Before you toss your broken tools in the trash it’s worth a bit of time to see if it’s repairable. In a day when even the manufacturer just replaces boards and doesn’t actually troubleshoot and repair their own equipment it can be a bit tricky though. In the not so distant past you could find lots of schematics inside the back cover of user manuals that came with electronics, those days are unfortunately gone but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth a look under the hood to see what the problem is.

In this case Webby from Elektrickery inherited a battery operated drill with a dead charger. Turns out that there was a thermal fuse that was blown. Webby could have just replaced the device and buttoned the unit up but he wanted to prevent the thermal fuse from popping again so he installed a cooling fan. If you look at some of his other repairs you might see a trend.

Igor Lovric sent in this PIC 16F877 based G-Force Monitor project which was inspired by a project over at Mikro Elektronika. The microcontroller reads in the values from the accelerometer and sends them via a serial connection to the computer. The computer is running a custom program that Igor wrote in Delphi 7. One thing that Igor notes is that the power supply that it is running on makes a huge difference on how clean the output of the device is.

“I actually took sample from Mikro Elektronika for using accelerometer board and made few changes. As you can see from code, communication protocol is very simple, it just send hi and lo byte of int that it reads from analog inputs.”

The prize this week is a mini tripod to help you get some great pictures of your next project. This contest will run for one week (July 16 – 22, 2011). Ending time is based on central standard time. To enter, identify the item pictured above.

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 July 30, 2011

The item to guess was Soyuz Spacecraft

The winner is Asit J. (there were 96 entries)

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Below is a picture of the prize.

JustDIY shows us how he reverse engineered a Pentax DSLR IR remote to make a DIY Pentax DSLR IR Interval Timer. By allowing the microcontroller to send the take picture command this project is now able to command the camera to take time lapse movies like the one after the jump. With a digital storage scope it is simple to capture this type of short waveform and duplicate it in code. The result is a nice and compact project that fits into a tiny mint tin.

“I connected the IR decoder to my o-scope and manually measured the pulse train. It was only 26 msec, and consisted of 15 transitions. 13 msec on, 2.8 msec off, and then 1 msec on/off repeated eight more times. Using the 12F683 chip (one of my favorites), I had access to an 8MHZ internal clock and a hardware PWM module. Microchip claims the hardware pwm maxes out at 20khz, but I had no trouble getting a stable 37khz carrier out of it.”

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I enjoy chicken meat but it is sad to see this type of machine which just treats the animal like an object. It might as well be making car tires. It is a marvelous feat of engineering any way you look at it though.

Via: TechEBlog

“The fastest human butchers can fully debone about 150 chickens per hour. That’s a lot of chickens! But the new Mayekawa Automatic Chicken Deboner easily bests it, masterfully breaking down a whopping 1,500 chickens in the same amount of time–which, if our math is correct, is ten times faster than a flesh-and-blood butcher.”

Gio from DIY Audio Projects just completed a new audio kit build. This one is for the Boozhound Laboratories partial JFET phono preamp kit. If you are into the classic audio then this kit might be for you. I unfortunately don’t even have a record player anymore and have completely converted to the dark side of music represented by ones and zeros… If you are looking for some other interesting sites DIY Audio Projects now has a Links page.

“My method of PCB assembly is to leave the sensitive active devices to last unless it would be difficult to fit them. Because the JFET devices were easy to fit on a fully populated board I placed and soldered all the resistors then the capacitors and then the JFETs. It is easy to assemble the whole PCB in under an hour. “

There are some crazy washrooms in the UK, they seem to like to automate everything. Is it just me or does that large high voltage symbol on the outside of the washroom make you a bit uneasy to use the facilities? Not sure why we need washroom doors that open and close automatically, but since most washrooms cost money I guess we can see what the money is paying for. This one was down the road from the London Monument.

Not sure if this one has voice capabilities but there was one in Glasgow that had subway like doors which opened and closed automatically. There were electronic buttons for everything, soap, water, hand dryer, toilet paper, call for help. Only thing that was missing was a button to flush the toilet, they apparently flush the toilet and go through a full internal self clean after each use. They have large LED number displays on the wall with a fifteen minute countdown, not sure what happens if the washroom is occupied for longer than 15 minutes, does the user get a free shower and blow dry?