Wow, check out this Jacobs Ladder too!

This is how I used a neon sign transformer to create my own classic sci-fi prop the Jacobs Ladder. A Jacobs Ladder is nothing more than two vertical wires attached to a very high voltage. The wires which form the ladder are close together at the base but diverge as they go up. When switched on an electric arc forms at the base of the wires. The arc heats the air above it and in doing so forms an easier path for the electricity to take. The arc moves upwards continually heating the air above itself and rising to take the easier path until eventually the arc reaches the end of the wires and leaps into the air. Once free of the wires it dies but a new arc starts again at the bottom of the ladder. The arc itself moves with a very distinctive buzzing noise. These devices are most usually seen in old sci-fi and horror films and the houses of strange people.

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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

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:

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Here’s a cool hack on HOWTO run multiple virtual domains on your MacBook Pro. This might be helpful if you want to do some testing on your website or blog before goin’ live. Thanks Tames for the link. (By the way, I do have a 24″ iMAC…hehe…proud owner of MAC and PC.)

How to support multiple virtual domains on a Mac is a question I had after recently purchasing a Macbook Pro. Part of the motivation in that purchase being that I wanted to get all my development stuff onto a portable platform so I could “work” when I’m supposed to be on vacation or from some destination deep in jungles of a remote island in the South Pacific or the couch. What I found was a lot of information on how to get one website to work under Apache but not multiple sites without manually switching them, it was a real pain, but after a good bit of research and some trial and error, I’ve come up with a solution that works for me.

via realitywired

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!

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I just painted my new apartment with some orange, more orange, and lavender paint. Here’s a great way you can make a IR PaintRemover! (good find, Phillip!)

The new unit would be a departure from the old. This new unit would be based on a ceramic emitter rather than your grandfather’s quartz tubes of yesteryear. Why ceramic? One reason is that a ceramic unit would be easier to build with fewer parts. Commercial ceramic emitters are readily available. Efficiencies for ceramic emitters run from 85 to 96% whereas quartz ran around 60%. Therefore, a higher percentage of the energy supplied to the unit would be transmitted as infrared rather than light. Quartz rods tend to have infrared hotspots. Cermaic on the other hand, produces a more evenly distributed heat.

[via] oceanmanorhouse

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…

I need one of these touch Tetris where you can actually move your whole arm to guide your boxes. (If I can only do this in the warehouse where everything fits, we’d save a lot of space…) (thinking of our warehouse pictures, i forgot to updated with ALL our Mattress-in-a-box(es)…visit our mattress store within 26 hours and you can save 20% OFF our retail prices…) (By the way, the only tightest and best stuff get marked as “Magic” under our category section…)

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SparkFun just moved into some bigger and better offices; they are still in Boulder and cranking out orders for various kits, components, and more. We dropped by the new space last week to check it out and congratulate them on their expansion - [Flickr Photoset]

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