Month: October 2009

GPS-enabled puzzle box opens only at Île-de-Bréhat, France

GPS-enabled puzzle box opens only at Île-de-Bréhat, France

The first presenter at last Thursday’s Dorkbot Austin was a gentleman named Mikal Hart, who described his “Reverse Geocaching Puzzle.” Designed and built as a wedding gift for an old friend moving to France, the box incorporates an Arduino with a custom shield. A prominent button on the lid, when pressed, returns a distance, in kilometers, on the LCD display (if a GPS signal can be acquired), and counts button-presses up to 50 atttempts. No directional information is provided, so the box must be moved about in order to triangulate the location it wants. Mikal also included a cunningly-disguised back door to allow it to be opened in the event of battery failures or bugs.

Harmony Generator vintage kit

Harmony Generator vintage kit

From the MAKE Flickr pool Matt the modulator picked this rather sweet 80’s Maplin Harmony Generator kit on ebay. Though nonfunctional after the initial assembly, a bit of rewiring got things up and running for the above-seen demo processing a Gameboy/LSDJ sequence. He was also kind enough to post the relevant schematics/article for those interested.

How-To: Transistor tester

How-To: Transistor tester

(photo by Michael L.) Though some of the fuller featured multimeters offer similar abilities, this ATMega8-based transistor tester project, identifies pins, measures gain, plus resistance and capacitance. Looks like a welcome addition to the workbench – schematic + source code can be found here [via Electronics-Lab]