The sales team in [Chuck’s] office is a pretty competitive bunch as you might expect, and they decided that they wanted a system which would allow them to challenge one another during their weekly meetings. The competition involves answering questions posed by their manager, but hand raising only works for so long – they needed …
Office game show buzzer keeps things fair and square
Coffee table puts on a show behind smoked glass
This coffee table is a real show-piece. It’s got a smoky glass surface that is hiding the LCD screen within. But what fun would it be if it could only play video? The rest of the enclosure houses all the parts necessary to make this living room centerpiece into a computer. After the break you …
Coffee table puts on a show behind smoked glass
This coffee table is a real show-piece. It’s got a smoky glass surface that is hiding the LCD screen within. But what fun would it be if it could only play video? The rest of the enclosure houses all the parts necessary to make this living room centerpiece into a computer. After the break you …
Reclaim the wireless controller module from a broken Xbox 360
If you’re one of the hordes whose Xbox 360 died the fiery death associated with the RRoD you may be wondering what to do with that multi-hundred dollar door stop you’re left with. Why not salvage the parts for other uses? If you’ve ever wanted to use your wireless controller with a computer here’s a …
Dog Pod Grid one step closer to reality
What’s better than one amazingly acrobatic quadcopter? How about a swarm of acrobatic micro-quadcopters? It’s not a rhetorical question, but an experimental reality. A team at the University of Pennsylvania are showing off their latest round of hovering robots which can move in formation and alter their orientation as a swarm. You may remember us …
Printable wire stripper lights up when you hit the conductor
Agonize no more over stripping the insulation off of tiny wires like those used in ribbon cables. For years we’ve used razor blades to do this, as the tiniest wires don’t have a slot on our trusty wire strippers. But often we cut all the way though the conductor (or many of the strands) when …
Kitchen timer makes Mario your Sous-chef
[Alan] was unimpressed by the cheap ticking egg timers that grace many of our kitchens. He decided this was an execllent opportunity to ply his skills with microcontrollers. He built this kitchen timer complete with an enclosure and audible alarm. The device is Arduino based, which makes driving the graphic LCD quite easy thanks the …
Measure radiation with military surplus
It’s really amazing what you can find at military surplus shops. [David] just built a radiation detector out of a DT-590A scintillation probe originally made to test if Air Force bases were contaminated with Plutonium. Who says nothing good came out of massive nuclear arsenals? DT-590A / PDR-56 Gamma ray probes were made obsolete by the US Air …
Rapid fire, remote controlled ping pong ball turret
[Andrew] and his brother had some time (and a lot of ping pong balls) on their hands, so they decided to have some fun and built a remote-controlled ping pong ball turret. Arduino aside, the turret is cheap and easy to build as [Andrew’s] writeup explains. The firing mechanism was constructed using a pair of …
Creating a Game for the CoCo
Retro is in the air today as [John] has tipped us off about a new game he has written for the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), The game, inspired by the homebrew game DOWNFALL for the Atari Jaguar, features what looks like snappy game play, lots of bright colorful animation and has just entered the Alpha …
