Some scrap plywood and a sheet of plexiglass fitted with a few cents’ worth of hardware is all it takes to get those must-frame items out of your drawers and onto your walls.
The George Nelson ball clock is a neat little slice of mid-century art and architecture, but with the current licensed reproduction selling for around $265, I decided that if I were going to have one, it would have to be an unofficial version.
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.
Using this simple technique, you can etch a design into a thin pane of clear plastic sheeting, then enclose the edges of the plastic with reflective tape and embed a battery-powered LED.
Computers add binary numbers constantly, but we never see how.
For this project, you need to have a Linux computer, or else the things I describe will not work.
Would you let your guests crap in a box on your floor?
This project will take about 8 hours.
The room needed a few new nautical additions, so I took an old lamp and gave it a re-vamp using thick boat rope, and adding a new shade with hand-painted stripes on it.
While reading through Charles Platt’s excellent book Make: Electronics, I came across this nice little circuit for making a gentle pulsing LED.
Fans of Patrick McGoohan’s classic BBC spy series The Prisoner will recognize this gimmick from Episode 15, “The Girl Who Was Death.” This is a pint glass with words etched on the bottom (in authentic “Village” font) that appear line by line as the liquid is imbibed.
In this project, I will show how to put the Lejos NXJ firmware on your NXT and load a simple program.