Joe Grand’s LED Watch Flashes Time in Midair We’ve covered a few of Joe Grand’s projects on the site before and here’s another fantastic project to add to the collection. This POV (persistence of vision) watch displays the current or elapsed time while the arm is swinging (such as during a run or brisk walk). A sequence of LED patterns from the watch are displayed in quick succession appearing in “thin air.” Build it Yourself You’ll find schematics, gerber files (learn how to design schematics in eagle), source code and everything you need to create your own POV watch. More POV fun We’ve covered plenty of POV projects in the past, a few of which even made it onto our top 40 arduino projects list. The image above is this POV bike project and there’s also this wireless version. You’ll also enjoy:
Homemade Document Imager Recently I had the need to digitize a few banker boxes worth of old documents. I usually would use a Canon Lide scanner to scan a few pages but this project required the capture of a few thousand pages of paper and would take forever with a normal document scanner. After looking around on the internet to see what other people have done to solve this type of problem I decided to build my own document imager. I converted an old overhead projector into a copy stand by taking off the projector head and adapted the arm and bracket to have a 1/4 inch camera thread mount. Then I spray painted a plywood board matte black for the imager table surface. Two old desk lamps were mounted next to the table for illumination. I have been extremely happy with the results and it takes a fraction of the time a normal scanner would take to capture a few hundred pages at a time. Document Imager Camera Bracket Here is a sample page that captured using this homemade document imager and was cropped in Photoshop.
Build your own AutoGyro Flying Machine An Autogyro is an odd, yet fascinating flying machine which uses a helicopter rotor for lift while a standard plane rotor provides thrust. You can learn to build a DIY autogyro yourself and even build autogyro models using miniature servos. Heck, even a remote Chinese farmer built his own autogyro. AutoGyro Tutorials: Early version of an autogyro:
DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization. Make your own Backyard Solar Concentrator Solar concentrators are essentially just like parabolic satellite dishes lined with mirrors. Regardless of where the sun hits the disc, it’s reflected into a center focal point, generating abundant amounts of power. You can pick up hundreds of tiny mirror tiles on eBay for just a few bucks. So basically, it’s like this power plant in Australia, except in your backyard: There are two versions of the project. One is the massive 7 foot dish above and the other involves four mini dishes (like the ones sides of houses). Both projects have plenty of excellent information but if you longing for more, view our vast amounts of DIY Green Energy projects: How to: Harness Solar and Wind EnergyGo Green this Winter with DIY Free HeatingConstruct your own 60 Watt Solar Panel
Using a WebCam for WhiteBoarding in GoToMeeting Have you ever wanted an easy way to communicate a simple visual idea on-the-fly from a GoToMeeting Session? GoToMeeting is awesome for communicating ideas, and with HDFaces it is awesome for getting that face-to-face feel. What I’m talking about is a quick drawing or whiteboard. So, here is what i did. I wanted to be able to use the medium I’m used to using, namely whiteboards or drawing a diagram on a pad and have that translate to a web meeting. There a quite a few tablet and drawing slate options but I wanted that direct feel of a sheet of paper or whiteboard. Here is the basic idea, use GoToMeeting HDFaces and shift focus to a webcam that is pointed downward from an overhead mount. I tool a Lagra work lamp from Ikea: and used the base and arm of the lamp. I used an HP HD-3110 webcam. My costs for this project were: 2 lamps, $4.99, $9.99, 1 webcam $19.99, plus a few cable ties. 1. 2. iGlasses 3.
Cigar Box Ukulele Materials: Cigar Box. If you have a choice, find one of solid wood. I found a cedar box with a plywood base. Wood for the lid supports: the cigar box will vibrate with the strings. Wood for the inside supports: These will go around the edges of the box for added strength and for a place to anchor the neck. Wood for the fretboard: I chose red oak. Material for the saddle and nut: I used dominos, which I cut down to size. Material for the frets: I actually bought brass welding wire for the frets, but ended up inlaying crushed turquoise instead. Fret markers: Ukes are usually marked at the 5th, 7th, and 10th frets. Ukulele strings: see your local music store. Tuners (set of 4): I took the tuners from a busted kid's electric guitar I got at a thrift shop. Wood Glue Epoxy Tung oil and mineral spirits (optional) Steel Wool 0000 (optional) Note about tools: I was lucky to have access to a woodshop, powertools, and someone who kept me from cutting off all of my fingers.
Making the Makerbot, A DIY 3-D Printer View Photo Gallery It sounds like the promise of an ad in the back of a PopSci issue from the 1950s. Build your own replicating machine! Make anything you desire in your own garage! But that's exactly what veteran hacker Bre Pettis and his pals offer with their CupCake CNC kit: a computer-controlled 3-D printer that can whip up almost any object of less than four inches on a side from two kinds of plastic. The company's goal is to make home manufacturing cheap and common. Click to launch the photo gallery for a piece-by-piece look at building the Makerbot MakerBot's Web site says the project should take two people a weekend. It turns out that the trickiest part of making a 3-D printer kit is the software coding that tells it what to do. Time: 3 Days Cost: $950 Easy: 3/5 EXTRUDER CONTROLLER: The top is the controller board. 5 Things to Know Before Tackling a MakerBot Build 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.