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If you are looking for a new desk lamp don’t go to Walmart, get out some hand tools (or a CNC or Laser Cutter) out and make your own. This crazy Wooden LED Desk Lamp Project design was done by jeff-o. He installed a 3 watt LED in the head for a nice amount light. “The majority of the lamp is made of 1/4″ and 1/2″ Baltic Birch plywood. I love using this stuff to make things – a quick skim of my other Instructables will confirm that! It’s strong and stable and easy to cut – and it’s made of a renewable resource! Everything is designed to be cut out of either 1/4″ or 1/2″ plywood. Since there are many identical parts, you can stack the 1/4″ wood and cut it in pairs. Not only is this faster, it also ensures that the joints are precisely aligned (this is important for the arms and joints especially).”
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With all the technology around us there will often come a time when you wish it would work in a slightly different way. Well unless you work as one of the design engineers in the company that made the product chances are you will just have to suck it up and live with what was produced. Well when Matt from Openschemes was in this situation with his Western Digital WDTV he decided to whip up a small circuit to make it work as he wanted. Turns out that the WDTV doesn’t really turn off, it just goes into a mode that looks like it is sleeping. Matt made the WDTV Remote Control External Power Circuit shown above to allow him to remotely turn the darn thing off for real. The board design and construction is well documented, a photo etch method is used etch a copper clad board and the coding of the PIC chip microcontroller can be seen here in this follow-up article. “The WDTV remote uses the NEC infrared protocol at 38kHz to transmit commands to the WDTV. This 38kHz stream of blinks is demodulated by the IR receiver to a relatively slow serial datastream which is then piped to the PIC. So here’s the (software) scheme.
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Daniel Garcia from Protostack has made a good tutorial describing the steps to Understand How to use External Interrupts on an ATmega168. It is nice to forget about manually coding to look for changes in state of inputs and other conditions within the microcontroller. Interrupts allow us to keep on doing real work while the system keep monitoring for changes. “Microcontroller interrupts are just like that.
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I had never heard of the system that this radio used to be used on. It was tied into the telephone system and received the audio programming over the phone line. Since this system has been discontinued the 1953 Radio was upgraded to play MP3s and FM Radio. The neat thing about the conversion is that it still uses all the original electronics to make the sound so it still sounds like it is from the 50s! Thanks Muris. “The idea is that the mp3 player and the FM receiver’s audio signals are re-modulated by using an AM modulator to keep the sound quality as it was. The radio now has IR remote that is actually from a car mp3 player (see the last image). The radio receives FM stations from a tuner PCB taken out from a working FM radio receiver.”
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John Boxall of Tronixstuff is known for his electronic kit reviews, he recently did a hands on build review of our IR Jammer Kit. You have to love his Fluke meter, if you haven’t seen one of these before you might think it’s a meter the size of a display but it’s actually a normal sized meter with a removable display. This would allow the display be placed in a convenient location to view it while the meter and probes are deep inside the system being inspected. The picture below is a shot of the IR LEDs all on, I think this was probably hard to capture since they are flashing very quickly. Of course the infrared LEDs are invisible to our naked eye but this shows a trick to see them which is to view them through a camera. As John mentions the IR Jammer (infrared jammer) would make a great companion to the TV-B-Gone, his evil plan is to turn off a TV, then jam the TV so that it can’t be turned on. I am thinking that would make for a nice cruel joke.
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Check out this great Windows Home Server built into Fine Furniture build over at Once Around the Block. The build is broken down into build post 1, 2 and 3. The finished system looks great but I think my favorite feature is the power on light which is an edge lit piece of plastic that has been inserted into the edge of a drawer. The power on button has also been hidden inside the drawer. “The server build was completed by fitting the Samsung hard drive behind the power supply. I made some mounting brackets out of right angled metal brackets I found at the hardware store (they are actually “concealed perlin cleats”). They allow enough height for me to eventually add a second hard drive underneath the first, although at this stage that space is filled with the surplus power supply cables.” |
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The prize this week is a loupe magnifier, this will let you get a close look at whatever you are working on. This contest will run for one week (Sept 4 – 10, 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 winner will be chosen at random from all of the correct entries. ———————————–———- Added September 12, 2010 The item to guess was Nintendo DSi Board The winner is Aleksander M. (there were 128 entries) ————————————–———- Below is a picture of the prize.
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