CircuitGeek

Even though the Halloween is already passed by, but it’s always fun to create a new open source project, especially when you do it with your family!

If you’re bored with the ordinary scanner, maybe this Jack-O’-lantern, “Larson Scanner” is going to light up your boring life.

For your information, the Larson scanner is named in honor of Glen A. Larson, the man who is responsible for making both the original Battlestar Galactica and Knight Rider TV shows (Sounds familiar to you, isn’t it?)

Have a detail look on the Larson Scanner. It’s based on the ATtiny2313 microcontroller and has a few advantages. Firstly, it’s a power efficient device, which is saving a lot more battery life. The new version uses a low power microcontroller and manages the power to the LEDs.

The Larson Scanner has nine LEDs. The “eye” scans from back and forth across the LEDs. In order to achieve the smooth scanning, you have to lit up to five of the LEDs to various its degrees at one moment.

One more thing, you should wire the battery box go up through holes in the board, before looping around.

When you’re driving on the road in the middle of night, suddenly your car was broken down! In this case, you’ve to put a protective barricade light at the back of your car to warn the pass by vehicles, so that the drivers didn’t accidently bump on your car.

Talking about the barricade light, it’s a very important emergency equipment, especially when your car was stuck in the middle of road of nowhere. The main objective of the barricade light warns the pass by drivers to be more careful about the broken down vehicle on the roadside.

Most of the time, people are usually purchase the barricade lights from the nearby car stores or hypermarkets. Honestly, did you know that you could make a cool emergency lamp out of one of those yellow lights on the top of a barricade light?

Ok, the components you needed here including:

• A barricade light,

• An old lamp (It would be fantastic, if it equipped with one of those clicky things to turn it on)

Then, you only have to assembly the lamp with the barricade light. Now, you own an amazing DIY lamp out of a barricade light! [rada194]

For those who have crush on the robot, they seem cannot get enough build different types of robots. In this case, if you’re one of them, maybe this cute little balancing robot might cheer up your day…

Have a good look on the balancing robot. It’s actually a very simple robot, which uses a simple switch as a sensor and stands on only two wheels with inverted pendulum mechanism.

The specialty of the robot is the high balancing ability. Let’s take an example. When the robots is going to fall, the motor starts and moves the robot to the direction it is going to fall. As a result, the motor torque about the center of gravity that is higher than the motor makes the robot in the balanced situation.

By the way, those components that you’re needed here are:

• Some small electric motor;

• Some gears;

• A shaft two wheels;

• Some sheets of plastic;

• Two battery holders;

• 4 AA batteries;

• One button cell;

• One SPDT switch;

• One toggle switch.

After that, you can start combine all the components and build the balancing robot. Honestly, it takes you only about an hour to finish the whole making process. [vahid_you2004]

For most of the video games players, especially those games that require the joystick, it would be a fantastic idea to build your own mini DIY joystick with fire button.

The biggest different between this miniature joystick with others is it made from a few switches and a ballpoint pen. Honestly, the fire button is only an optional, which you can add it onto the joystick if your pen is the clicker type.

This project is quite simple, as it only needs you to mount four of the switches around a center point and using something to control them like a joystick. You don’t have to waste over hundreds of dollars, rushing to the nearby electronic store buying the joystick. Instead, you can DIY it with a clicking pen!

Honestly, it’s a very cool thing to have a button at the top of the joystick. By the way, if you assume that the prototype is not as good as the one that you buying from the electronic stores, then you might be wrong here! After you’ve tested the joystick by yourself, you’ll realize that the action is very smooth and responsive.

In present days, there is many type of headphone amp kits available on the market. However, majority of them are not as good as they’ve claimed. In fact, they’re costing up to hundreds of dollars and consuming a lot of energy!

For those who want to try out something cheaper and energy saving headphone amp kit, maybe you should have a look on the JAN6418 Valve Preamplifier.

Basically, the PCB of JAN6418 Valve Amplifier is plated through, dual layered, solder masked and screen printed. By using the 9V battery, you can easily operating the kit. That’s why, the JAN6418 Valve Preamplifier is considering as the safe and ideal kit, especially for the amateurs.

For your information, the JAN6418 valves are having the appearance like small Christmas tree lights. The USA made Raytheon JAN6418 sub-miniature valves are low power consumption pentodes, which are normally used as triodes in the circuit.

Why you have to spend over $5000 for the valve preamplifier that put in an expensive plastic enclosure, instead you can build the valve preamplifier by less than $50? Frankly, you can use a rigid ABS box and insert all the electronics components into the non-expensive plastic case! As a result, you can save over thousands of dollars and have a well-built valve preamplifier too. [diyaudioprojects]

Would you wish to have a smart tweezer that allows you to test out the volt or ohm of the electronics components? Honestly, the smart tweezer is also known as digital multimeter or DMM generally.

A sweet tweezer can be a very useful device, especially for basic faultfinding and field service work or a bench instrument. They’re mostly being used to troubleshoot electrical problems in a wide array of industrial or household devices. Those devices that can be used to test, including the batteries, motor controls, power supplies and much more.

Did you know that the smart tweezer is one of the latest and recent developments in the DMM field? Normally, they consist of a simple DMM circuit powered by a 3V lithium cell, and built into the form factor of a pair of oversized tweezers. In this case, the metallic tweezer probes act as the DMM terminals!

By simply contacting an SMD device, it allows the smart tweezer to measure resistance, capacitance, diode Vf, or inductance instantly.

You can add the $10 dollar voltage measurement function to a cheap pair of smart tweezers. Honestly, for the cost of a 25 cent DPDT DIP switch, it’s totally worth it all! [continue to know how]

Among the living creatures on the Earth, the insects comprise the largest portion of all. Based on the latest statistic, there are more than 10 quintillion insects alive on the Earth! Gosh, the number is so huge, as it’s many times more than the total population of human beings.

However, you must beware of the insects, as not every one of them is actually a harmless living creature. Recently, the scientists from the University of California had developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. It sounds like a very ordinary thing, but the interesting part is it they have used the giant flower beetle that implemented with electrodes and a radio receiver on its back. In this case, the scientists are able to wirelessly controlled the beetle accordingly.

The electrodes that being attached on the beetles’ back is giving the electrical signals or commands to the little insect. It controlled the beetles to do several actions, including when to take off, turn left or right, and hover in the midflight!

The beetle’s payload consists of an off-the-shelf microprocessor, a radio receiver and a battery attached to a custom-printed circuit board. All the flight commands are sent to the beetle via radio-frequency transmitter, which are remotely controlled by laptop!

The scientists said it’s this experiment is going to bring a huge different, especially in the microelectricity industry. [via]