From the MAKE Flickr pool Furan dug into an LED message scrolling badge to gain custom control – This is one of those el-cheapo led nametag badges. The inside of the badge had one of those gloptop chips between some pads for a smt chip, so I dremeled out the gloptop, reverse engineered the schematics […]
A brand spankin’ new big brother to the Duemilanove, the first pic of a new Arduino board has surfaced. The Mega uses an ATmega1280 surface mount chip and offers a whole big bunch of new features – 128KB of Flash 4KB RAM 4KB EEPROM 53 IO 4 HW UARTs 14 PWMs I2C bus 16 Analog […]
Joe Grand writes in with plans to build his POV wristwatch (mentioned here a while back) – Five years ago, I designed a prototype for a wristwatch based on the phenomenon of persistence-of-vision. Being a longtime runner, I thought it would be cool to be able to run at night without fumbling with my watch […]
From the NYCResistor crew comes this action-packed crash-course in capacitors – complete with a cliffhanger ending! Here’s hoping the saga continues with a miniature rescue mission via shrink ray (they must have one in their somewhere, right?) If after that, cap functionality still seems a bit fuzzy, check out this rather helpful little web demonstration […]
MAKE subscriber mtbf0 used a MiniPOV kit to create this rather sweet UV printer – This is a video of a phosphorescent text display that needs a name. It’s a minipov3 board with uv leds. It has a built-in 5×7 font and room for over 900 characters of display text. When passed over a phosphorescent […]
This Instructable shows you how to build a lighter-based 12v battery trickle charger made from a laptop power supply, a LM317T regulator, and an Altoids tin (and some other misc components). Car Battery Charger from Spare Parts in Mint Tin
When I first got involved in digital electronics, it took me awhile to understand the concepts of pull-up and pull-down resistors and when to use up or down, and when to use internal (built in, programmable) resistors, and when to use actual, discrete component, resistors. On Youritronics (a name that will always make me wince), […]
