Check out this cool DIY you can make some cheap high voltage.  I’ve always wanted to do this at a low cost but here it is!

What you see here is a spent propane torch tank with a 1-inch (2.5cm) ball bearing glued to it with a 1/4-inch (6mm) bearing glued to that. I stripped the propane tank with paint stripper, but this is unnecessary as you can just scrape off the paint where the ball bearings go. The Leyden jar is just a common quart sized polyethylene bottle cut off at the top. The electrode is an ordinary empty soda can turned upside down, stuffed into a styrofoam coffee cup. The coffee cup just acts as a gasket to hold the can in place. A piece of wire hanging from the soda can tab connects to about three inches of salt water in the bottom of the bottle through a hole in the styrofoam cup. Both the propane tank and the Leyden jar sit atop a strip of aluminum foil. That’s it.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a cool IM-bot, which let’s you know when your friends are online. This one is for Linux
but it shouldn’t be too hard to make it yourself using a PIC 16F628A or any other microcontroller.

To make the device, you first need a push puppet. A push puppet is a small articulated character composed of several body parts held together by several strings that run through them under tension. The strings are all connected to a large spring-loaded button under the base. When the button is pressed, the strings go slack and the puppet collapses. When the button is released, the strings pull the puppet back to its normal erect shape. More information on push puppets can be had at http://www.pushpuppets.com/. Push puppets are cheap toys for small children, and can be found at most serious toy stores. Mine is a wooden dog from the “farm animals” series, made by Toys Pure. I paid 2.77€ for it and I find it much cuter than the Availabot guy. What’s more, it doesn’t “drop dead” like the Availabot guy when the button is pushed, but instead drops its head and bows its knees, which I find nicer.

Here’s some cool looking homemade brushless motors made using some PC Hard drive parts and
power tools…. wow!

My first home-built outrunner motor from hard drive stators (Western Digital Caviar). Motor designation is 280-10-6 as it has a 28dia x 10mm long stator. I used 6 windings of 3-strand 0.35mm wire with a delta connection and a distributed winding pattern. It spins 12,300 RPM @ 23.3A with a 8×4 Graupner SLIM prop.

This 350-20 is the biggest motor I’ve built so far. The 12-tooth, 35mm stator is from a power tool and the 14 magnets are 20×6x2mm. This motor has a nominal rating of 600w, but can safely be pushed to 750W for short durations. A similar motor powers a friend’s Smith Miniplane built to the original SIG plans and gives it vertical performance.

Wow, this is one cool keyboard I wanna get.

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Check out this new table saw that can possibly protect your fingers…

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a cool video of using lemons to power an LED! (which is about 1.8 to 3V!)

Now, how many Lemons do we need to power a 60 watt light bulb?

Check out this cool digital roulette table. It looks like all the casinos will have to go digital in the
next few years.  Also check out these digital roulette kits for your kids.

Now this is what I call, sweet! We’ve seen our fair share of futuristic interactive tables (here, here, and here), but this one just seems like fun. Designed by Moritz Waldemeyer

via ministryoftech

Here the site that finds out what superhero you’d be after answering couple questions!

via wagthis

Cool midi project using PIC!

As you’ll see in the pictures, first I built a flat 8X8 array of switches laid out in the Hayden pattern (the white one plays “c”). The flat array let me lay the first one out pretty much just like the schematic diagram. It also let me not care too much about the end result, since I was learning to solder. The first version was wired to a breadboard, (not shown) where I debugged the circuitry. And after the electronics worked, I used it to develop the software.

The flexibility of this technology is part of the fun. It’s just buttons on a board, so you can build just about any shape you’d like to try. My son wants me to build another flat array, but complete with PIC & battery. His vision is, you hang it around your neck like sort of an electronic washboard. (”Bellyboard”) The range of a small electronic keyboard, the form-factor of a sandwich, and the ergonomics of scratching your stomach. With a sound module on your belt and headphones, just the thing for grooving in subway or hammock. Why not?

If you stare at Jordan Petkov’s schematics long enough, the following picture should make sense. The leads out the top were to the breadboard: 8 inputs to select a row, and 8 columns of outputs.

The MIDI controller electronics are mostly Jordan Petkov’s design. Jordan has done really great work on developing simple MIDI controllers using PIC “engines”; his site and offerings will reward your study. I added a power supply (7805-based), a MIDI OUT plug, and a 10MHz crystal rather than of the indicated 4MHz. The buttons are “Tactile Switches” (JameCo, 37 cents each), arranged on perfboard to mimic the Hayden diagrams.