If you want to mess around with your Xbox 360 controllers on a computer Microsoft would be pleased to sell you a USB dongle to do so. but [Tino] went a different route. The board that drives the Xbox 360’s status light ring also includes the RF module that wirelessly connects the controllers. He wired…
[Matt Reed] works at a pet friendly work-space, where his pooch called [Bean] loves to wander around and disappear. She’s not getting in trouble, but nonetheless, [Matt] worries about her. So he took the creepy stalker route and put a beacon on her collar to track her every move. He’s using a small BLE beacon…
[Wilywyrm] needed to find up with a final job for art class that commented on a social issue. Healthcare, schmealthcare, he said, as well as busted out this motion picture poster about the NSA spying scandal instead. The circuit utilizes three extended-duty astable 555 timers to manage the brightness of the 5050 RGB common-anode LED strips that…
There’s some interesting technology bundled into this energy harvesting wristwatch. While energy harvesting timepieces (called automatic watches) have been around for nearly 240 years, [bobricius] has used parts and methods that are much more easily transferable to other projects. Unlike early mechanical systems, this design uses the versatile BPW34 PIN photodiode (PDF warning). PIN photodiodes…
[Damcave] decided to try out some bar code reader projects. He got his hands on a CueCat years ago. The problem is that it outputs encrypted character sets instead of a clear text string. To get around this he used his Arduino to decrypt the CueCat’s data output. Originally you could get you hands on…
While the violin maker gets a lot of of the acclaim and prestige for turning lumber into musical instruments, you can’t deny the sheer beauty and grandeur of a jazz-style archtop guitar. much larger than a violin or viola, the scale of a guitar can still lend itself to the exacting artistry of a master…
There’s an unknown piece of armed forces electronic gear being investigated over on [Usagi Electric]’s YouTube channel (see video below the break). The few markings as well as labels on the box aren’t extremely helpful, however together with the building as well as parts, seem to determine it as relating to the us Navy from…
If you think your last project required a lot of soldering, take a look at [Multivac’s] remote controlled and fully-articulable desktop crane lamp. Sure, it’s a 430 microcontroller combined with an LED driver, 32 LEDs, PWM control, and some moving parts: but take a closer look at the structure. The Cramp uses an old HDD as…
numerous films utilize a similar trope when it concerns poisoning. The aspiring murderer ingests a drink poured from the exact same vessel as that provided to their meant sufferer to suggest the liquid is risk-free to imbibe. The Assassin’s Teapot is a method one might accomplish such a ruse, enabling two different liquids to be…
If you thought programming your 1990s VCR was rough, wait until you see this Russian telephone autodialer that [Mike] took apart over on the mikeselectricalstuff YouTube channel (video below the break). [Mike] got this 1980s Soviet-era machine a few years ago, and finally got around to breaking into it to learning what makes it tick. The autodialer plugs…