Having a memorable business card is a big plus and we have seen some of these cards before, the Gear Business Card comes to mind. Aaron Alai has designed and created an Electronic Business Card that I guarantee no one who is lucky enough to receive will ever toss in the garbage. The only drawback is that each card takes Aaron 1 hour to make, hopefully he lands his dream job before making these business cards becomes a full time job!

“When I touch the business card a small and imperceivable (I can’t feel it) amount of current flows from the battery into my fingers and out to the transistor. Upon entering the transistor the small amount of current makes the transistor more conductive, allowing a greater number of electrons to flow through the transistor.  This greater number of electrons passes thought the light making it glow. “

Thanks to ioBridge for sponsoring the contest this week. They will be providing a serial LED to the contest winner, this product can be found on their online store. Nice thing about this serial LCD is that it can be connected to any of your microcontroller projects in addition to their popular IO-204 Monitor & Control Modules.

“This 16×2 serial LCD display plugs directly into an I/O channel and can be controlled from an ioBridge serial output widget or any other serial device.

• Adjustable backlight and contrast
• 16×2 characters
• Scrolling messages up to 100 characters
• Configurable backlight timer
• Built in vertical and horizontal gauge
• Control LCD by ioBridge widgets, javascript, or serial devices”

This contest will run for one week (March 13, 2010 – March 19, 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 27, 2010

The item to guess was a AAAA Cells From inside a 9 Volt Battery

The winner is Laurence W. (there were 316 entries)

Wow, we had lots of entries for this one!

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Below is a pictures of the prize.

Our friend Daniel Eindhoven from Megavolts has been hard at work improving on the coil gun that we featured here before. The new circuit modifications allows the gun to fire every second now. The new halogen charge resistors look much cooler also.

“At the moment the only limiting factor for fire rate is the charge time, this is the time the capacitor bank takes to get fully charged. This time can be influenced by the charging resistor, a lower value charge resistor will reduce the charge time but increase the charge current.

The first version of the CoilMaster has a 150W bulb as charge resistor, at the time I was pretty fond of the (relatively) short charge time. But I recently realized that it could be improved by a LOT. This upgrade takes charge time to the next level. In stead of one 150W bulb now  2x1000W halogen tubes are used, the entire charge circuit had to be upgraded to handle the peak currents.”

We have seen some some strange batteries before, the potato battery comes to mind. When I think of beer, electrolyte isn’t the first thing I think of but the picture above is a beer battery. Watch the video below to see the battery lighting an LED. Now it just needs to be scaled up a bit to charge an iPod.

Via HG Forum

“The core of this device is the voltaic pile invented by alesandro volta in the year 1800, which consists of a copper and zinc electrode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. For this experiment I replaced the salt water from his original design with beer! And it works!”

Our friends over at Gadget Gangster have recently released the El Jugador – Open-Source Game Console. If you had an old game console growing up it will probably bring back come memories. You can also see some additional information in the Instructable.

Via: HG Forum

“Features:

• Make your own games with just a little coding experience
• SD Card bootloader so you don’t need any special programming hardware
• PAL or NTSC video output with audio
• Dual Controller Ports for multiplayer games
• Modular so you can add modules things like battery packs or protoboards.
• High-Performance 32-bit, 160 MIPS CPU
• Open Source under the MIT license
• Overclock-able up to 200 MIPS with a 6.25Mhz Crystal”

If you like steampunk you are going to love this. This Steampunk Wheelchair Project is a work of art, other than the obvious donor electric wheel chair platform at the bottom the unit looks like it is something crazy from the past. The sound effects really top it off.

Via Adafruit and Make

“What you get when you mix an 1875 Eastlake Victorian platform rocking chair with a Permobil C300 Power wheelchair and a few trips to an antique store. Toss in screaming digital amped sound system, an event triggered sound processor, oh and a portable smoke machine!”

If you are looking for a nice DIY Binary Clock design have a look at this one by Kenneth Finnegan. It uses a sweet DS3232 RTC, but at a cost of $7.63 it better also do the dishes…

“The time is kept by a DS3232, which is a very cool chip in that it has a built in temperature sensor, which it uses to compensate the crystal to try and keep better time, and the crystal itself is built into the package, which is an advantage since I’m using this on a breadboard, and crystals don’t seem to like the stray capacitance on the boards that much.  This chip is quite a bit more expensive than the DS1307 I’ve usually been using for these projects, but both use the same address over I²C, so replacing one with the other is simply a matter of connecting the correct pins.”