Monopole writes in about an open source 3D camera – “Stereoscopic Camera and Camcorder Synchronizer using the commonly available LANC camera control ports. Based on the Atmel ATMega8 microcontroller. Both the software and the hardware is open source, with board layouts on the website.” Link.
NextBrick.net has a post about some really cool LEGO’s from the 60’s and 70’s from Mario, he writes “Dedicated to those of you LEGOmaniacs who are too young to remember the first years of Lego, or who have never had the opportunity to see some of these relics. During my childhood I spent tons of hours playing with Lego, and a large part of my small week’s pay buying spare parts. It would have been strange not to receive at least one Lego set at or birthday. My sister Elena and my brother Stefano are just one and two years younger than I am. They were very fond of Lego too and we usually played together to build very large cities. Not all of our Lego survived, but we still own a very large bunch of pieces, which I am pleased to share with you in this page.” Link.
We’ve had a few emails and posts about folks who wanted to build their own lie detector, here’s one (and how it works) – “The circuit diagram of the Lie Detector is shown above. It consists of three transistors (TR1 to TR3), a capacitor (C1), two lights or LEDs (L1 & L2), five resistors (R1 to R5), and a variable resistor (VR1). Suitable transistors to use are BC547, BC548 or BC549, or any other small NPN transistor. The Lie Detector circuit works based on the fact that a person’s skin resistance changes when they sweat (sweating because they’re lying). Dry skin has a resistance of about 1 million ohms, whereas the resistance of moist skin is reduced by a factor of ten or more.” Link.
Harvey writes “Where US Taxpayer’s have already bought the best equipment (Like $2,000 hammers) and you can pick up it up for a faraction of its original cost. Get electronics and test equipment, pumps and motors, battaries and computer equipment by the pallet! Buy entire pallets of parts at a time and make the impractical dream a reality! NOTE: Read the fine print and watch out for shipping costs!” Link. I’m bookmarking this for the occasional requests we get for surplus or bizarre decommissioned gear.
Jason from Preshrunk writes “The gang over at Vestal Design have made and documented a really killer bar made out of somewhere in the neighborhood of 700 discarded library books. Well, I know I’d totally make one if I had that many books laying around.” Link.
Excellent set of photos of the construction of cigar box guitars from Pasque – “I am building guitars out of cigar boxes with my students. Here are some photos of the prototype I built at home (now updated with photos of my students’ guitars). I went begging and got a bunch of wooden fingerjointed cigar boxes. The fee… a photo of my students with their guitars, a fair trade. The project idea came from Make magazine Vol. 4.“ Link.
Ian writes “This ‘instructable’ covers my new design that programs 8/14/18/28/40 pin PICs. The circuit is based on the JDM2 programmer, with two enhancements: clock and data line filtering; selectable programming voltage. The ZIP archive contains all the project files. Schematic layout for an updated JDM2 PIC Programmer. Includes clock & data filter, Vpp voltage divider for modern PIC microcontrollers (eg USB PIC 18F2455/4455).” Link.
