• LEDs invade coffee table crevice
That’s a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [Tobias] sourced three display boards from Sure Electronics for a total of [...]
• LEDs invade coffee table crevice
That’s a lot of LEDs, and a little bit of glass cleaner. [Tobias] spiced up his IKEA coffee table by adding 6144 LEDs. This is a larger realization of SparkFun’s LED coffee table which used 64 8×8 modules. [Tobias] sourced three display boards from Sure Electronics for a total of [...]
• 137 years of Popular Science online free
137 years of the magazine Popular Science are now being hosted online by Google. You can peruse at your leisure, though you’ll have to search by keyword. We don’t see a date or issue browsing option. The cover art alone is worth your time, even if you’re not a fan of [...]
• Lucid dreaming
When we saw [merkz] use of an Arduino to produce lucid dreaming we were quite shocked. Unlike typical setups that just flash a light through sleep, his system monitors eye movement through electrodes and is able to send the data to a computer for graphing and analyzing. The only problem being we couldn’t [...]
• RC truck source for robotics platform
[Michael] sent us a link to his RC robotic platform. He started with the same RC toy as the iPhone Robot (CAR) but ended up with a blank slate waiting for more features. What he has is an Arduino with a motor driver, three bump switches for the front [...]
• Is GEK a modern-day Mr. Fusion?
[Nanomonkey] spent the weekend building generators that run off of syngas. All Powers Lab produces Gasifier Experimenter Kits to convert raw material to energy. The kits use Gasification to make a “natural gas like” fuel from materials such as wood chips, walnut shells, construction debris or agricultural waste.
So is [...]
• Monocle fixes webcam farsightedness
[Vik Oliver] came up with a webcam focus fix that is so quick and simple we never would have thought of it. He received the webcam as a gift and mounted on an articulated lamp so that it could easily be positioned around his projects. The problem is the camera lacks [...]
• Automatic telephone recorder
[James Bond] types and those suffering from a hefty dose of paranoia can now record all telephone conversations. [Trax] built this module that monitors the phone line and starts recording when a handset is picked up. A computer does the actual recording, triggered by the microcontroller via a USB connection.
We like the [...]
• Hacker finds better use for a Windows machine
[Patrick Becker] had an ancient PC on his hands with a blown PSU. He converted this into a stylish home for his Betta splendens.
The aquarium itself is fashioned from a piece for construction glass block with the top cut off. This allows for a window that looks [...]
• 112-LED coffee table
[Joe] tipped us off about his 112 LED coffee table. This 12-ups the LED matrix from Friday and 31-ups the Shiftbrite table. Driving this grid is an ATmega328 in i2c slave mode. It listens for display data from a second ATmega328 and uses that to set the array of TLC5940 driven LEDs [...]