|
There are a number of great older bench meters out there that would be perfect when upgrading from a hand held meter when working on the bench. The HP 3468A meter can be had for under $200 in good working condition and often around $100 for a unit that powers on but no operation confirmed. Modemhead purchased one that was DOA, have a look at the pictures he took of the internal construction when he disassembled it for repair. The construction is top notch! Turns out the fuse was blown by some shorted capacitors in the power supply section. |
|
Ok, this is a very interesting motor that RimstarOrg built with some scrap wood, two bearings, a bolt and some nuts. It is connected to a low voltage high current power source and can magically spin (or can it???). Watch the video to 3:20 but no further. Is this a real motor? Is there some careful camera tricks at work here? If it is real how does it work? Leave your guess and thoughts in the comments (trying not to read other comments). Now watch the rest of the video. Is that what you expected? I didn’t think that was what was going on…
|
|
Some new cars such as the Audi A8 pack some high tech electronics to enhance safety. Mike’s Electric Stuff has a look inside the Audi Night Vision System. “Located in the Driver’s Information System, between the speedometer and rev counter a camera’s eye view of the road ahead is displayed to the driver. The system will highlight people using their heat source. Typically a person standing by the side of the road would be highlighted in yellow, indicating they are outside of the vehicles route, however should the person start to walk towards the road the advanced image processing system will identify that they could walk into the car’s path and will highlight them in red.” |
|
If you still have a few floppy drives left over after making your Floppy Drive CNC machine have a look at making some music by making a Floppy Disk Jukebox! ”The overall setup is completly modular. Each floppy is connected to its own floppy driver (rrfdc), which in turn speaks I²C with the main board (rrcmd). On power-on the main board auto-discovers the connected floppies and adjusts the software to utilize the available drives. In theory the amount of floppies connected to RumbleRail is only limited by I²C address/bus restrictions. The most important feature of RumbleRail is the ability to run standalone. After being powered-on, the main board scans the hotswapable SD card (rrsdc) and lists its content on the display. The user can browse through the selection using the rotary encoder and, once a song is selected, the main board decodes the MIDI file and streams the notes to the floppy drivers.”
|
|
Forrest Bourke, Saarth Mehrotra, Michael Searing and Elliott Wyse from Olin College of Engineering built an interesting project called The Confectionary Cannon, it is a Face Tracking Marshmallow Shooting Gun! It uses air pressure which is released by a sprinkler valve to launch marshmallows to their victim using face tracking to get it done. Via: OhGizmo and Hack a Day ”After sketching out a few initial designs, we designed the entire system in Solidworks. Most of the parts are acrylic, which we chose primarily for its cost and ease of laser-cutting. Acrylic isn’t very strong and is quite brittle, but it’s less than a third the cost of acetyl (Delrin). The three aluminium parts were made from shop scrap.”
|
|
If you have something in the real world that you would like to monitor this Arduino Data Visualization will help you to do just that. “Hardware:
Software: |
|
If you are in the market for a Logic Analyzer the DSLogic might fit the bill. At time of writing it is fully funded and you can get the early backer board for $49 (there are still 13 left). The next step up is $40 more and gets you the test clips and a USB cable, if you don’t mind making some test leads yourself you can save some cash. Thanks for sending this in Andy. “DSLogic consists of DSLogic-Core and extension modules. DSLogic-Core is a re-configurable circuit board based on FPGA technology with maximum 200MHz sampling rate and 64Mbit on-board memory. DSLogic-Core can work alone as a fully functional logic analyzer, along with various extension modules.DSLogic can also work as oscilloscope, data acquisition system, protocol analyzer and even RF analyzer.”
|
