There are lots of items out there that promote proper tooth brushing, you can get toothbrushes that play a tune for a few minutes, you can get toothbrush timers but there is nothing that can tell you how long you need to spend on each section of your teeth. That is where the Arduino based Toothbrushing aid called the Brushduino comes in. It knows when you are brushing by the accelerometer that gets attached to the brush and tells you where you should be brushing and when it’s time to move to the next section of your mouth. This gadget may seem a bit far fetched but I can see this being fun enough that kids would use it.

Thanks Steve.

“It’s basically all LED’s. There are 6 white LED’s that correspond to the six regions of the mouth that I want to highlight, there are four green LED’s for showing progress and there’s a speaker I pulled out of some broken toy that’s there to entertain the children while they brush. The multi-strand wire connected to the three analog inputs on the Arduino also supplies 3.3v and ground to the accelerometer. The cable itself is an old ADB keyboard cable from my old Mac SE/30 from back in the day. It’s been laying in my junk box for ages. There are also some current limiting resistors for the LED’s and a bunch more of that lovely AWG30 solid core wire I like so much.”

If you are a light sleeper and don’t need much to wake you up in the morning then this DIY Gentle Wake Up Alarm Clock by Michiel Spithoven might be the ticket for you. On the other hand if you can sleep through a thunderstorm then you may want to look into a real loud alarm clock instead.

“First I wrote some test code to check of a small microchip with internal crystal can manage to keep track of time. Well.., uuuuh.., the result was I lost three minutes a hour, not great.
Not having any crystals and it being Sunday I search for other ways of getting a decent timing signal. After some brainstorming I pulled a old alarm clock and search for a usable signal, I struck gold with a nice 1Hz signal.”

Our friend Bob Davis is working on an experimental device he calls an Ionic Spinner. It’s working but still needs some fine tuning. The first video he describes the creation but the demo doesn’t work too well, in the second video you can see the modified design and the spinner spinning away. Bob is using a TV flyback transformer in this experiment so use extreme caution if you attempt to build your own!

“Basically the idea is to take some needels and mount them in opposite directions on the ends of a wire that has a loop in the center that goes over the top of a Tesla Coil or similar high voltage device.  Then when the high voltage is turned on and sparks fly off the ends of the needels the spinner starts rotating in circles.”

Thanks to Stanley for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a Compact HID Spotlight to a lucky contest winner. This flashlight would have come in handy last year when we did some travels and visited a number of campgrounds. It usually ended up being dark when we were setting up camp and light was always an issue. We had a number of flashlights but you can never have one that is too bright.

With a 10 second warmup time and an output of 3000 lumens this $69.99 flashlight is sure to be a hit for Stanley. It can be charged from a cigarette lighter in 2 hours so there is no more dead battery problems.

This contest will run for one week (February 20, 2010 – February 26, 2010) . Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above and give an example of what can be done with it.

Please do not give the answer in the comments.

Send an email to contest @ hackedgadgets.com with “Name the Thing Contest” as the subject, and the message body consisting of:

• The name of the item in the above picture
• An example of what the item pictured above can be used for

The winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries.

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Added Mar 10, 2010

The item to guess was a Voltage Regulator

The winner is Andrew C. (there were 158 entries)

I was totally impressed by the bunch of people who described sections of the circuit and how they function!

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Below is a pictures of the prize.

We have seen tons of cool rubber band guns and lots of potato guns but I think this is the first Sausage Gun I have ever seen. The resulting gun after a 4 hour build looks like lots of fun. I guess it would be classified as a less lethal weapon since I think it would hurt but I don’t think it could kill.

Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from the Netherlands has got his hands on an interesting piece of ancient medical equipment. He will be refurbishing this Voodoo Magic High Frequency Healing Device from the 1930s. I wonder if Dr. Eindhoven does house calls. It is truly quite shocking what people used to do to cure you. I guess some of its applications are not far fetched even these days though.

“This device works with some kind of electrodes consisting of glass tubes filled with different types of gas. There was also a copy of a leaflet with all the different electrodes that they sold in this particular shop. Prices in guilders. Most electrodes should go at very odd places, some at your eyes, others in holes and crevices which I can not mention here, partly because I won’t be able to access my own site anymore (due to the filter). I made sure to clean and disinfect the electrodes thoroughly, and I’m (obviously) not going to use them in the manner they were intended.”

Here is an interesting Linear Clock that is driven by two Stepper Motors. It is using an Arduino Mega as the brain and an Adafruit motor shield to interface to two stepper motors. The stepper motors turn a lead screw that moves two nuts up an down to indicate the current time.

Via: Adafruit