Driving motors from a microcontroller will be required for a project eventually. This video by NerdKits will go over some of the basics that are needed.

Thanks Humberto.

"Electric motors are a key way of converting electrical power (voltage and current) into mechanical power (torque and speed), and because electric motors are simple and reliable machines, they can be found all over, in many different shapes and sizes. In this video tutorial we’re just going to address the electrical side of the system. This includes some experiments you should try with a DC motor, a model of the system from an electrical perspective, building a MOSFET-based switching circuit, and finally two demos of a microcontroller-operated motor. This video and webpage specifically addresses a brushed DC motor, and although the specifics are not fully applicable to brushless (BLDC) motors, stepper motors, or AC motors, the big ideas about motor modeling and control will be useful in those areas as well."

If you have some top secret into that needs to hide in plain sight have a look at this USB Cigar. When the cigar is together there is no sign that it has been hacked!

"Materials:

• A thick cigar
• An USB flash disk of small dimensions
• Some wire, 2 x LEDs (red!), 1 x 10K resistor
• Wood primer
• Some tape
• A short USB extension cable
• Very thin paper, the size of a stamp"

This Greenbox project is a beautiful way to save energy. Not only does it dress up the charging area but it also saves you money. When the phone is removed the wall wart charger is electrically disconnected.

"As a design exercise, I have built a phone charging station that makes unplugging very easy and instinctive (with affordance playing a big role). So easy you don’t even notice it unplugs automagically. The design is made from cheap and available materials, and was a great fun to build on a rainy day. "

Thanks Alberto

This Arduino based Timelapse Photography Rig that Aonomus built is a great idea that will let you dig out your old digital camera and get a bit more use out of it. The Arduino microcontroller monitors a potentiometer and changes the time delay between pictures based on the dialed in value. There’s a LCD screen that shows the number of pictures taken and the delay between pictures. Finally to get the work done a servo moves back and forth enough to press the capture button on any camera. When Aonomus isn’t making microcontroller based projects he is playing with fire (literally).

This DIY Electronic Meat Thermometer project will not only have you end up with a cooking thermometer in the end bit you will also learn some signal processing techniques.

"To passionate chefs, cooking is an art. Knowing exactly when a cut of meat is cooked to perfection requires knowing your meat and your grill. But with a little bit of technology, we can build a digital meat thermometer, and use digital signal processing techniques to get a much faster response. This video explains how we can use the predictably slow heat transfer inside the temperature probe to mathematically model the sensor, and ultimately get a much faster response, with a little bit microcontroller computing power!"

This Arduino Oscilloscope project is a great idea. For people that are getting into electronics having a meter is good but having a scope is great. With this project you can take your $30 Arduino board and turn it into a oscilloscope, it won’t show you great detail or very fast circuits but often times that is not needed.

"This software allows you to get a visual representation of an analog signal using Arduino and Processing. The resolution is 10 bits so this is not like a real oscilloscope but it is still pretty useful. It works by sending values read from the Arduino board (pin 0) to Processing through serial communication."

The Workshop.ca Suzuk-E project is done! have a look at the video to see some of the work that was needed to finish the project. If it looks like there are some major new parts you would be right. As it worked out there were some failures near the end of the build which required some expensive new parts. Frank hooked up a meter that can keep track of the total charge energy that the battery needs. This will allow a simple calculation to see how much it cost to “fill up”.

“Canadian Tire offered a “Blue Planet - Electronic Energy Meter” on special for under $20 one week and I just couldn’t pass-up that sort of value. A very clever bit of code in the Blue Planet Energy Meter is the ability to log the Kwh and cumulative cost per Charge of say individual or Banks of batteries… In our part of Canada we pay a flat 5.6 cents per Kwh up to the first 1000 Kwh’s, and the rate jumps to 6.5 cents there after…”