Collin’s Lab: USB Hacking with Arduino
Collin does a little hacking to get his USB-based MIDI keyboard to talk to his Arduino.
Electronics
Digi-Key’s TechZone Magazine
Alden Hart, one of our LED gurus at HacDC (that’s right, we have several — we’re geek like ‘at) sent out a memo about how impressed he was with the latest issue of Digi-Key’s TechZone magazine. I got a Digi-Key TechZone magazine in snail mail the other day and it has a lot of good […]
Jeri homebrews some point-contact transistors
Jeri’s at it again, this time, cracking open some 1N34 diodes to harvest the germanium to build a crude transistor. Before that, she does a really nice job sketching out the basic physics behind semi-conductor operation. And she does get her point-contact transistor to work. Crude, but it works! Kudos, as always, Jeri! Make a […]
Ganging up your Larson Scanners
You’re likely already familiar with the Larson Scanner kit, created by Evil Mad Scientist Labs and carried in the Maker Shed. Named after Glen A. Larson, the man behind the original Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider TV shows, it’s a microcontrolled 9-LED display that emulates the back and forth panning light patterns used on the […]
Circuit Skills: LED Color Organ, sponsored by Jameco Electronics
Long before the dawn of digital music, folks employed the power of the electric color organ (aka “light organ”) to add some synced visuals to their hi-fi experience. Schematics for building such a beast based on AC power and incandescent bulbs can be be found fairly easily on the web, but plans for comparable LED-based […]
Jeri homebrews her own EL ink!
Our geek BFF, Jeri Ellsworth, has tickled our exploratory fancies again (and continued to push the “don’t try this at home” envelope) with a chemistry hack of re-doping common ZnS:Cu green glow powder to arrive at her own blue electroluminescent (EL) powder. Nice work, Jer! Make Electroluminescent (EL) Ink at Home – Re-doping Glow Powder
Make It Last Build Series: “Hello, world” blinky light on a PIC
If you haven’t already heard, we’re excited to be running the Make It Last, a project build series and contest, sponsored by Microchip and Energizer. Throughout the course of this series, we’re going to cover three project builds, each demonstrating an example of low-power design using microcontrollers. Just getting started? We suggest you take a […]
