If tunes are your sleeping pills, and you can’t dream without a soundtrack, now you can get cozy and fall asleep with your Pillow Music. Pillow Music was born from the experience of living — and trying to fall asleep every night — in small shared apartments with the nonstop sounds of the city in […]
Continue Reading
Clock radios are everyday hated devices that designers seem to ignore, judging by how little their features and user interfaces have changed. This project adds a new capability, letting would-be sleepyheads enjoy a human-machine interaction of a different sort. Don’t worry, we’re not going to connect your clock to an MP3 player and play mellow […]
Continue Reading
Powering a TV remote with the sun means you won’t have to buy batteries every six months to surf from your sofa. Low-voltage devices that use power only occasionally, like remotes, are good candidates for a solar-powered trickle-charge. Here’s how we modded our remote to live off of the sun, using rechargeable batteries connected in parallel with a small solar cell and a diode to keep any power from trickling back out.
Continue Reading
RC hobby servomotors were just made for hacking. What’s not obvious is how much you can hack them — with a few tricks, you can use a servo to control almost anything. Hobby servos consist of a DC gear motor, a potentiometer (usually 5K), and a control circuit. The output shaft is the output of […]
Continue Reading
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 […]
Continue Reading
Make this easy hot-wire foam cutter and reuse leftover EPS foam to create treasures from trash.
Continue Reading
“Bring It Back” Microgravity Kit by Prashant Rao & Subra Sankaran Prashant Rao, Ph.D., Principal Engineer, Barrios/Jacobs/ESCG Subra Sankaran, Ph.D., Senior Thermal Specialist, MEIT/Jacobs/ESCG at NASA JSC, 2224 Bay Area Blvd, Houston TX 77058 Three experiments are described here (with suggestions for additional experiments) that use molten wax in different setups to demonstrate important principles […]
Continue Reading
