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This is a cool Nixie Bargraph Clock that has an hour and minute tube, the heights of the plasma in each tube indicates the time. There are some wires wrapped around the tubes so you can easily see what time it is without estimating. The electronics are tucked out of sight in a box out of sight so when you are admiring the clock you don’t see the modern electronics which adds a nice touch of class. There are full details on the build so you could build your own, please note that since there is a Nixie tube in the project high voltages in the range of 140 volts are present making it a dangerous project if you are not careful.
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If you have a box full of Raspberry Pi’s kicking around you can connect a camera to all of them, hook together on a network and have fun with your new Raspberry Pi Bullet Time Recorder. Of course if you would like to freeze time like in the movies you will need to purchase 3 or 4 dozen DSLR cameras, better get your checkbook ready! Via: Hack a Day “Tech Specs For those of you interested in the gory techie details, here are the stats
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If you hate when you don’t have a partner to play ping pong with you why not build a robot. Ulf Hoffmann is an industrial mechanic and has some creative ideas. His Ping Pong Robot (translated) is quite amazing, you can see it in action above. The videos below demonstrate the building blocks to get to where the robot is today. Via: Laughing Squid
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Wrist watches seem to be loosing their grasp on our wrists with the popularity of smart phones but I think the beauty of a well crafted watch will never die. You can buy a digital watch at the dollar store which would have been churned out in a factory in China or you can purchase one for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mechanical watches require very detailed manufacturing and tolerances that are incredibly tight. The super high end watches also require lots of human interaction to finish and assemble the watch. When you think of the complexity it is amazing that you can get years of solid use out of them.
Watchmaking Part 1
Watchmaking Part 2
Watchmaking Part 3 Making of a Glashütte |
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Have you ever wanted to play around with an Enigma Machine? Well if you act fast you can get one of your very own. This Open Enigma Project Kickstarter by S&T GeoTronics still has 28 days to go and is already over half funded so it looks very promising. It uses an Arduino Mega to run the show so customization of the system would be very simply. The design is wonderful looking, I think it would make a great coffee table piece. Thanks to James for sending in the tip.
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Adafruit recently took on production of the Fadecandy project that Elizabeth Scott developed. The video above is How the Fadecandy LED Controller is Made using the automated PCB production machines. There are 3 basic machines in the equipment path, the panelized PCB goes through a solder paste machine where a laser etched stencil is used to put solder in just the right locations. The board is then moved through the pick and place machine where all of the components are automatically placed, and finally it rolls through a reflow oven where all of the parts are permanently soldered in place. Only thing to do after that is snap the board off and plug it into a test jig. |
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When you want to make a project small you might grab an Arduino Pro Mini instead of a full sized Arduino board but what if your project needs to fit into a blood vessel? F. Levent Degertekin, a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is developing some miniature technology that will revolutionize how medical doctors will look at the heart and blood vessels. Via: Electronics Lab “The device integrates ultrasound transducers with processing electronics on a single 1.4 millimeter silicon chip. On-chip processing of signals allows data from more than a hundred elements on the device to be transmitted using just 13 tiny cables, permitting it to easily travel through circuitous blood vessels. The forward-looking images produced by the device would provide significantly more information than existing cross-sectional ultrasound. The dual-ring array includes 56 ultrasound transmit elements and 48 receive elements. When assembled, the donut-shaped array is just 1.5 millimeters in diameter, with a 430-micron center hole to accommodate a guide wire.”
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