The R1 Radio reminds me of a roller ball mouse without the roller ball. When you move it up and down you control the volume, right and left adjusts the tuning. We have seen some other fun music players that use physical movement to interact with them, I think there is a use for this technology other than just the cool novelty factor.

Via: OhGizmo and Dvice

"By using a wheel structure user can control the radio by physical movement. The ‘R1’ allowed users to turn gadget on or off and to control volume and tuning simply by physically rolling the radio forward, backward and sideways. Functionally, by using bevel gear system, I could increase a tuning range more than four times wider than before. There were too many channels in a narrow display before."

Who says you need a entire car to drive around in. This two seat car looks nice and comfortable. The only issue looks to be that it stops quite abruptly when reversing.

If you have a need for a DIY 30KV power supply have a look at this one that Daniel Eindhoven from megavolts.nl has built! You may have to scrounge for the parts for a few years though since it took 30 microwaves to get the needed parts. If you are thinking that you remember the name you are right, Daniel is also the one who brought us the MV CoilMaster Mark1 Coil Gun.

Kizomox has been working on some great high voltage experiments lately. You may remember the Potato that he Exploded with Defibrillator Capacitor that we featured before. Looks like he has moved way up in power since then! There aren’t very many people who have their personal pole transformer in their back yard.

Via Article comments.

Here is my latest creation, it’s a Gear Clock. It consists of a bunch of wooden gears, a PIC microcontroller and a stepper motor. The heart of the clock is a PIC 16f628A microcontroller. This microcontroller has an internal oscillator however an external 20MHz crystal oscillator is being used since it will have to accurately keep track of time for weeks and months. The microcontroller is interfaced to two buttons and one motor.

The gear arrangement is as follows:

• 9 tooth motor gear
• 72 tooth minute gear with a 24 tooth secondary
• 72 tooth intermediate gear with a 18 tooth secondary
• 72 tooth hour gear

To achieve the correct timing the 9 tooth motor gear is advanced 4 steps every 9 seconds. By moving 4 steps at a time the motor routines can be simple since the motor is always at rest with the same coil energized.

Read more about the gear clock here.

This is a great TED Talk with Woody Norris. He is a mainly self taught inventing genius! Near the end of the video he talks about some of the cool military uses for his new directional sound device that are very interesting (and funny). He also discusses some of his ideas that have sold for millions of dollars. His interests vary more than most people, you may remember the AirScooter II Ultralight Helicopter that we featured before, yes that is one of his ideas also!

"Woody’s electronics knowledge is mainly self-taught, consisting of repairing broken radios he begged from the local repair shop on the way home from school. "I had a chicken coop full of 20 or 30 or 50 radios… I fixed most of them." He had a mere six months of basic electronics training in the Air Force, where he worked with radar and electronics used to trigger A and H bombs."

How to keep a room comfortable before you enter without running a cooling or heating system all the time? That is the problem that was faced here. The solution was to use IR to turn the system on automatically by making a Hacked Air Conditioner Infrared Remote Control.

Via: Elektronika

Thanks Mario.

"Here in China, there is no central air, so my office is heated/cooled by a room air conditioner. Because of this, it’s cold when I arrive at work in the winter, and hot in the summer. So an idea was born to create a small, battery powered, IR emitter that would issue the same "ON" command the AC’s remote control does, but does it an hour or so before I get to work in the morning. Timing will be handled by using the watchdog interrupt. The watchdog will fire every 8 seconds (450 ticks per hour). If we set up a 24 hour counter, then the counter should roll over every 10,800 ticks. If we start our IR emitter at 5:00pm we should initialize the timer counter to 7,650. We want the IR emitter to send the "ON" command to the AC unit at 7:30am (3,375 ticks), then again every 10 minutes (75 ticks) until 8:30am (3,825 ticks)."