How-To: Add LEDs to an Engagement Ring
Engineer Ben Kokes created this incredible engagement ring featuring LEDs that light up when he and his fiance hold hands.
Technology
Controlling LEDs with Charlieplexing
MAKE contributor Andy has created a great tutorial to introduce you to the utility of “Charlieplexing,” a method for controlling multiple LEDs without the use of multiple microcontroller pins. With charlieplexing you can turn on or off one LED at a time. To light more than one LED at a time, you can scan the LEDs by turning a sequence of them on and off really fast.
DIY 3D Laser Scanner Using Arduino
The principle behind this scanner is the typical of a line scanner. A laser beam intercepts the object to be measured and a camera, positioned at a known angle and distance shoots a series of images. With some trigonometry considerations and optic laws it is relatively easy to reconstruct the Zeta dimension, the measurement of the distance between the object and the camera.
Milwaukee Makerspace’s Hacked Water Cooler
Ron Bean has a fascinating post on Milwaukee Makerspace’s wiki about his project to plumb in the hackerspace’s water cooler. In addition to the obligatory refrigerator full of soda (or sometimes empty of soda, depending on whether anyone’s filled it recently), we also have a water cooler that takes the big 5gal water bottles. They […]
5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Things About Joe Grand
San Francisco-based electrical engineer Joe Grand has spent the last two decades finding security flaws in hardware devices and educating engineers on how to increase the security of their designs. He specializes in inventing, designing, and licensing products and modules for electronics hobbyists. Joe has been on the MAKE technical advisory board since the first issue, and is the author of the longest project (35 pages) to ever run on the pages of MAKE.
The Toa Mata Drumbots Return
Italian maker and sound producer Giuseppe Acito returns with his robot percussion band by combining LEGO Bionicle bots, Arduino Uno, and an iPad MIDI sequencer app.
Use an Op Amp to Make a Self-Dimming Night Light
On Make: Projects, Jason Poel Smith uses a pair of LM741 op amps to build an self-dimming night light that turns itself off after a period of time so you don’t waste electricity. The timer is made from a 741 op amp (operational amplifier) wired as a comparator. It compares the voltage across a capacitor […]