The South Florida Science Center recently added a new ten-inch telescope and turned to [Andres Paris] and his brother to replace the hand-cranked dome door system. They turned to an Arduino along with some beefy motor drivers. You can see some videos of the beast in operation, below. According to a Reddit post, the brothers picked up a 5A 12V motor but decided to overdesign and selected an H-bridge that wou ...

Climate Change have been a crucial factor taken into consideration by the Australian researchers from Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology before creating the first rechargeable proton battery. After considering all available options about cost and availability of the materials needed, the researchers in Melbourne decided to make a proton battery to meet up with the alarming increase of energy needs in t ...

Accelerometers are used in almost all fields, and they have been growing in popularity in IoT and wearables. Nowadays, those devices require a of energy, and because of this, they need to be constantly charged or batteries need to be constantly changed which causes users to lose interest, or to be limited by this problem. Size might be a problem too because some MEMs (micromechanical systems) acceleration s ...

Researchers led by Kourosh Kalantar-Zadeh, at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have developed the first intestinal gas-diagnosing pill to be tested in human. During the study, which was published on January 8 in Nature Electronics, the swallowable gas sensors were tested in seven healthy participants who ate low and high-fiber diets. This ‘smart’ capsule is capable of measuring levels of Oxygen, Hydr ...

Some days ago I bought a laser rangefinder (Uni-T UT390b, f.e. http://www.dx.com/de/p/uni-t-ut390b-45m-laser-dist...) to realise a simple LiDAR. The rangefinder has an accuracy of +/- 2mm and is able to measure distances up to 45m. This will be enough for my living room ;-) You'll also need: * Arduino Mega (because of more than one Serial Outputs) * 2 Servos * Servo tilt (f.e. http://physicalcomputing. ...

In early 1990s lithium-ion batteries started gaining popularity as a substitute for nickel-cadmium batteries. They have higher energy density, low self- discharge, and low maintenance, but it was soon found that they have short life span, unstability which causes security concerns and creates the need for protection circuits (to maintain it within safe limits), and are really expensive to produce. Lithium i ...

https://youtu.be/IbkUL7U1qIA LED strips are a very fun and effective way to give lots of glow and color to a project. In this Instructable you will learn about the basic kinds of strips and how to hook them up to the Intel Edison with Arduino breakout board. These circuits include hardware needed for external power and how to set up a button and potentiometer to blink and fade using Intel's special flavor o ...

Lithium-ion batteries are very popular as they’re lightweight and have high energy density. But at the same time, li-ion batteries are very sensitive to overcharge/over discharge. An internal short circuit can cause fire and it may even lead to a violent explosion. Fortunately, nanotechnology found a way to prevent this kind of nightmare. How? let’s discuss: Why Does li-ion Battery Explode? When a device dr ...

Battery anxiety is a modern day problem for many of us. Mobile phone and wearable technologies are getting developed rapidly, but battery issues seem to be neverending. As phones and wearables are getting thinner, there needs to be a trade-off between battery life and design. Scientists are searching for a way to make a battery that’s tiny yet capable of holding the charge for a long time. So, what’s the so ...

Lithium-ion batteries are flammable and the price of the raw material is increasing. Scientists and engineers have been trying to find out a safe yet efficient alternative to the Lithium-ion technology. The researchers of Empa and ETH Zürich have discovered promising approaches as to how we might produce powerful batteries out of waste graphite and scrap metal. Kostiantyn Kravchyk and Maksym Kovalenko, the ...

As far as controlling robots goes, makers today are spoilt for choice. WiFi and Bluetooth enabled microcontrollers are a dime a dozen, and integration with smartphone apps is a cinch. Despite this, the old methods still hold sway, as [Igor Fonseca] demonstrates with a simple Arduino bot. It’s a classic build, using a tracked chassis with a pair of motors providing propulsion and skid steering. The moto ...

Lithium-sulfur batteries are suitable for both vehicle and grid applications as they are ultra-cheap, high-energy devices. Sulfur is a very low-cost material and the energy capacity is much higher than that of lithium-ion. So, lithium-sulfur is one chemistry that can possibly meet the demand for energy storage at a cheap price. However, the serious problem is, lithium-sulfur batteries suffer from significan ...