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Read more...Thursday, April 1, 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010
Vacuum tube tesla coil
[xellers] may have been in 8th grade when he built this vacuum tube tesla coil, but he did a fantastic job. Unlike most of the tesla coils we have shown, this one doesn’t use a high current transformer from a neon sign. Instead, he’s gone the direction of vacuum tubes. He spent a total of about $125 which isn’t too bad. Most of us could reduce that cost by scrounging from our parts bin.
LEGO router case bests factory finish
Stare at [Luke's] LEGO router case; STARE AT IT! The router is nothing special, a WRT54GL that is fun to hack. We’ve seen it used as a robot, turned into a war driving box, and obviously this is where dd-wrt custom firmware started.
[Luke] designed the case in MLCAD and found a seller for the parts which came in just over $50. We think it’s much better looking than the stock case an if you used that for a different project, this is a way to replace it. We’ve embedded [Luke's] assembly video after the break. If you like this case, take a look at his LEGO PC case as well.
Bike trainer computer: Speed, Cadence, Heartrate, Trainer temp
[Kurt] was using a bike trainer to get in shape for warmer and dryer biking months. Unfortunately it’s pretty hard to train if you don’t have reliable data concerning how hard you’re working. There’s commercial solutions for trainer computers but he’d read some rough reviews about them and decided to build his own trainer computer. He’s done a great job of integrating a lot of different data collection sources. He picked up two replacement bike computer sensors to use on the back wheel for speed (the front wheel is stationary with this type of trainer) and on the crank for cadence. He also wears a heart rate monitor and sourced a SparkFun heart rate module to gather that data. Finally, an LM235 analog temperature sensor was combined with a spring clamp to detect the temperature of the trainer’s resistance module.
Data from the sensors is collected with a PIC16F73 microprocessor and fed to a computer over a serial connection. He’s got a screenshot of the realtime graphs that he’s using for feedback while on the bike. This is a useful and practical setup but when he get’s tired of exercising he’s just a few lines of code from converting this into a gaming controller.
[Thanks Justin]
Don’t put that EPROM in your mouth!
[Jeremy] had some chips on hand that included EPROM. We’re not talking about EEPROM, we mean EPROM that need a UV light source to erase. Most people don’t want to drop a few hundred dollars on a dedicated EPROM eraser, there must be another way.
Boy, EPROM really suck. But so do pacifiers and he already had a solution for exposing those to UV. He pulled out his $30 UV pacifier cleaner and tossed the chip inside. Two times through the cleaning cycle and the data was gone. We’ve looked into using UV LEDs to do the job but some experimentation shows that it doesn’t work. These pacifier cleaners are cheap and easy to get a hold of. The real question is are you still using chips that require UV for erasing?
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