Turning On the Kettle with your Phone

Why do light bulbs, furnaces, outlets and even automated blinds get all the home automation love? Won’t somebody think of the kettle!? How are we suppose to ensure tea-time is always a button click away? Tired of his lack of options for remotely controlling his kettle, [FatCookies] decided to make his own WiFi enabled kettle.

He started by ripping up an old power supply enclosure he had lying around, and it happened to be just big enough for a Raspberry Pi. He then added a 2-way relay board designed for handling mains voltage at a high amperage — quite necessary …read more

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DIY AC for the Hot Shop

Working out in the shop is usually super fun but if it’s summertime, watch out, it can get hot! We’ve all been there and we’ve all wished we could do something about it. Well, woodworker and general DIYer [April] has stepped up to the plate and built a portable low-buck AC unit to cool her shop down to an acceptable temperature.

The unit is very simple and starts off with an old thrift store cooler. A hole is cut in the back of the cooler to make room for a fan that is directed to blow air inside the cooler …read more

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DIY Concrete Mixing Wheelbarrow Made from Recycled Parts

[Dan] had a bunch of concrete mixing to do. Sure, it was possible to stand there and mix concrete and water in a wheelbarrow for hours and hours but that sounds like a tedious task. Instead, [Dan] looked around the shop to see if he had parts available to make a concrete mixer. As you may have guessed, he did. Instead of stopping at just a concrete mixer, he decided to make a concrete mixing wheelbarrow!

The frame is built out of plywood left over from a past canoe project. The frame holds a mixing barrel that was also hanging …read more

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Pocket Voltage Supply: A USB Powered Variable Voltage Supply

The Pocket Voltage Supply plugs into any 5V USB hub & allows the user to output 5V,3.3V,2.5V,1.8V,&1.5V. Use it for all your projects! The Pocket Voltage Supply is a USB powered variable voltage supply. It can be powered with any 5V USB hub and can supply up to 1.5A. 5V USB hubs can be found […]

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Gerber Multi-Tool "Covert Entry" Tool mod

This instructable is about installing a small lock picking tool selection into a common military issued Gerber Multi-Tool. The reason I made this is because there was a file that had broken off of my Multi-Tool a long time ago (that I never used anyways) so I thought I would install a more useful to...
By: ksnewells

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Machining A Tailstock Die Holder For The Sherline Lathe

The Sherline Lathe would have to be one of the best value tools I have in my shop. It is incredibly versatile, very accurate, and well priced. Sherline also have an excellent 'open source' approach to the way customers can access their products. Every single part, no matter how small, is available f...
By: Clickspring

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Make your own Sanding Mop

I made this sanding mop for my drillpress and it works great !You can use it for sanding small projects and to made sharp edges smooth.Hope you injoy it What you need: 1. Abrasive cloth or old beltsander belts2. Piece of 6 mm plywood3. Clamps4. Nuts and Bolts and washers M125. Scrollsaw / jigsaw6...
By: hboom

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Arduino Bike Speedometer

by amandaghassaei instructables.com: Monitor your road speed using the Arduino. This project uses a magnetic switch (also called a reed switch) to measure the speed of one of the bike’s wheels. The Arduino calculates the mph, and send this information out to the LCD screen on the handlebars as you ride. It is compatible with […]

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RS232 – MAX232 Interface Module

This project provides you a simple and easy solution to connect / convert your Microcontroller input/output to be connected to the serial port of the Computer. This projects build around popular MAX232 level shifter IC to do the Level Shifting (Voltage) between 5 V and 12 V DC. An Onboard 9 pin female “D” connects […]

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GSM based SMS Alert Fire Alarm System using Arduino

by jojo @ circuitstoday.com Recently we have learned how to interface GSM Module with Arduino and send/receive SMS using GSM module. Interfacing any device with a micro controller is the first step to building a useful system or project with that particular device. In this tutorial, we are going to build a very interesting project – a […]

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Complete DIY Raspberry Pi Weather Station with Software

by kkingsbury @ instructables.com: Back in late February I saw this post on the Raspberry Pi site. http://ift.tt/1Cd49AD They had created Raspberry Pi Weather Stations for Schools. I totally wanted one! But at that time (and I believe still as of writing this) they are not publicly available (you need to be in a select group […]

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How to find your car in a parking lot

The easiest way it to use smart phone with GPS locator. When you park, simply record your location and when you need to find it use navigator which guides you to its place. If you don’t have such phone and want to build one, follow msuzuki777 instructable where he builds … Continue reading

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Experimenting with Arduino based low speed BLDC control

