Whack-a-Mole Game
Jim Chen designed an excellent electronic “Whack-a-Mole” game using 555 timers, LEDs, and bent-diode touch sensors, that you can build on a solderless breadboard
LED
Beating Heart Pendant
While reading through Charles Platt’s excellent book Make: Electronics, I came across this nice little circuit for making a gentle pulsing LED. I was struck by the “humanness” of the pulse, but couldn’t figure out what to do with it. Later I found a heart-shaped tag on some pants I had bought, and well, this […]
The Autophenakistoscope
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 […]
Dish-O-Tron 6000
I’m absentminded in general, but especially when it comes to the dishwasher. I can never remember whether the dishes are clean, whether the machine needs to be run, or emptied, or whatever. I needed a solution to this problem. My first thought was to hang a flippable sign on the door that said “clean” on […]
Laser Harp
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.
The Truth Meter
By Sean M. Montgomery and Ira M. Laefsky Excerpted from a Primer on Biosensing in MAKE Volume 26. When you experience an arousing stimulus, like an evocative question, a startling noise, or even a disturbing thought, your body generates a variety of psychophysical responses. One of these is micro-pulses of sweat released after a 1- […]
Arduino and Python: Learn Serial Programming
For this tutorial, you will need (or at least it is helpful to have) a knowledge of the Python programming language. You will also need an Arduino and, depending on how many of the projects below you want to work on, different electronic parts. Let’s dive in!
