By Norene Leddy with Ed Bringas and Johana Moscoso The Alarm Purse is a simple, fashionable way to add an audible alarm to your handbag. Tuck it away when you don’t need it (so it won’t go off by accident) and quickly hook it up when you do. The latest addition to the ongoing Aphrodite […]
Powering a TV remote with the sun means you won’t have to buy batteries every six months to surf from your sofa. Low-voltage devices that use power only occasionally, like remotes, are good candidates for a solar-powered trickle-charge. Here’s how we modded our remote to live off of the sun, using rechargeable batteries connected in parallel with a small solar cell and a diode to keep any power from trickling back out.
Motorize a phenakistoscope, a 19th-century parlor novelty that preceded motion pictures, and keep its frames synched to an LED strobe by using a sensor and an Arduino microcontroller. Invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau, this device creates a moving picture from a sequence of stills arranged on a spinning disk and viewed through strategically cut […]
Whether you’re at a Bangkok hostel or backpacking in Goa, you can rock out to your favorite tunes with these portable Rock ’n’ Roll Speakers, a set of customizable, low-fi travel speakers that allow you to take your music everywhere. The speakers are driven by a simple power amplifier circuit and a tilt switch. With […]
I once saw someone playing music by breaking laser beams with his hands. I thought it was fake, but discovered it was real and made my own laser harp.
By Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone We live in a rented apartment, so we don’t have hacking access to a power meter or breaker panel. But we still wanted to measure our household power usage long-term, so we developed the Tweet-a-Watt. It uses plug-in electricity monitors at each outlet to wirelessly send readings to a […]
Tote your Thinkpad and port your Apple in style with our custom TRON-inspired laptop bag tutorial. With a little soldering and sewing skills you can have your own light-up satchel, sure to impress geeky friends. So grab your sewing needle and soldering iron and follow along. This project was a collaboration between ladyada & becky […]
