Want to get up before the sunrise? Here’s the money shredding alarm clock project by Rich Olson’s to help you get yourself up early: If you have trouble getting out of bed a bed shaker alarm might be a bit extreme, you might … Read more
Can’t sleep because of a noisy hamster wheel? Felipe shows you how to easily make a very silent homemade hamster wheel using an old hard disk drive: Felipe La Rotta from Cocodrilabs had a noisy hamster wheel. Hamster wheels like most … Read more
Emeryth discovered that these cheap laptop PCI GPS modules can easily be interfaced with microcontrollers. On the back of the board there are testpoints which he identified as UART and USB. The USB is recognized as a CDC-ACM standard virtual … Read more
A few weeks ago Mats used a hacked footprint, where he removed the unused pins to help him route a board. Here’s a commercial USB flash drive that uses the same method. Few of the pins on the memory chip … Read more
Routing complex surface mount circuits on a 1 or 2 layer PCB is tricky. TSSOP and similar small parts often don’t have enough clearance to route a trace between two leads. Mats tackled this by by removing a few unused … Read more
Hack an Etch a Sketch toy to act as a display for your projects. In this example it’s used as a temperature logger. The project uses two stepper motors driving the knobs, which are controlled via a PICAXE 18M2 microcontroller. … Read more
Want your doorbell to play prerecorded messages or tunes? This hack at instructables replaces the original speaker in a wireless doorbell with a 9 volt recording module. Most doorbells just make a simple generic tone. But I thought that it would be … Read more
Usually we book with Orbitz, but for a few flights on the upcoming India trip we used Expedia. Some had to be canceled and rescheduled, luckily only a $20 change fee so no biggie right? Nope, Expedia was a fresh … Read more
Hack a Crayola ColorStudio HD Pen and load it up with your own Arduino sketch. The pen uses a PIC microcontroller to pulse a reed relay which is picked up by the capacitive screen on the tablet. An app on … Read more
Here is simple hack that allows you to use a breadboad with the Arduino. Alex simply bent the Arduino’s digital IO header so it would fit the standard 0.1” pitch of breadboards. Via the forum.
Wardy hacked a tank toy he got from eBay. Motors are driven through a L298N dual full-bridge driver, while the tank is currently controlled with an Arduino. Soon the Arduino will give way to a Propeller-based custom board. That toy … Read more
Lindsay lets us know about a problem he ran into with cheap female pinheaders: I once had problems with a 0.1″ pin header connector – the sockets inside the female connector made extremely poor contact. It was for an LCD … Read more
We talked to Jeri (@6:22) at this years Bay Area Maker Faire about her C64 bass guitar. In this video she goes into the internals of her project. Jeri shows a bass guitar she build from an old C64. It … Read more
How to modify standard servos for continuous operation. This hack involves opening up the servo, removing the limit mechanics, and modifying the feedback pot. In his second tutorial Andrey shows how to add a rotatory encoder to the servo, for … Read more
Matthias fixed the EDID ROM of his Samsung monitor using the Bus Pirate. He documented the whole process on his blog. Also included is a tip on how to connect the Bus Pirate to I2C line through the VGA, or … Read more
Flavor accidentally shorted the power on his Open Bench Logic Sniffer 3.3volt regulator and blew it out. With some quick thinking and a TO-220 through-hole voltage regulator his Logic Sniffer was back in business. Via the forum.
Half Ohm is a adapter for multimeters that allows you to measure resistance in the milliohm range. The project is open source, the design files are available in KiCad. Half Ohm milliohm adapter is ready! Multimeter adapter that transforms any … Read more
Here is a tutorial on how to build a sous-vide cooker. Sous-Vide cookers cook food placed inside a plastic bag, which is inserted into temperature controlled bath. NerdKits describes all the theory, along with plenty of instruction on how to … Read more
If a project calls for resistor arrays, but all you have are singles and mad soldering skills, you can try this hack. Yoganerdnl used a bunch of 0603 resistors on their side to replace the resistor arrays on his Bus … Read more
We go through a lot of prototypes, and many are not perfect the first time around. Here is a pic of one of our prototypes that had 2 pins cross-connected. The simplest solution was to cut the offending traces and … Read more
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