Here is a DIY Digital Light Dimmer that uses 2 push buttons to adjust the brightness output. Full details can be found here.

Thanks

“The light level can be adjusted with two push-buttons “Up” and “Down”. Controller in this application is PIC16F84 that drives BUZ11 mosfet. Dimmer is tested with a light bulb 12V/4W and mosftet didn’t get even warm (which was expected since the datasheet says: 50V/30A).”

I have seen the writing on the wall for many years now. It is now possible for a single person or a small team to crank out physical items just like the big players with huge factories. In this new age where circuit designs can be cranked out on the coffee table and sent out to China for production the next day is fantastic! The internet has shortened the gap between design and manufacturing. With the advent of inexpensive machines like the Maker Bot you can wake up with a brilliant design idea, cad up a quick design and print your plastic idea before the sun it up. If the idea is a good one ship off the electronic file to a facility to crank them out and move onto your next big idea.

As an example the Button Code project was designed in my home office. Parts were sourced from a electronic wholesaler  and the board manufacturing was outsourced. All orders are electronic and most are sent out in kit form.

Chris Anderson from Wired and DIY Drones has written a great article which describes this exciting time, you owe it to yourself to check it out and be inspired.

“We designed the boards the way all electronics tinkerers do, with parts bought from online shops, wired together on prototyping breadboards. Once it worked on the breadboard, we laid out the schematic diagrams with CadSoft Eagle and started designing it as a custom printed circuit board (PCB). Each time we had a design that looked good onscreen, we’d upload it to a commercial PCB fab, and a couple of weeks later, samples would arrive at our door. We’d solder on the components, try them out, and then fix our errors and otherwise make improvements for the next version.

Eventually, we had a design we were happy with. How to commercialize it? We could do it ourselves, getting our PCB fab house to solder on the components, too, but we thought it might be better to partner with a retailer. The one that seemed culturally matched was SparkFun, which designs, makes, and sells electronics for the growing open source hardware community.”

Long time Hacked Gadgets reader NatureTM has just completed phase 1 of his Hard Drive Clock. It’s using an Arduino to keep track of time and control the clock display LEDs. After accidentally letting out the magic smoke from the hard drive controller he decided to improvise and use a hobby RC motor speed controller. This clock will be super accurate when it is complete since it will eventually be using a Chronodot from Macetech.

Via: Hacked Gadgets Forum

“The first interrupt just records the time that the slot reaches the sensor and sets the position to zero. [It actually sets the position to the offset value since the sensor isn't at 12 o'clock and I like to think of 12 as pos 0.] Now I can tell how long a rotation takes and how long it has been since the last completed rotation.

I have the rotation split into 180 divisions. I guess I’ll call them roxels (rotational pixels) since making up jargon is fun. I’ll call one full rotation of the platter a cycle. Then we know to draw the next roxel every cycle length/180. I then set arduino’s timer2 interrupt to overflow every new roxel and advance the roxel counter. I found this to be very efficient compared to other methods I tried. Actually, I was really proud when I figured this out, but I’ve been dying to know if everyone else is using this method as well. “

The next installment of the Dune Buggy Electric Conversion project is in. Since we brought you the 1st installment about a month ago there has been lots of work put into it. There are lots of interesting techniques that can be used next time you are working with some high current applications. I like the way the wire lug ends were made rather than bought. The frame is sure to be nice and level since it was laser aligned.

“The tube locations were determined with a laser-level and transcribed to a sheet of plywood. Two more pieces of wood (of the same size) were clamped to the template board, and drilled together to accurately place the holes for the tubing. The plywood sheets were squared and held together with lengths of scrap trim secured diagonally.”

Here is another project idea for one of those old hard drives you have laying around. The Multichord turns your hard drive and some other miscellaneous items into a musical instrument.

“The Multichord musical instrument is an acoustic stringed instrument with a single string, constructed from wood, a hard drive, 20-lb monofilament, and assorted electronic components. It was the culmination of a project to build an acoustic instrument capable of playing multiple notes without fretting or manual, time-consuming retuning. The Multichord achieves this by attaching a hard drive read/write head assembly between the resonant string and a tensioning spring to adjust the tension of the instrument’s string. Careful adjustment was made to the tension of both the string and the spring with the hard drive head in a neutral, unpowered position to ensure a bipolar application of voltage within the safety ratings of the hard drive’s coil could cause the string to cover a full musical octave. In the end, the Multichord was tuned to a C-major scale (no flats or sharps) running from A at 220Hz through (but not including) A at 440Hz.”

Carnegie Mellon University recorded a great talk about starting up a business. Steven Fleck who started ClearCount Medical Solutions moderated the panel. The panel members are Bryan Kaplan of Collaborative Fusion, Nathan Martin of Deep Local, Jessica Trybus of Etcetera Edutainment and David Chen of Fooala.

It looks like CMU is doing a good job of fostering business building acumen into their current students. Nice to see that Nathan is successful even though he has had a number of product failures. It was interesting to hear about the issues that David had when he had to hire technicians for his company when he was 12.

See a video below, it is the Nike Chalk Bot that Nathan Matrin mentions.

There are tons of cool LEGO CNC machines that have been made. The one pictured above can be seen in operation here (unfortunately we can’t embed the video here). It shows how so many people have real creativity since these CNC machines are obviously only for fun since a LEGO frame would not be adequate for doing any real work. Nice thing about LEGO is that once your design is done you can rip it apart can move on to your next creation. I am still waiting to see a LEGO pick and place machine populating surface mount components onto a circuit board.