Dan writes “Build the ultimate garage door monitor, if you like home automation, you will definitely like this. This How-To shows how to monitor the exact position of the garage door, and display its status in your touchscreen interface (in this case, Main Lobby). A lot of details, but easy to understand.”Link.
“Mark McKeown loved the classic RCA Theremin so much that he built one to spec from scratch, down to the vintage power supply, coils, and cabinet. With authentic tubes and other details, this near-perfect replica can reproduce the instrument’s sound far better than a cheap kit. Mark includes links to resources for specs and supplies if you want to try it yourself.” [via] Link.
MAKE photo pool member Shufflehacks writes “I built my own radio-transmitter for my Shuffle, I nicknamed it “iMouse”. It works quite easy, there is a power switch on the bottom to turn it on. Just press play on the Shuffle and tune your radio to the right frequency. The range is about 100 to 150 meters.(500 feet) Now I can enjoy my Shuffle on my car stereo.” Link. It’s made out of an old mouse, excellent.
“Oww is a software project, to communicate with the Dallas 1-wire weather station and other 1-wire sensors, presenting live weather readings, logging data to file, uploading data to weather Web sites, and sending data to other programs through a command line interface.” Thanks Jason! Link.
Pastelero has a great use for an old scanner lamp, use it inside a PC! “I had a broken scanner around here, so I decided to do something with it. I decided to install the lamp inside my computer. And it worked!!! So I’ll try to explain what I did to make it work. I believe it’s different for different scanners, but you can try to figure out for yours!” Thanks Star! Link.
Electric clothing writes “At the next Dorkbot meeting in NYC (Wednesday, January 4th @ 7pm) Mikey Sklar will be explaining the process he used to install a $2 RFID tag in his left hand. His talk will cover why he choose to do this, the necessary materials, different tag options, and what he and other people have been doing with these tags.” Link. See our interview with a RFID implanter as well.
“This application note describes a circuit designed to control the speed of a dc motor used in radio-controlled boats. The electronic speed controller (ESC) is a “no-brake, forward-only” controller. I wanted to keep the part count low and the circuit simple so a couple features were sacrificed. The circuit does not have: over-current protection, over-temp protection, polarity protection, or over/under voltage protection. All the parts can be obtained from digikey distributors. The circuit was designed with a popular 12-cell model boat motor in mind (graupner speed 700). This project was my first attempt at using Bascom-avr and Atmel microcontrollers. ” Thanks JasonR! Link.
