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)."

Have a look at this cool PSP GO Mod. There isn’t much details since the creator doesn’t speak English.

Thanks Wouter!

Doyle sent in about an interesting product that he makes. It is a Terracotta Pot Candle Heater. He sells the units but also provides all the details for us DIY people to make our own. It consists of nuts and bolts which provide the metal mass along with 3 terracotta pots and a metal base. I haven’t made or used one of these but it seems like it would be the perfect device to put in an office or a den just to keep the chill out of the air.

By looking at his Web site I can see that Doyle is a serial inventor! Have a look at the recycled tin can solar furnace and his Heat Stick to see a few of his other ideas.

We have all seen these power meters on the outside of homes but have you ever seen inside? Popular Science gives us a sneak peek inside one of these Electric Power Usage Meters. Oddly there is no crazy voodoo electronics or mechanical parts in there. Now the question is, based on knowing exactly how it’s constructed how can it be defeated? Sure if you rip it out and plug it in upside down to let it run backwards but is there a working covert method of making it run slower or stop? There is this Plug and Save device that has lots of crazy claims, I haven’t seen anywhere that explains what kind of magic is in the box though. I don’t see how it could work, anyone care to enlighten us on how it could or couldn’t work? Not sure if this article is a plant but it looks convincing.

Woody who is a controls electrician has a cool hobby! He builds custom animatronic Halloween props. Have a look at his latest creation, the Halloween Animatronic Winged Demon. The controller that is being used is a Allen Bradley SLC 5/04 which is out of reach for most Halloween prop makers but since he is in the business I am sure some of this equipment was acquired through customer upgrades. You can see a few more pictures of the prop here. Like most other things, if it is worth doing, it is worth overdoing!

If you are looking for a way to convert a regular room into a scary Halloween room have a look at this UV LED Illuminated Halloween Skull Room idea. Flashing UV LEDs are used to illuminate skulls that have been painted on black fabric walls. If that wasn’t enough camouflaged people were in there scaring the guests!

This is an entry in the Hacked Gadgets Show us your Halloween Project Contest, there is still time for you to enter the contest by showing us how you add to the Halloween fun.

"I used flashing LED kits and wired up 3 banks of 8 UV LEDs to all flash together. "

BobS has come up with a creative Hard Drive Camera Stabilizer. We have seen other ways to Gyro Stabilize a Camera but this one is nice because it has the possibility of making use of a hard drive that otherwise would have no purpose.

"In an experiment, I connected a loose HD to a computer power supply, and felt the resistance to its change of position. I figured a HD in the horizontal and one in the vertical plane (X- and Y- axis) would dampen almost all unwanted shaking. A single Gyro has its theoretical limits. A strong Gyro in the front / back plane (Z - axis) could dampen shaking, but would not correct rotation. But if rotation around the optical axis is only a minor component of motion blur… , the advantage is less weight and power requirement."