Electronics

Spare parts Enterprise boldy goes …

Spare parts Enterprise boldy goes …

From the MAKE Flickr pool … where no LED has gone before. Observe the maiden voyage of a tiny space-faring ship. Upon encountering the above-seen “magnetic anomaly” the ship’s onboard magnetic reed switch is activated. Chief engineer Origamiwolf explains the ship’s schematics – A resistor is added to each of the red LED branches; this […]

Piezo sound meter

Piezo sound meter

Over at NerdKits, Humberto shows how to build a piezoelectric-based sound meter fed to an LED display, using their USB NerdKit. By using the piezoelectric buzzer that comes in the kit as a microphone, and adding a transistor and a few other components, you can create a sound meter and send its output to an […]

The elliptical Stella sequencer

The elliptical Stella sequencer

From the MAKE Flickr pool JoeLMutantE’s DIY step sequencer looks about as high-end as it gets. Dubbed the Project Stella, the rack-mountable monster was created as an antidote to standard linear interfaces – Stella is an analog step sequencer based on an old P3 sequencer kit. It has been made trying to make some different […]

The RGB coffee table

The RGB coffee table

From the MAKE Flickr pool Macetech built this dazzling RGB coffee table – IKEA Granas side table (over 2×2 feet, big enough for coffee table) with 9×9 array of 81 ShiftBrite RGB LED modules. Currently running a simple sine plasma into HSV/RGB conversion on an Arduino (Seeeduino). Wow – more than a conversation piece, I’m […]

Arduino-powered Braitenberg vehicle

Arduino-powered Braitenberg vehicle

For the next issue of MAKE, our second robot-themed issue, I’m doing a review of one of my favorite robot-related books, Valentino Braitenberg’s Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. It is a seminal work in robotics, especially with behavior-based robotics, BEAM, and other forms of simple, bottom-up robot architectures. Alex at Tinkerlog decided to build a […]