Watch High Voltage Plasma Vortices Dance On Your Speaker
The vortex of arcing electricity seen in Anthony Garofalo’s speakers rely on the Lorentz force. It’s a super cool effect that you must watch!
electricity
This High Voltage Robot Sculpture Is as Scary as It Is Cute
This tiny EPROM robot sculpture will shock you!
Why You Should Be Using a Linear Voltage Regulator
If your project requires stable voltage but you have an unregulated input, you’ll want to use the right kind of linear voltage regulator.
Use 10,000 Volts to Light Your Tiki Torch
This tiki torch uses super high voltage to ignite itself electronically.
Paint Your Circuits with Bare Conductive
At World Maker Faire, I finally got to see paintable circuits in action. Matt Johnson spoke with me about the conductive paint that people were using and showed me a few projects that demonstrate the possibilities. The business cards they brought were printed with a swath of conductive paint suitable for some home experimenting.
Bare Conductive grew out of the founders’ graduate studies at the Innovation Design Engineering Course at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. The version of their conductive paints they had at Maker Faire is similar to the skin paint featured in a music video of a few years back.
The paints can be used to create traditional circuits, and for signalling with the Arduino. Since the company has just passed its’ regulatory approvals, we can expect to see many new experiments as the community of users grows.
Hurricane Irene: What Worked, What Didn’t?
A little while ago, the utility gods smiled upon my house, renewing the electricity, telephone and internet. Hurricane Irene provided many people an opportunity to examine our cultural commitment to the systems of technology. We were without these modern amenities for about 48 hours, long enough to regain a healthy appreciation.
Thinking back upon my family’s recent technology vacation, it occurs to me that more things fell into the ‘Works Fine’ category than the ‘Doesn’t Work’ category. There’s also the ‘Works, but…’ column, which may be the most interesting to us makers. Having things stop working gives a great view into the systems that we depend on, how they work, how they fail, and what we can do to either prevent failure or deal with it when it comes our way.
Circuit Skills: PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)
Collin explains Pulse Width Modulation, a simple method for controlling analog devices via a digital signal.
