Dotklok LED Clock

If there's a LED clock worth displaying in your living room, this is it. The Dotklok turns passing time into much more than simple numbers passing by.
Now, every minute will pass by with a cute transition/animation inspired in games like Pong, Tetris, Pacman, and Space Invaders.

You can build your own dotklok, as everything you need is publicly available. But, if you don't have the time/patience to spare, you can also buy a fully assembled one.
Of course, in that case, you'll be missing most of the enjoyment of building it yourself and saying to your friends (and yourself): "I made it!"


DOTKLOK: Game Time from The Latest Artists on Vimeo.


DOTKOK rev. 1.0 from The Latest Artists on Vimeo.

PIC24F with Ethernet, USB and SD

It's no secret most people will use an Arduino for their electronics project. But, it's no secret Microchip's PIC range of microcontrollers are also quite common and popular.
When you start toying around with it, sooner or later you'll be wishing for more... and that includes things like an SD card to load/store data; a USB port to interact with a PC; or even an ethernet connection for networking. So, I present you this WEBSD.

Some of thing you can do with it:

1. An Touch keyboard, usable as a standard USB keyboard.
2. A Video Game ( pong and snake games) , with TV output, and connection to a PC Keyboard ( the old PS/2 ) for control.
3. Picture frame,  reads pictures form the SD card and show them on the TV.
4. Controling a 5 volt LCD and some leds, with just 3 wires ( the MCU is 3.3V)
5. Web server, where you can see some status of the board as temperature, the position of a Pot and a Button,  control some leds and the LCD ( all this from the internet)

I'm sure you'll be able to come up with some pretty cool ideas of your own to take it even further.

Arduino The Documentary

You've probably already heard about the Arduino. This open-source electronics development platform is being used by thousands and thousand of people around the world.

I've shown you some projects using it: like photographing at the speed of sound, individually addressable LED strips, and a Portuguese made Arduino made of paper.

If you're into this kind of stuff, don't miss out the following video: Arduino The Documentary.


Arduino The Documentary (2010) English HD from gnd on Vimeo.

Electronic Order Menu Made in Portugal

No doubt everyone of us has already wished to have some form of automated ordering system when waiting for a waiter to come take your order at a restaurante, bar, or café. Well, a Portugues company - X64 - has decided to make something about it, and came up with the electronic menu.

It's a small menu with several pages and buttons that can transmit your order wirelessly to a receiving station. (They claim it has 1 year battery life - which should help clear out any worried about frequent battery replacement or recharging.)

You can keep track of your order on a small LCD screen, and each page is detected via magnetic detection (each page has its unique magnet)

It's a quite simple concept, that can already be found in some places in Portugal.

PAPERduino

While attending Codebits I came across a very interesting project by Guilherme Martins: PAPERduino.

Considering that the PCB is one of the most "troublesome" aspects of building your own Arduino - unless you opt to buy a ready-to-assemble kit - Guilherme had the excellent idea: why not bypass the PCB completely and use paper and cardboard instead?

The PAPERduino thus becomes one of the easiest and cheapest methods to build your own Arduino.

Considering you'll soon be able to print electronic components on paper using nanotube ink I don't think it's too far-fetched to think of a time when you'll be able to print all your electronics in a similar way.

iPhone - Man's Best Friend's Best Friend

No, it's not a typpo, the title's exactly how I meant it

Jt's just that Stephen Meyers remebered to use his iPhone as a universal controler to keep tabs on his dog at home - as well as being able to treat him from afar.

With some hardware modules from IObridge, and using WebcamXP for streaming the video, the entire project took just a couple of hours.

That's the perfect example of what you can accomplish using off-the-shelf components and using it in a creative way.

Wireless Electricity

One of the last barriers keeping us from living a truly wireless life is about to smashed: wireless electricity!

That's right, we'll soon be able to kiss those dreaded power cables goodbye.

And while many companies have promissed that (and failed to deliver) I think this time it may be different, because it's none other than Intel itself saying it!

Intel has shown that it could transmit electricity wirelessly over a dozen inches with 75% efficiency (previous systems were only able to achieve 50% efficiency at best.)

So, it really seems we may have some cablefree gagdgets in the near future afterall.

Mechanical Dragonfly - Surveillance Wet Dream

A machine that resembles a dragonfly, that can fly indoors, with motors, batteries, camera, video transmiter, measuring less that 10cm and weighing 3 grams?

What more can I say: it's incredible!

Next time you spat any bug flying around you, be sure to check if it wasn't one of these. :)




via [Gizmodo]

Vacuum Tube DIY

Sometimes it's hard to believe how things evolve so fast.
Just "recently", before the appearance of the solid-state transistor, the king of electronic was the vacuum tube triode.

Today those tubes are still widely used, from HAM radio to Hi-Fi components, and when the time comes for you to replace one of them, it can be hard to find a suitable one. That's why some people decide to make their own vacuum tube triodes.

Let's take a trip down memory lane, as we watch a french amateur radio operator creating a triode from scratch:



Just try to image how you'd stick millions of these things in a few square millimeters, as it happens with modern computer chips. :)