Kiriakos Triantafyllou from Volos – Greece is a 40 years old  Industrial electrician. He shares this project on the EEVBlog Forum which shows us how he built a professional looking DIY Resistors Decade Box.  Have a look at some of the very neat wiring, I am thinking this looks better than some of the vintage electronic gear I have taken apart where everything used to be point to point wired. With an end cost over 109 Euros it wasn’t a cheap build but it should last a lifetime so the cost is really no big deal in the long term. The labels make the system look store bought, believe it or not they were just printed with a HP 970 Cxi  printer on glossy photo paper.

You all know I have a thing for meter clocks. Instructables user Doug Paradis built this one around the MSP430 microcontroller platform, check out the cool variety of meters that he is using! I love the big clunky looking Simpson meter that is being used for the hours. Doug got his inspiration from the ShareBrained clock.

Via: Hack a Day

“It has 3 push buttons, two of which allow you to adjust the minutes and hours. Pushing the minute or hour buttons will increment the minute or hour values by one. The third button is a reset button. Analog panel meters have inherent nonlinearities, especially cheap or old meters with wear and dirt. We also add nonlinearities to the meter by driving them using PWM (pulse width modulation) and by our homemade meter scales. The c program for this project handles this by providing 2 arrays that are used to individually tune the meter readings.”

We normally see snakebots swimming in pools and they can climb inside pipes but check out how well this CMU Snakebots can Climb Trees, it is a creation from the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Via: Botjunkie

“From the Biorobotics Lab at Carnegie Mellon University, a snake robot (Snakebot) demonstrates how it can climb a tree and look around.

Please keep in mind that this robot climbed a specific tree with a specific trunk width about 1 meter off of the ground. The researchers working to design, build and program these robots still have much work to do to get these bots to climb taller trees of various sizes and to navigate over branches and wires.”

Back in 1959 a small garage was rented and a DIY television studio was born. The TV station was called PJ-TV because they were located in Port Jervis. They were broadcasting to its viewers instead of using the airwaves. Seems that things have come full circle, all of the big networks are turning to IP TV for a large portion of their offering and other initiatives such as TWIT and Revision 3 are solely internet based and entering the viewers homes on wires.

The 19 by 20 garage reminds me of the TWIT cottage a bit, they have recently expanded their staff and have taken over more rooms in the cottage so it’s now larger than the 380 sq foot PJ-TV garage though. For a look at the tour of the TWIT cottage that Mostly Lisa (Lisa Bettany) recorded have a look at the bottom of this article.

One day Hacked Gadgets will need to do a road trip and visit Leo Laporte at TWIT and Kevin Rose at Revision 3!

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Frank has completed the next phase in the Dune Bug E Build, we saw the last build update back in May. It is interesting to see what is involved in making a normal differential into a locked differential, this process allows both rear wheels to always be powered with no slipping. The gearing has also been changed increasing the top speed of the vehicle.

“Since the internal gear ratios were unchanged the 22 tooth drive sprocket was upgraded to a 38 tooth unit as pictured here. This has bumped the top speed on level ground to approx 35Km/hr, though the chain noise is considerably louder.

Basic stats and generalizations – the Bug-E can cover 8 to 12Km from the Parallel combined battery banks, with a flat ground top speed of approx 35Km/hr, factors that affect range are Solo or Passenger driving, terrain, aggressiveness of driving.”