Gadget Freak

Fun and entertaining projects for the gadget freaks among us

Mowing the lawn from your hammock

Posted by The Gadgeteer on November 21, 2009

The remote control mow-bot Most of the country has packed away lawn maintenance equipment for the year, but here in the central Texas there isn’t an off season for mowing. If the grass turns brown in the winter, it’s only because it’s tired from growing year round. So when the Arduino contest on Instructables turned up an entry for a remote ...... Read More

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Reflow Soldering on the Cheap

Posted by The Gadgeteer on November 16, 2009

What a great time to be an electronics hobbyist! Who could have imagined 10 years ago the cool parts that are available for experimentation and projects today: Triple axis accelerometers Compact GPS receivers 32 bit superscalar microcontrollers at hundreds of MHz RGB LEDs LCD panels touchscreens Standard interfaces like I2C, SPI, CAN, etc. to easily hook all of the above together. PC ...... Read More

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Industries: Materials/Fastening , Electronics/Test

The Musical Pencil

Posted by The Gadgeteer on November 16, 2009

One of the milestones on my path to electrical engineering was sometime around 6th grade, when my parents bought me one of those 150-in-1 electronics kits, the one with all the wires and spring terminals, and point to point directions for wiring things up. I didn’t understand a lot of what the articles said, but I had a lot of fun wiring up sound generators, radios, and light bulb ...... Read More

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Industries: Electronics/Test

Home-Built EFI Computer for Your Car

Posted by The Gadgeteer on November 13, 2009

Today’s column is about Megasquirt, an EFI (Electronic Fuel Injection) computer that you can build. Maybe you own a hotrod (or clunker), and while you love it for sentimental reasons, you wish it had the driveability of today’s fuel injected cars: No more pumping the gas pedal while starting, good gas mileage combined with power, easy starting either hot or cold. With MegaSquirt t ...... Read More

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Cool Motor Kits for Future Engineers

Posted by The Gadgeteer on October 30, 2009

Greetings fellow gadgeteers! In this blog post, I will take a look at some electronics projects for kids. Like many of you, I have kids that are at that impressionable age where they can hopefully be steered towards an honorable life spent in a field such engineering, science, or plumbing, and away from such disreputable activities as ticket scalping or lawyering. To that end I present some proj ...... Read More

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MBED - Embedded for the Rest of Us

Posted by The Gadgeteer on October 23, 2009

In a previous post I mentioned the MBED ARM powered development board. This board is such a neat product I thought I’d write a column giving more details about it. In the interest of full disclosure, I am currently an ARM employee and have been for the past 11 years, in ARM’s Processor Division. During this time I have worked on parts such as ARM 1026, 926, 968, Cortex A8, and othe ...... Read More

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Industries: Software/Hardware

Behind Billy's New Brain

Posted by The Gadgeteer on October 20, 2009

Don’t be ashamed Go ahead, admit it. In the back of your closet, up on a shelf in the garage, or in a box where it got packed away but never unpacked, lies one of the most popular novelty gifts of the 21st century: Big Mouth Billy Bass. Billy was introduced to the world in April 2000, and was an immediate hit. Many stores sold out inventory in days and had to put customers on waiting li ...... Read More

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Unique Tesla Coil Operates on Low Voltage

Posted by The Gadgeteer on August 20, 2009

Ken Herrick’s unique Tesla coil operated on the “tickle principle,” a patented circuit he designed that produces a relatively gradual build-up of secondary voltage to produce awesome sparks a bit more safety. By Ken Herrick, Contributing Writer Though sadly no longer operational, Ken Herrick’s novel Tesla Coil (aka “entertainment machine”) produced some s ...... Read More

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Tiny server robot

Posted by The Gadgeteer on June 26, 2009

Here’s another cool tiny robot from MiddleCreekMerchants. This is a very small all-analog real working robot. It walks forward a little less than 1 inch per Second. The robot moves in psuedo-organic behavior. Two Servos twist left then right in a pattern which places each foot on the ground at different times in order to give him a forward stride. The robot has a NiMh battery which runs fo ...... Read More

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Tiny caterpillar robot

Posted by The Gadgeteer on June 15, 2009

This weird little “bugbot” from Middle Creek Merchants is a a bicore pulling five slavecores. It oscillates and follows light. The whole tiny train is only a couple inches long. ...... Read More

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Weird gadget converts sun to sound

Posted by The Gadgeteer on May 4, 2009

Here’s a strange electronic gadget that takes sun rays and converts them to sound. My parakeets love this thing. ...... Read More

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A gadget that parallel parks

Posted by The Gadgeteer on March 28, 2009

Here’s a gadget that does a better job of parallel parking than I do. Give me one for my minivan! ...... Read More

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