Long before the dawn of digital music, folks employed the power of the electric color organ (aka “light organ”) to add some synced visuals to their hi-fi experience. Schematics for building such a beast based on AC power and incandescent bulbs can be be found fairly easily on the web, but plans for comparable LED-based […]
Our geek BFF, Jeri Ellsworth, has tickled our exploratory fancies again (and continued to push the “don’t try this at home” envelope) with a chemistry hack of re-doping common ZnS:Cu green glow powder to arrive at her own blue electroluminescent (EL) powder. Nice work, Jer! Make Electroluminescent (EL) Ink at Home – Re-doping Glow Powder
If you haven’t already heard, we’re excited to be running the Make It Last, a project build series and contest, sponsored by Microchip and Energizer. Throughout the course of this series, we’re going to cover three project builds, each demonstrating an example of low-power design using microcontrollers. Just getting started? We suggest you take a […]
Once the growing sprawl of electronic parts starts showing up in your dreams, you know you’ve got some tidying up to do. It can be a challenge to spend quality hacking time on humdrum sorting & parts organization, but of course, in the long run it’s a no-brainer. I’ve yet to discover a magical motivator* […]
Morten Nisker tweeted this serviceable little portable electronics bench he built so that he could carry all of his electronics tools and supplies in a handy carrying case. He realized that he didn’t do that many electronics projects because it was kind of a hassle to scare everything up from far flung corners of the […]
Our pal Jeri has a few more installments of her videos exploring making your own EL wire and displays. In the first vid above, she shows how she twisted the enameled and bare wires to create the EL wire detailed in her previous vid. In the second video above, she shows how she used some […]
I’ve tried my hand at quite a few different methods for circuit building — breadboard, perfboard, custom etching, even some boardless freeform wiring, but somehow, I never got around to using surface-mount parts (until now, that is). Understandably, many balk at the idea of soldering the infamously tiny SMD packages, but once equipped with the […]
