JAN8

LED display in a business card

This is a business card that you will not giveaway that easy. It has LED display and PIC microcontroller and is powered from a 3V CR2032 button-cell battery. The microcontroller used in this application is PIC16F57 and display consists of 75 RED SMD LEDs. By pressing on any of four available buttons, an appropriate predefined message will be displayed on LED display.

This is a very good business card that you can give someone, knowing it will not be throwen away!

Source: tomward

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JAN7

Pressure sensor - cheap and homemade

If you ever need a pressure sensor, you can build your own from just a few components: two pieces of copper clad board, two wires and for the main ingredient you will need a conductive foam. Conductive foam is actually a sponge that you stick your IC's onto. That conductive foam has it's ohm resistance that depends on electrode's distance on it's surface. As the two plates come closer together, the resistance will become lower and that is the general idea. With this little sensor we get what is called a "force sensitive resistor" or FSR.

Source: kylemcdonald

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JAN6

Printing your PCB directly with InkJet printer

You have probably already seen this, but for those who didn't here is another method of making PCBs that gives the same results as photo-etching technique!

All that you will need is an old InkJet printer that needs to be modified to support printing directly on the copper-clad boards instead of paper. After the printer prints your design on the board, the key step is to cure the ink on 230 degrees Celsius in order to turn it into a strong acid resist. That is the key for successful PCB with this method.

Source: Volkan S., Stefan T.

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JAN5

DIY LED chandelier

This must be the best use for some 160 white LED diodes that you have laying around. The whole chandelier is powered from mains, actually from a 12V transformer. Vertical support is made out of bicycle wheel spokes and they are also used as power lines for LEDs.

I must say, it looks very impressive!

Source: Dipankar

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JAN4

Sound torture device

This device has been built for one reason only - to annoy everyone around it. What's interesting is that "everyone" is actually people with less than 25-30 years of age because this device produces a high-pitch sound of around 17 kHz. Ofcorse, it is well known fact that most people above the mentioned age can't hear those high-pitch noises.

It is based on ATtiny25 microcontroller and can be powered by 3V battery (button-cell CR2032). Source code is available for download from the author's web page.

Source: Hungry_Myst

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JAN3

USB CapsLocker prank

This great little device emulates USB HID keyboard when connected to a PC USB port. It toggles Caps Lock key in random intervals, from 30sec to 8min hence driving the PC user simply crazy. Just imagine plugging in this little device in your coworkers' PC.

It is based on ATtiny45 microcontroller, powered from USB port and it is small enough not to easily notice it!

Source: Garrett M.

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JAN2

Laptop PC robot base

If you wish to build a robot but you are not very familiar with microcontrollers, or your microcontroller just doesn't seem to have enough memory, why wouldn't you simply put your laptop on wheels?

Here you will see a 3-wheeled base for a robot who's brain is your notebook PC. With this configuration you will not end up without FLASH memory and you pretty much don't have any limitations. You can easily access: wifi, web camera, you can write your own image processing software and don't care how big it is, you can access it with your bluetooth phone and so on.

Source: CarlS

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JAN1