Common hobby BLDC motors are meant to run on relatively high speeds. Take any plane, quadcopter or boat – low speeds aren’t required here. For high speed rotations BLDC drivers rely on back-EMF (or Hall-sensor) to sense rotation speed. Berryjam decided to see how slow he can run those motors … Continue reading

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Camera harvests energy through its sensing elements

There is long known fact that diode can be used in reverse mode to generate small current when placed on a light. Computer scientists at Columbia University thought that this phenomenon could be used for dual purpose – harvest energy and take images. They constructed 30×40 array of diode pixels … Continue reading

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3 Weird and Wonderful Raspberry Pi Innovations

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most acclaimed inventions of our days – a credit card sized computer with the potential to improve our lives in an incredible variety of ways, and educate a whole new generation of hardware and software engineers. In honor of the recent Pi Day … Continue reading

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App note: Charge and discharge application of electrolytic capacitor

An application note from Rubycon about what causes electrolytic capacitors to deteriorate. PDF link is Here. Performance deterioration of aluminum electrolytic capacitor is accelerated by repeated charge and discharge. The speed of deterioration is determined by operating conditions. For example, … Read more

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Make an ATTiny85 programmer and development board

  Larry blogged about his DIY AVR ATTiny85  programmer and development board: Starting from upper left is the 6-pin AVR programming header. I chose it because it has +5 and GND as well as the programming signals and can power the board. … Read more

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DIY ATX Bench power supply

@LuisMirandaAceb tweeted, “I started only with ATX PS and your breakout board but finally this is what I ended with… ”  

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Drive an old laptop display from an AVR

Jean refers us to this article by Eric Wazhung  about interfacing LVDS displays using an 8-bit AVR: Different displays have different (undocumented) functionality. With the several I’ve tested, I’ve attempted to create a step-by-step procedure to get a new display going (or … Read more

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App note: Improving ADC resolution by oversampling and averaging

Silicon Labs’ application note (PDF!) on improving ADC resolution  by oversampling and averaging: This application note describes utilizing oversampling and averaging to increase the resolution and SNR of analog-to-digital conversions. Oversampling and averaging can increase the resolution of a measurement without resorting … Read more

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CNC3020 assembled in 30 minutes

Got it bolted together in less than an hour. Works. Except the safety stop that is, it does not work at all. Next the software.

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Using The Sun To Beat The Heat

It’s practically May, and that means the sweltering heat of summer is nearly upon us. Soon you’ll be sitting outside somewhere, perhaps by a lake, or fishing from a canoe, or atop a blanket spread out on the grass at a music festival, all the while wishing you had built yourself a solar-powered personal air conditioner.

[Nords] created his from a large insulated beverage vessel. The imbibing spout offers a pre-made path to the depths of said vessel and the heart of this build, the ice water refrigerant. [Nords] fashioned a coil out of copper tubing to use as a …read more

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Adding PID Control To A Non-Adjustable Iron

Do remember your first soldering iron? We do. It plugged into the wall, and had no way to adjust the temperature. Most people call these kind of irons “fire starters.” Not only are they potentially unsafe (mainly because of the inadequate stand they come with) they can be hard to use, slow to heat up, and you never know what temperature you are soldering at.

[Mike Doughty] wondered if you could hack a cheap iron to be temperature controlled. He began by taking apart an iron, and adding a K-type thermocouple to the mica heating element with the help of …read more

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Upgrading A Microsoft Surface To A 1 TB SSD

The Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is a neat little tablet, and with an i7 processor, a decent-resolution display, and running a full Windows 8.1 Pro, it’s the closest you’re going to get to a desktop in tablet format. Upgrading the Surface Pro 3, on the other hand, is nigh impossible. iFixit destroyed the display in their teardown, as did CNET. [Jorge] wanted to upgrade his Surface Pro 3 with a 1 TB SSD, and where there’s a will there’s a way. In this case, a very precise application of advanced Dremel technology.

Taking a Surface Pro 3 apart the traditional …read more

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A DIY Fourier Transform Spectrometer

Typical spectrometers use prisms or diffraction gratings to spread light over a viewing window or digital sensor as a function of frequency. While both prisms and gratings work very well, there are a couple of downsides to each. Diffraction gratings produce good results for a wide range of wavelengths, but a very small diffraction grating is needed to get high-resolution data. Smaller gratings let much less light through, which limits the size of the grating. Prisms have their own set of issues, such as a limited wavelength range. To get around these issues, [iliasam] built a Fourier transform spectrometer (translated), …read more

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