This NIXIE Clock Multimeter that Flickr member Shklaw looks fantastic. I think it’s because both components are retro. We have the old world NIXIE tubes stuffed into an old multimeter housing! It is based on the NIXI clocks from this site.

“These nixie tubes are NL-5440A’s. The banana sockets were replaced with switches to set the hours and minutes. When the rotary switch on the left is set to OP, the clock is off, when it its set to AC, the clock is on (but can’t be set) and when the switch is set to DC, the clock it still on and you can set the time using the push buttons. The ohms adjust dial on the right controls the brightness of the blue up lighting (fully off to quite bright!).”

If you love old video games this new version of PONG is sure to make you smile. The guys over at Evil Mad Scientists Laboratories have knocked this one out of the park! It is mostly laser cut plywood and plastic with only a touch of electronics.

Via: Hack A Day

“Inside the wooden paddle box are two timing belt pulleys. One is turned directly by a knob that will be added to the top, and the othe is free spinning. As the timing belt turns it slides the paddle assembly, which is mounted to the linear slide system and can move up and down the slot.

The overall feeling that you get turning the knob is a lot like operating foosball controls.”

This morning is SparkFun Free Day, make sure you claim your swag! I love the idea, SparkFun is obviously expecting a ton of traffic since they beefed up their servers for this special occasion but I wonder how well they will cope? If you get some stuff leave us a comment and let us know how it went.

Here are the details.

“For those of you unfamiliar with SparkFun’s Free Day (see the original post here), here it is in a nutshell. Starting at 9AM MST (that’s 11 AM EST) on Thursday, January 7th, 2010, each customer will receive $100 towards their order until we reach a limit of $100,000. You’ll have to take care of shipping.

There really are no catches, but there are a few rules for fairness’ and logistic’s sake:

• $100 max per person (cheating kills kittens)
• You pay shipping
• Limit of $100,000 in giveaways for the day
• Starts 9AM MST January 7th, 2010
• Ends 11PM MST January 7th, 2010 (or when we hit $100k, whichever comes first)
• Rainchecks for popular items will be allowed
• There is no special code to type in. But you get only one order on Free Day, so spend it well!
• Only one $100 credit per household. We ask that you respect this limit and don’t try to abuse this gift.
• There is no minimum or maximum order. You can spend more than $100, the balance of which will be charged to your method of payment.
• Only Credit Card and Paypal orders will be eligible for the $100 credit. We don’t want to have people tying up inventory with POs, wire transfers, checks in the mail, or lost faxes.
• You will see whether or not your order qualifies for a credit in the checkout process.
• Free Day does not apply to our distributors. Sorry!
• Gift Cards cannot be bought on Free Day.
• Any returns from Free Day will be exchanged for the same item.
• Every order isn’t going to ship on Free Day, or for a few days after. We’ve got extra tape guns on hand, but please be patient and give us some time to catch up!
• We are ratcheting up inventory for Free Day, but backorders (a.k.a. rainchecks) are allowed on most items (some items we simply can’t get anymore). We’ll get you your goodies just as soon as we can get them back in stock.”

You might remember the Hard Drive Oscilloscope project that was made about 3 and a half years ago (wow how time flies). Over the years there have been lots of people who have been inspired by it and built a project similar to it. Here is one, here is another, and one more for good measure. I was amazed to see that there was actually about 30 of them built! This Dual Hard Drive Laser Drawing Machine works in a similar way but actually uses 2 hard drives to provide more control of the laser beam.

“Lux Vocis works like so: a user speaks into a microphone and my puredata patch picks out the most commonly recurring spectral peaks of the voice.  These frequencies are then used as seeds for a Lissajous figure, which is then drawn on the surface by oscillating the two mirrors attached to the hard drive voice coils.”

If you have a hard time coming up with a good excuse in a split second then you need this PIC 16F690 based Emergency Excuse Generator. Next time the boss calls all you will need to do is give the big red button a press and bingo you will have an instant excuse to recite to your boss. Full build details, code and schematics are provided.

I haven’t heard of the random number generation method used here before. I guess the built in pseudo-random PIC random number was not good enough? Maybe the creator can leave a comment to clear that up.

Thanks for the tip Alexander.

“Any time the need arises, you will have an original, freshly-generated excuse ready in seconds. One press of the button can get you out of a tight spot ensuring smooth sailing toward retirement and guaranteeing that you don’t have to perform any actual work.

Most similar projects use the user input (for example, the length of time a button is down) to generate random numbers. The button press time is used this way here too, but this is not enough for the Excuse Generator. One can get just several random bits out of a single button press, and for this project we need a constant flow of random numbers, even with a low degree of randomness. To deal with this problem I came up with the RC circuit connected to RB5. Most of the time RB5 is configured as an output that keeps the capacitor discharged. When a random number is needed RB5 is configured as a high-impedance input. The capacitor starts charging through the 1M resistor, while the microcontroller counts the elapsed time. When the capacitor voltage reaches logical 1 level, the value of the counter is taken as a random number. This works pretty well because the slow charging through the 1M resistor and the exact level at which logical 1 is detected by the microcontroller are quite noisy processes. However, special care must be taken when choosing the capacitor and resistor. I would recommend using a film/foil type capacitor- anything with low leak current. Depending on your capacitor, you may have to use different resistor value. Higher values will mean higher degree of randomness, but slower response time for the Excuse Generator.”

So a few days ago we featured a video that Dave Jones did about how he fixed his plasma TV. Well he didn’t really fix it as many of our commenters pointed out, in the end the clever fix was to mask the problem to make it mostly usable again. Johannes mentioned in the EEVblog comments that he saw this video. It is a much superior solution since Dave only masks the issue, in this video you can clearly see that it’s no more invasive (don’t need to take off the cover). And it brings the picture quality back to the original state. Tools are minimal and you probably already have a baseball bat in your closet.

Just in case someone stumbles on this article looking for a way to actually fix their plasma TV, please don’t fix your TV with a baseball bat unless it is non reparable. In that case whack away to get your frustrations out!

Our friends are back at it, the Suzuki Electric Bike project wasn’t a big enough challenge I guess. The new project is the Dune Bug E which is a Dune Buggy Electric Conversion. By the looks of the tear down there won’t be one bolt on the donor vehicle that will be left untouched.