Prototyping circuit designs are usually needed even after a circuit design has been developed in conjunction with a circuit simulator. Bruce Heran built this Vacuum Tube Prototyping Design Board to allow to test designs quickly and easily.

"I have frequently found that the models do not agree with the final build. Some are right on, but most are off enough to turn a good idea into a waste of time. Thus the need to quickly prototype designs. Now I could have created this board with many additional features - speakers, output transformers, LEDs… But what I needed was a simple way to test single stage tube circuits. So for simplicity I wired the tube pins together (pin 1 to pin 1 and so on). The leads from the pins are brought out to terminals on a “Euro” style terminal strip. I included several other “Euro” strips, a pair of RCA jacks, a 100 k-ohm variable resistor and solderless prototype breadboard. This solderless breadboard is available in various sizes from several sources."

A simple game is always much more fun when it is spiced up with some cool electronics. The wooden tilt maze game has been around for a long time. This Marble Maze that is Remote Controlled using an Accelerometer kicks up the original game by allowing the player to interact with the game using a controller that moves the real game according to user movements. Have a look at the project build details for all of the issues that were found during the construction.

Via: Trossen Robotics

"To control the servos I used a BOE development board with a BS2 microcontroller from Parallax along with a Memsic 2125 dual-axis accelerometer as the controller. The addition of the maze transforms this project from a electro-mechanical thing-a-ma-jig to an exciting hands-on game. For this project I choose to build a maze myself using balsa wood. This would allow me complete control of the maze difficulty and dimensions and also ensures the weight is kept to a minimum. I also found wooden balls to serve as the "marbles" for the maze. It just so happens that these balls and the balsa wood walls make a fun "thunk" noise whenever they collide."

How many times were you left frustrated trying to change the channel on the TV just to realize that the batteries are dead. Of course there are no more batteries in the house so you are forced to steal the batteries from a lesser used remote. Even more frustrating is when you need to use the remote that had the batteries robbed out of them. This problem may be a thing of the past, there is finally a remote control that is charged by picking it up and using it! Motion is what charges this cool unit.

Via: OhGizmo

"Sound power generation and NEC Electronics Corporation (President: Kohei Hayamizu, Location: Fujisawa City, Kanagawa Prefecture, following the sound power generation) today announced that power generation in vibration that occurs when you press the button on the remote control with your fingers, "Vibration power generation, "The combination of power control techniques and proprietary technology, a prototype remote control without batteries for consumer electronics."

This video shows how the common pole transformer is made. Overall it is a simple process. If you can get one of these you could also have some dangerous high voltage fun. The video below shows how a transformer works.

Marissa Mayer is the Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google. This talk gives you some behind the scenes concepts that have made Google the success power house that it is. She also mentions the famous Google 20% time, this is where you have 20% of your paid Google time to work on a concept that you have. Turns out that 50% of the released Google’s products last year grew out of the 20% time. It is nice to hear her talk openly about how Google can fail also (Google Video). On a side note enrique550 made a laugh compilation of Marissa’s contagious laugh.

Via: Reteno

"Marissa leads the company’s product management efforts on search products – web search, images, news, books, products, maps, Google Earth, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Health, Google Labs and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and web server teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies – outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters – for 6,000+ people (employees plus family and friends)."

In College I remember rifling through my now tattered yellow Texas Instruments TTL Reference Book. Texas Instruments has been constantly developing interesting products and is holding an event called eTech Days where they will hold a number of online technical training sessions. It is going to be held tomorrow (November 17th), so have a look at the lineup, register and enjoy some interesting sessions tomorrow. I am looking forward to checking some of them out and hope to see some of you there!

Via: HG Forum

"On November 17th, 2009, please join us to interact with experts from Texas Instruments, TI Developer Network and the open source community, in technical training sessions and in the E2E Community forums. A full schedule can be found below, and see the Getting Started links to the right. Click here to register for the live training and we’ll see you on November 17th.
To participate in ‘Office Hours’ on the E2E community forums, click here to log in, or if you aren’t an E2E Community member yet, sign up for an account."

PyroElectro has built an interesting motor Optical Motor Encoder system that allows a sled to move back and forth using optical feedback to know where the sled is. A L298 DC Motor Controller is used to drive the simple DC motor that is used to precisely position the sled. You may remember this CD-ROM Read Head Actuator Head Scratcher article from earlier in the year where I was wondering how a simple DC motor could be used to precisely position a CD-ROM read write head.

"The goal of this tutorial is to create a way to know where the ’stage’ is, accurate to about 1/4” using optical encoding. The stage is controlled via a 12v motor so we will use an L298 motor controller for controlling the motor via a 18F4520 PIC. The PIC will use hardware PWM generators to output the correct frequency & duty cycle. The PIC will also take the analog input from the IR detector diode to keep track of how far the stage has moved via an internal analog to digital converter (ADC)."