Here’s a cool DIY on making your very own Jacobs Ladder. I always goto Fry’s with my friend Eric and find that they have this giant Jacobs Ladder that’d go off as soon as you were about to touch motherboards and whatnot. But this is great that now I know how it’s made.

The basic construction and principle of a Jacobs ladder is that a metal vee is formed from two bits of wire and a high voltage is applied across them. The electricity arcs across at the bottom of the vee where the electrodes are closest together. The air that the spark is passing through is ionised making it a preffered route for the arc, so when it heats up and begins to rise it drags the arc up the metal vee pulling it wider as it goes. In a correctly set up ladder the arc will travel all the way to the top where the wires have a sharp outward bend in them to pull the arc apart to the point that it extinguishes and the whole process starts again at the bottom of the vee. Here’s a picture of the base of my own Jacobs ladder showing the mounting of the wires.

via Hackaday

This is a great image which demonstrates the humble 1 GB, the device that looks like a nuclear bomb is a 1 GB hard drive as made by IBM around twenty years ago, and then it was a top item.

While in the mans hand is a SD memory card, which we know can hold anything up to and beyond 20 GB’s, I wonder what technology will be like in a further twenty years?

Source [Fosfor Gadgets]

Wow, check out these LED Lightfish! Haha, we have a new word, “Lightfish“. (When will they put it on Merrium and Webster encyclopedia?…I mean dictionary.)

Yes, that’s a simple hack, an LED and a 3V 2230 Battery…and rubberband of course. :p

And this looks pretty cool once installed inside the water. Hmmm…then again, we need autonomous fish that can swim around too kinda like these Autonomous Light Vessels:

via

Now this is a really neat little idea that could put some light on the subject! This torch is merely a nine volt battery with the business end of a torch fixed onto to it, this is one of those things that everyone could have made, but never got around to it.

These are handy to place in cupboards and drawers for emergencies as they do not take up much room. The torch bit has the light and a handy switch for turning it off; there are some devices that do not have this feature, so it is quite a neat idea.

Cost id expected to be around $10, not sure if battery included or not!

Source [Uber Gizmo]

Wow, check out this homebrewed radio you can make in your spare time!

The first time I tried this, it didn’t work. It was frustrating, but I just went through my materials, blued the razor blade and it worked. The second time I tried to get it to work, I couldn’t get a station, I just got buzz. I played with everything and finally figured out that the ground connection wasn’t very good. When I fixed that, I was able to hear sports talk radio! One of the interesting things is that it works better or worse depending on where you put the pencil lead on the razor blade. If it doesn’t work the first time, don’t give up! Every project you work on can have 100% success as long as you don’t mind mistakes and redoing things!

via

Pitchfork LED!

Although we haven’t been doing much DIYs lately, you can check out the Pitchfork LED for ideas for this Halloween!

Here’s the really cool spinning bluetooth wireless hoverboard!

Now if you are really serious, you can make this talking Halloween basket using couple LEDs and a CUBLOC chip.

Hmmm…I just can’t think of anything this year so you are going to have to review our last year’s DIYs for now until my thinking block is gone…

Videos:

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Wow…I just can’t believe I made those things…but I am proud now…

Here’s a little hack on HOWTO update your Arduino Chip from David Fowler. (Thanks David!)

After doing the reset mod to my Arduino Compatible Bare Bones Boards I wanted to update the firmware to get the full benefit of the Diecimila update. I followed the directions on the Arduino website but could not succeed. I sent emails and did web searches and still did not find the answer. Ultimately with the help of David Mellis, one of the Arduino Team members, we figured out that it can not be done from the IDE using the simple cable described at the Arduino web site. It can be done however and this article will give you the information needed to update or program new Mega168 chips with the latest Arduino code.

via uCHobby

Check out this cool home brewed iPhone Voice Recorder. Tight.

My iPhone broke. The screen just died a slow death, getting brighter and brighter and then very hot and then…nothing…over the course of a morning. With no phone to play with this morning, I did a lot of thinking and hunting through iPhone foundation files instead. And I seemed to find quite a lot of interesting calls in the Celestial framework, specifically the AVRecorder class.

[via] tuaw

Yep, you CAN make a hovercraft during your lunch break now. Just follow the directions!

I built a working hovercraft using cardboard and a shop vacuum in 30 minutes.

You can build a hovercraft quickly and easily using cardboard, duct tape, and a vacuum. There are excellent instructions available on the Internet. I adapted these standard instructions by substituting cardboard for plywood. In fact you build a hovercraft out of most anything that’s more or less airtight.

You can ride your hovercraft outside by using a gas powered leaf blower instead of a vacuum. Don’t use a leaf blower indoors because they are very loud and create smoke. One problem you will encounter outside is that there are few flat surfaces. Tennis courts work well. If you try to ride on the road you will quickly end up in the ditch since roads have a convex surface that keeps rainwater from building up.

Well… you CAN make an alarm system in 3 minutes too… (That means you can make 10 alarm systems for the time it takes to make 1 hovercraft…)

[via] latteier