Congratulations to Joseph, winner of the latest Weekend Projects giveaway. You get a Maker’s Notebook and a Mintronics: Survival Pack (above). The Mintronics pack includes many of the components that we’ve been working with over the past few months in Weekend Projects. And with the notebook, Joseph will be able to jot down his project ideas in the years ahead.
If you’ve been wanting to dive into basic electronics but haven’t figured out where to begin or are too intimidated by circuit schematics and Printed Circuit Boards, and want to start with something simple, then this is the project for you! The Solar USB Charger, our latest addition to Weekend Projects, combines the very familiar technologies of a solar cell and a USB cable to convert the sun into USB power.
In working on the builds for Weekend Projects, we’ve been dealing a lot with resistors of different values (indicated by the color bands on the resistors themselves). Trying to figure out the values of these common components can be confusing to new electronics hobbyists, so I thought it would be helpful to share some tips […]
We at MAKE love how RadioShack has returned to the DIY fold, and this series of videos, hosted by Meredith Scheff and Ken Murphy, are really well done and worth a watch.
In celebration of the Wearable Light Organ (above), our 10th electronics project in the Weekend Projects series, we’re doing another giveaway. This time, you could win a Maker’s Notebook AND a Maker Shed Mintronics: Survival Pack which is packed with some of the very components we’ve been using in many of our projects.
About the size of two 9V batteries, and powered by only one, our latest Weekend Project, the Light Organ, is both portable and fun! The beating heart of this project is the LM324 Integrated Circuit (IC), the black chip in the middle of the board. This legendary IC actually has four operational amplifiers (or “op-amps”) embedded in it, although for the purpose of this project, we’re only using two.
A homemade alarm system made from two “normally closed” audio jacks is the focus of our most recent Weekend Project, the Alarm Bag. The alarm system, built into an enclosure (above), can be installed into any bag (in our project, a messenger bag is used) or even modified to act as a door or window alarm. The 2-jack design means the alarm will activate whenever the second audio jack (the trigger) is removed.
