qi Pan, a PhD candidate at the Engineering Department of Cambridge University, has developed a novel approach to capturing 3D objects with a standard webcam.
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CupCake CNC build, part 4: Update & burning the bootloaders
I planned on writing an entry about burning bootloaders & updating the firmware, but I just realized my kit comes all ready to go! Yea! If you are making you own boards from scratch, or purchased a non-assembled kit, check out these detailed instructions on burning bootloaders and updating firmware before going any further.
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Man invents electric lobster taser
Tasering just isn't for 10 year olds, a UK man invented a lobster zapper that some feel is more humane than just tossing them in boiling water. I would like to try this electric lobster they speak of. Looking...
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GAKKEN Japanino: An Arduino clone in Japan?
Wow, this is interesting... Hobbymedia writes - Yesterday I went to Tokyo MAKE Meeting 04 with Gianluca Martino: a member of the Arduino team. He has been super popular and he really appreciated the Japanese Arduino scene. During the...
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Motorsports carving? Who knew?
There are woodcarvers, and then there's Gary Tatman, of Glen Burnie, Maryland. Gary explains his incredible work on Hemmings Auto Blog: You're correct in your assumptions- these carvings start out as a block. I use the Internet motorsports archives...
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