Here’s a great DIY on how to make a solar heater. Although the one he made is not functional you can probably easily make it functional by adding an inlet pipe and outlet pipe plus a small PC fan. But the theory is very impressive and this thing could be made more efficient with a little bit more work.

Using the same equipment and methods, I determined the outlet temperature to be about 95 degrees - thus a 15 degree temperature differential. Not 110 degrees, but not bad , considering I didn’t even break $50 in materials - most of that being the plexiglas window.

Obviously don’t have the inlet and outlet attached to the garage - figures that the day I finish the furnace, it’s 80 degrees and sunny and it looks like we’re finally done with winter. Dad recommends wiring a pusher fan at the end of the inlet tube to keep the air circulating through the furnace.

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Cool, check out Al’s Quick and Dirty Headcam. He says it’s simple and it works.

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Here’s a cool Deer Repellent for those of you with deers on your front yard that eat up your plants. But just turn it off on Christmas so Rudolph the Raindeer doesn’t get scared.

My original “Deer Repellent/ Seismic Sensor” recommended using a speaker with a weight glued to the cone as a vibration sensor (see bottom of page) but it recently occurred to me that the speaker could supply the mass itself. By gluing a standoff to the center of the cone, an inexpensive 2″, 8 ohm speaker becomes a vibration sensor with a natural resonance below 100Hz which is quite good.

If you use Linux, you know Xeyes is a simple program that follows your mouse movements. You can check out some web examples of Xeyes. You can even paste this javascript code on your website for Xeyes on the web.

Anyway, Hunz created physical Xeyes that stands on his window and follow people’s walking movements. Tight! We want one.

The eyes are made from large pizza boxes cardboard and rolled by RC-servos that are controlled by an ATTiny2313 that’s connected to the PC using the low-speed software usb stack. The camera is connected using USB as well. Since I disassembled my webcam and hooked it up to an FPGA for some experiments, I used an analog one and a USB video digitizer.

The video processing is done using mplayer. It’s cropped first to get only the street and no neighbour estates. Then a tiny & quick&dirty video filter plugin looks for the column with the strongest Y-component difference between the last & current frame and if the difference exceeds a certain threshold, that column is passed to the microcontroller using libusb.

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Cool, here’s an instructable that shows you how to zap stuff at 120,000 volts!

It’s Frankenstein time. Who doesn’t enjoy the smell of ozone and the snap of a big fat spark?
The dome is rotating due to vibration
Although a Van De Graff generator has recently been posted I decided to post mine based on it’s substantial differences.

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Check out this awesome 3D mouse you can build using some creative hacks!

I’ve been exploring 3D graphics using VVVV. One of the things you quickly learn when working in 3D is that doing anything with a 2D mouse is a pain. Particularly I found I was spending a lot of time shuffling the camera position which involves a tricky combination of keystrokes and mouse movements. I wanted to get a camera control that would allow me to fly the camera smoothly in 3D space.

Looking for “3D Mice” in Google found a variety of more-or-less ugly and expensive commercial options, but also this project linked off Slashdot. Humm I thought, how hard could that be to copy.

The basic principle of Three Blind Mice is to run three threads round three rollers from old mechanical mice. By using the mouse reports to calculate the length of the extended thread this allows the position where all the threads join to be calculated. First job was to interface the mice to a PC. I am using old Microsoft Itellimice. The “z” axis on these mice which measures the position of the wheel is very low resolution and not suitable for this application. So, you need two mice to get the three axis of measurement required.

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Check out this cool DIY on making your own LED Pimp Bedroom and RGB light HOWTO!

I got this idea last year from a couple different things, one was this rope lightdecoration at the Illini Union courtyard cafe that continuously changes colors. The other was from this huge bright LED sign at Irving Park and Sheridan in Chicago that is at some mechanic that uses the sign to advertise his parking spaces for Cubs games. I made this with Red, Green, and Blue LEDs, so I can make any color of the rainbow. This is done the same way your TV or computer monitor works, Red+Green=Yellow, Red+Blue=Purple. I threw in some ultraviolet LEDs in hopes they’d be nice like a black light but they’re more violet than a black light.Go to index 1 of 2 if you want to see more technical pictures. Also, check out The Vos Pad

Click below for more pics!

Continue reading ‘DIY HACK - Make your own LED Bedroom!’

In case you missed it, here’s HOWTO make a Birdfeeder Webcam. Garrett
been telling me how his college project on a webcam birdfeeder webcam
has gotten over 30% of his university’s web traffic, now here’s a cool
video how you can make one yourself.  There’s also a cool pdf you can download
for step-by-step instructions.

Have you ever wondered what birds live in your neighborhood? With the birdfeeder webcam that Steve and I will teach you to make this weekend, you’ll be able to find out! Using motion detection webcam software, you’ll be able to document every bird that shows up at the feeder and get a picture of it whenever it moves. Check the instruction blogpost for the pdf instructions.

Here’s the live picture from the webcam! (it does gets turned off at night) You can also get to a little birdcam page where it gets updated every thirty seconds.

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