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.
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Many cheap, fun sonic and musical toys have built-in speakers and no output jack. This limits their volume, unless you constantly hold them up to a microphone. Here’s how to mod these devices so you can plug them in, adjust their volume, and rock out. The simplest way to install an output jack is to […]
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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 […]
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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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For many years I have been searching for temperature-recording equipment. There were a lot of types available, such as old paper chart recorders. For computers there are various types, some expensive, single-channel, DIY units requiring programming, ADC (Analog to Digital Converters) with poor voltage sensitivity at thermocouple levels, and requiring a power supply to take […]
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I’m lazy. My impatience often leads me to botch important steps when I make yogurt. So to get better control over the fermentation process, I made a crockpot thermostat attachment to precisely control the temperature. You can buy electric yogurt makers, but most of them only incubate; the heating/sterilization step still has to be done […]
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I’m fascinated by sous vide cooking, in which foods vacuum-sealed in plastic are immersed in a precisely temperature controlled hot water bath to achieve optimal doneness. But most sous vide (soo-veed) cooking machines are commercial models that cost north of $2,000, and the first “home” version, the countertop SousVide Supreme, is priced in the […]
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