A mix of extreme high voltage and tunes, does a project get any better! Steve Conner has posted his ultra cool visual instrument on 4HV.ORG. Note the second video was listed by EastVoltResearch and can be seen on this site.

“I finally gave in and decided to post footage of me testing my OMG super secret musical DRSSTC. I designed it last year as a paid commission for a Danish arts group who wanted a chorus of six musical coils that could be played by MIDI. I made a single prototype to test it here, but they ran six coils together in the final system, built by Finn Hammer over in Denmark.

What I made was an adaptor board that connected the internal tone generators on a Roland JX-8P synth to one or more DRSSTCs. The board converted the volume envelope to burst length, so the harder you pounded the keys, the bigger the sparks got. Hitting a high pitched note hard would blow the fuses, and the MIDI arrangements had to take this into account.”

Via: Make

The Handy is an interesting project by Zaizhuang Cheng, Derrick Ko, Colin Tan and Naga Setiawan from Purdue University. Very impressive since the parts cost is around $100.00.

“The motivation is to provide a button-free environment in which the user can just use hand gestures to control the sound system. For example, when the user is driving, all he has to do is perform the appropriate hand gestures to control his sound system, all without taking his eyes off the road. Our project will comprise of three main hardware components: the Microcontroller, the sensing plate and the LCD screen. The infrared sensors will be mounted on a flat plate in a 3×3 grid. When a user passes his hand over the plate, each sensor will detect the position of the hand and send the information to the microcontroller. The microcontroller will then process the raw information and translate it into a specific command which is then sent to the sound system via infra-red. Users will be able to assign their own hand movements to correspond to different commands (eg. play, pause and next). An LCD screen will then display the command that is detected by the microcontroller and provides a user interface for the user to assign hand gestures to each command.”

Via: TechEBlog

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You have seen propeller clocks before, but what about a Nixie Propeller Clock? I didn’t think so! Check out the link for code and a schematic.

“I stuffed the board with the PIC, the crystal oscillator, two logic chips, 10 HV transistors, the nixie, the HV inverter from a disposable camera flash circuit, the 7805 5V regulator, a 0.6 Farad memory cap, diodes, and the pushbuttons for setting the time. Rather than taking apart the motor to obtain power from the armature for the spinning board, I ripped apart another cheap motor and pulled out the armature and brush contacts and put it on the outside shaft of the other motor. The shaft was long enough for the armature and the cylinder that holds the spinning board.”

Via: Make

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If you have a Roomba, why not buy a broom and put the Roomba to better use.

“The other day I was marveling at the efficient operation of my roomba when it occurred to me that it would be really nice if roomba would get me a beer. While gestating the idea my first thought was to have roomba follow a line to the fridge and back. And a short while after that I realized that roomba already had 4 downward facing optical sensors AKA the cliff sensors. I decided to hack them up and make them sense light/dark lines instead of cliff/no cliff. I haven’t actually made the roomba get me a beer yet, I’m thinking of using a PIC to interface the roomba serially, and a 4066 switch IC to change between normal and beer retrival modes. Anyway I’ve shown here how to hack up your sensors as a first step. Enjoy!”

Via: Hackaday

David Cook from the Robot Room has Reverse-Engineered the PCB for the Big Trak Toy. This is a toy that was built in the late 70s. It is interesting to see how things worked 25 years ago!

“The motherboard is single layer/single sided. There are between 8 and 10 jumper wires acting as second-side traces on the component side. The PCB does not include a silkscreen (printed layer), so the component numbers are not listed anywhere. As such, the part numbering referred to on the page is mine, arbitrarily based on which IC pin the parts are connected to.”

This is an neat little solar robot that would be cheap and easy to build.

“Make your own solar powered robot at home using things you probably already have. Transistors, resistor, capacitor, solar battery and flashing LED are available at any electronic store, if you don’t already have them. Solar cells out of calculators work as well, you might want to use more than one since they are really small. If you do, connect the positive wire from each solar battery together. A small motor should be used like the ones in walkmans. Solder everything together and watch it come alive. Put it under a light and let it charge, it should take couple seconds for each burst of energy. Works best in sunlight. There are two solar panels connected in parallel providing more power, and there are two 2200uF capacitors connected in parallel giving 4400uF.”