Rohitdesa built a breakout board for the Nokia 1100 LCD. The advantage of Nokia 1100 LCDs to the 3310s, is that they have a built in LED backlight. He used some high gauge wires to connect the LCD connectors to a standard pinheader. Via the forum.
Category Archives: DIY
DIY Ultrasonic range finder clone
Erdabyz made a DIY clone of the SRF04 ultrasonic range finder. He used pictures of the SRF04 and some intuition to make the PCB. His project is the exact clone of the device and uses these ultrasonic sensors. He was kind enough to provide the PCB source files, as well as some source code for […]
Altoids tin fume extractor
After checking out Make’s mini fume extractor, Eric decided to make his own. What he had lying around was a 24v fan that couldn’t quite fit in a single Altoids box, so he soldered two boxes together to get a single wider one. Two 9V batteries connected in series provide the power for the fan, […]
DIY ATTiny85 Development Board
Christopher built an ATTiny85 development board. It has all the microcontroller pins broken out to a 2×4 dual row pinheader, a power indicator LED, and a reset button as well.
DIY 3D printer using DPL projector
Peter is building a 3D high-resolution Printer that uses a DLP projector to cure resin in layers, building up a 3D model. He started a blog following all the stages of his build, from the idea to completion. This video shows a recording of his X and Z axis control test.
Homemade GPS receiver
Andrew built a DIY GPS receiver with an accuracy of ~25m : A homemade GPS receiver built from the ground up using discrete components and featuring a limiting IF, followed by 1-bit ADC ahead of DSP signal processing in a Xilinx Spartan 3 FPGA. Fast FFT-based search and navigational solutions are computed by “C” code […]
DIY breadboard modules for rapid prototyping
Raj made a few breadboard modules to speed up prototyping. We think it’s a great idea to have a power supply, few switches, LEDs, etc, broken out into modules. It will save you a ton of time, and space on your breadboard. Breadboards are a great tool for prototyping and testing electronics circuits. However, if […]
DIY high resolution 3D printer
Arhi tipped us about this amazing DIY high resolution 3D printer. It uses a projector to cure resin and, layer by layer, develop a 3D object. The developer wants to produce it as a low-cost, high-resolution 3D printer: I have been dreaming about having a 3D Printer at home for many years, but the ones […]
UBW32 Arduino shield adaptor
TitanMKD wants to interface his UBW32 with a NFC Arduino shield. He decided to make a adapter board to easily connect and disconnect them together: I have just developped a first version of arduino adaptor for UBW32, this version is basic because only Power Supply and SPI are connected in order to have a working […]
Defcon 19: build your own radar system
At the Defcon 19 (2011) conference Michael Scarito demonstrated how to construct your own radar system. The project is based on a design by Dr. Greg Charvat from MIT and uses synthetic aperture techniques to generate a two- or three-dimensional image. (You can read Dr. Charvat’s research paper here.) The hardware operates in the 2.4 […]
Electronics art
Being bored can sometimes inspire people to make cool stuff. Hak8or made these cool stick figures from his unused electronic parts. The hardest part of this build was soldering the tiny 0402 LEDs for eyes. You might also wanna check out these amazing sculptures made from unused PCBs. Via the forum.
DIPtheDIL use dual row headers in a breadboard
After posting about SILtheDIL, we received another idea on how to break-out dual row headers. Victzh and Shaos made similar adapters that allow dual row headers to be used with a standard breadboard. They write: “it’s more like “DILtheDIP” or “DIPtheDIL” :)”. Via the forum.
LiPo auto-balancing circuit
ScottD tipped us to the LiPo Auto Balancer circuit featured in the Elektor magazine’s June 2010 issue. When using multiple lithium ion/polymer batteries in series an auto-balancing circuit is needed to make sure all the cells charge equally. Due to slight differences in capacity, some cells will reach full charge before others. This effect increases […]
Converting an Inkjet printer to print PCBs
There are many ways to built a DIY PCB. Some of the more popular ones are the toner transfer method, and the UV exposure of PCBs. Both methods require lots of trial and error. Here is another way to go around building you PCBs. Pourcirup posted a tutorial on how to convert an old ink-jet […]
FPGACheap DIY Altera FPGA USB programmer
This is a DIY USB programer for Altera FPGAs. It only uses a PIC uC and a few discrete components to provide a JTAG interface with a FPGA. Somun found it on a Japanese site (machine translation), and with the help of Google Translate he built one for himself. There are two versions available. The […]
Fingertip heart rate monitor
R-B built a heart rate measurement from fingertip circuit. He also provided all the design files, and general theory of it’s operation: This project describes a microcontroller based heart rate measuement system that uses optical sensors to measure the alteration in blood volume at fingertip with each heart beat. The sensor unit consists of an […]
E-book reader for the microtouch
Rossum built an e-book reader for the microtouch. He wanted to use the common e-book format epub. But unfortunately since the format is actually a compressed set of text, html links and images, it was too much for the 8-bit microcontroller to handle. To overcome this he developed a transcoding tool (epubgrider) to decompress the […]
Intelligent Fan Controller
Geoff designed this USB PC case fan controller. It is used to control the speed of your fans depending on the temperatures in your case. Software that was developed for this project allows you to customize the temperature profiles for your computer. The project is based on the PIC18F2550 that is connected to the computer […]
Controllable aquarium moonlight strip
Theatrus build a controllable aquarium moonlight strip on the fish tank bubbler. Royal-blue Osram high power surface mount LEDs provide the lighting, and an ATmega88 the control. RS485 port is used for control. All of the design files should be available shortly. Its quite potent (visible with the main 6x80W T5s running). Its easy to mount […]
AT42QT1010 touch panel underwater test
pppd did some some tests for his underwater touch panel using the AT42QT1010 and a DIY panel. The panel is constructed from aluminum sheets, foam, and duct tape. He is currently sorting out calibration issues, as right now it makes a great cat-drinking-water indicator. Via the forum.