The various displays and interfaces in Star Trek, especially The Original Series, were intentionally designed to be obtuse and overly complex so they would appear futuristic to the audience. If you can figure out how Sulu was able to fly the Enterprise with an array of unlabeled buttons and rocker switches, we’d love to hear it. But one area of […]
AN ARDUINO SICKBAY DISPLAY WORTHY OF THE ENTERPRISE Continue Reading
When it comes to wall-mounted ornamentation, get ready to throw out your throw-rugs and swap them for something that will pop so vividly, you’ll want to get your eyes checked. To get our eyes warmed up and popping, [James Best] has concocted a gargantuan 900-RGB-LED music visualizer to ensure that our bedrooms are bright and blinky on
LED MUSIC VISUALIZER BESPECKLES YOUR BEDROOM Continue Reading
Fish are easy to keep as pets, requiring little more than regular feeding to keep them happy in the short-to-medium term. If you’re going on holiday, it can be nice to know that your pets are being taken care of, but finding someone to take on the chore can be hard. [Trevor_DIY] doesn’t need to
THIS ARDUINO IS FEEDING THE FISHES Continue Reading
For [Turbo Conquering Mega Eagle], the question was simple: Do I spend 20 minutes slaving away in front of a bandsaw to cut a bunch of short brass rods into even shorter pieces of brass rod? Or do I spend days designing and building an automatic cutoff saw to do the same job? The answer is obvious. It’s
AUTOMATIC CUT-OFF SAW TAKES THE TEDIUM OUT OF A TWENTY-MINUTE JOB Continue Reading
Parallel processing is an idea that will be familiar to most readers. Few of you will not be reading this on a device with only one processor core, and quite a few of you will have experimented with clusters of Raspberry Pi or similar SBCs. Instead of one processor doing tasks sequentially, the idea goes,
PARALLEL PROCESSING WAS NEVER QUITE DONE LIKE THIS Continue Reading
We’ve seen countless different robot kits promoted for STEM education, every one of which can perform the robotic “Hello World” task of line following. Many were in attendance at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019 toiling in their endless loops. Walking past one such display by Microduino, Inc. our attention was caught by a demonstration of their
MAGNETIC ATTRACTION OF MICRODUINO MCOOKIE MODULES Continue Reading
The 18650 cell has become a ubiquitous standard in the lithium battery world. From power drills to early Tesla vehicles, these compact cells power all manner of portable devices. A particularly common use is in laptop batteries, where they’re often built into a pack using the Smart Battery System. This creates a smart battery that
PACKPROBE REPORTS LAPTOP BATTERY HEALTH Continue Reading
We’ve heard of beer pong, but we’re not sure we’ve heard of wine pong. And certainly never wine pong automated with a ping pong ball throwing robot like this one. There’s not a huge amount of detail available in the video below, and no build log per se. But [Electron Dust] has a few shots in the
TRICK SHOT BOT FLINGS BALLS INTO WINE GLASS EVERY TIME Continue Reading
If you like solving puzzles out in the real world, you’ve probably been to an escape room before, or are at least familiar with its concept of getting (voluntarily) locked inside a place and searching for clues that will eventually lead to a key or door lock combination that gets you out again. And while
PLASMA GLOBE REVEALS YOUR NEXT CLUE Continue Reading
Now that digital imaging sensors are starting to become more freely available to the masses, all kinds of open source projects have been popping up that use them. Most of them are typically fairly limited to things like the Raspberry Pi or development boards like the Arduino and ESP32. But now, there is a new and pretty serious looking open
THE OCTOPUS IS A 5K FULL FRAME OPEN SOURCE CAMERA THAT LETS YOU SWAP OUT SENSORS Continue Reading
