A bench power supply is a must for any hardware tinkerer, this DIY Digital Bench Power Supply by Microsyl is a bit high end and much more than you need but in the end you will have a great system to enhance your bench. If you would like to make one from parts you probably have laying around you can make a cheap bench power supply from a spare ATX computer power supply.

Via: Hack a Day

“ Features

• Output Voltage adjustable from 0 to 25v
• Output Current adjustable from 0 to 5amp
• Digital reading of set points for current & voltage and output current & voltage.
• No need of multi tap transformer or center tap transformer
• Short circuit protected
• Very low cost”

The guys over at Nerd Kits have made a cool Human Theremin project that uses Infrared Light. IR light from an infrared LED is bounced off someones hand and some of the light is reflected back onto an infrared transistor. The closer the hands are the more IR light is reflected back onto the IR transistor. The output of the IR circuit is fed into a Nerd Kit microcontroller and sounds are created based on the analog values. As Humberto demonstrates this makes for a cool wearable project that allows for cool interactions. The same IR technique was used in the Nerf Gun Hack when an IR LED and IR transistor were used to make an invisible beam which fired the gun when crossed.

“This project recreates the properties of a musical instrument called the theremin. A theremin is played without the performer having physical contact with the instrument. A “normal” theremin uses two antennas and changing electric fields to sense the position of the players hands (not unlike our previous Capacitive Proximity Sensor from last Halloween); one hand controls the pitch of the note, and the other hand controls the volume or amplitude of the note.”

I love looking at old tech. Year after year the technology around us increases in power and shrinks, could you imagine if this happened in other areas of our life? If engine technology followed the same evolution we would have a 1000 HP power plant in all of our cars and it would be filled up with a cup of fuel. It’s hard to believe that within our lifetime computer technology has come so far! You may remember this huge hard drive from the 50s that needed a forklift to move around but as we can see in the 80s the hard drives were still a 2 person lift! For a full look at this Old Computer Data Center have a look at the English Russia photo spread.

Ming-Zher Poh who is a MIT student studying  Electrical and Medical Engineering has created a Medical Mirror using a cheap camera as the medical sensor. The camera doesn’t have to be anything special, the cheap webcam in your laptop would do just fine. It is looking for a person and tracks their face. Once it is locked onto the face it monitors the slight changes caused by blood flow.

“Public-domain software is used to identify the position of the face in the image, and then the digital information from this area is broken down into the separate red, green and blue portions of the video image. Poh continues to work on developing the capability to get blood pressure and blood-oxygen measurements from the same video images. Extracting such data from optical imagery should work, he says, since conventional blood oxygen sensors already work by using optical detection, although they use a dedicated light source rather than ambient lighting.”

If you are making a Hard Drive Wind Generator you will need to wire up a bunch of coils. This tutorial video from The Geek Group goes over some 3 Phase Rectifier Basics. See this page for more details.

“For three-phase AC, six diodes are used. Typically there are three pairs of diodes, each pair, though, is not the same kind of double diode that would be used for a full wave single-phase rectifier. Instead the pairs are in series (anode to cathode). Typically, commercially available double diodes have four terminals so the user can configure them as single-phase split supply use, for half a bridge, or for three-phase use.”

This Jumbo Nintendo DS Screen is insane. With the help of a FPGA this simple Nintendo DS is supersized! It can now be enjoyed on two massive screens, and to top it off you can still interact with the games using the screen touch interface.

Via: Coregamer

“The closest match I could find to the DS LCD is Sharp LQ030B7DD01. You can find a datasheet Here. Aside from RGB, the only LCD signals I needed to use were DCLK1 and GSP1 (everything is conveniently labeled on the DS PCB). GSP1 is vsync, analogous to SPS in the datasheet. I find hsync by counting clocks (263 per line). If you need the actual hsync signal from the DS, you’ll have to find it yourself; I don’t know which one it is. The bottom screen data is latched on rising clock edges, top screen is read on the falling clock. I had to buffer a full frame in ram because screen timings didn’t quite match up (incidentally, this also made adding the screen capture ability very easy).”

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We have seen some amazing Quadrocopters in the past but this Wooden Quadrocopter adds the emphasis on the Quadcopter  body and structure. There are no less than four types of wood that have been machined into this incredible machine. The parts were designed based on an older kit and redesigned to be made from wood, the alien detail in the top dome is very well done. If you want to make your own the CAD files have been made available.

“The inlay of the alien head was cut into the dome first. I used my CNC machine. Then after the alien head was cut I just filled it with some 5 minute epoxy. I had to tape off the other parts of the dome as I did not want the epoxy to leak through. I colored the epoxy with some acrylic paint. After it dried for 24 hours, I sanded it smooth and cut the holes around the outer edge. Then a couple of coats of lacquer and buffed with some floor wax. I think it turned out rather well!”