Computer

Whack-a-Mole Game

Whack-a-Mole Game

Jim Chen designed an excellent electronic “Whack-a-Mole” game using 555 timers, LEDs, and bent-diode touch sensors, that you can build on a solderless breadboard

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SketchUp 101

SketchUp 101

For decades, computer-aided design (CAD) applications were expensive tools used only by a limited circle of designers and engineers. Now Google has offered CAD to the masses, with SketchUp, a free program that’s intuitive to use. In this tutorial we’ll be modeling a charging caddy: a box to house a power strip and chargers, with […]

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The Autophenakistoscope

The Autophenakistoscope

Motorize a phenakistoscope, a 19th-century parlor novelty that preceded motion pictures, and keep its frames synched to an LED strobe by using a sensor and an Arduino microcontroller. Invented in 1832 by Joseph Plateau, this device creates a moving picture from a sequence of stills arranged on a spinning disk and viewed through strategically cut […]

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Photo Flipbook

Photo Flipbook

One of my fondest memories of being a kid is my dad teaching me how to make animations. We’d take a notebook and draw pictures in the top margin of each page. Each picture would be one frame of the animation, so that when you flipped the pages, you could see the object in motion. […]

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Laser Harp

Laser Harp

I once saw someone playing music by breaking laser beams with his hands. I thought it was fake, but discovered it was real and made my own laser harp.

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Listening to Satellites with a Homemade Yagi Antenna

Listening to Satellites with a Homemade Yagi Antenna

One of my favorite things to do is talk with other ham radio operators through satellites or the International Space Station (ISS). To do this, I stand on a rooftop and tune a handheld multiband radio while tracing the orbit of a satellite or the ISS with my homemade yagi antenna.

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