Author Archives: Kristina Panos

It’s Not Morning Until Green o’clock

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[JohnathonT] has a two-year-old who can’t reliably tell time just yet. Every morning, he gets up before the rooster crows and barges into his parents’ room, ready to face the day.

In an effort to catch a few more Zs, [JohnathonT] built a simple but sanity-saving clock that tells time in a visual, kid-friendly way. Sure, this is a simple build. But if a toddler is part of your reality, who has time to make one from logic gates? The hardware is what you’d expect to see: Arduino Nano, a DS1307 RTC, plus the LEDs and resistors. We think an …read more

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Automatic MtG Card Sorter Separates Rags from Riches

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Like many of us, [Michael Portera] was an avid trading card collector as a kid. Also like many of us, life got in the way, and the collections sat ignored in boxes until our mothers threatened to get rid of them (or skipped the threat altogether and sold them at a garage sale for next to nothing).

[Michael] was recently reunited with his collection of Magic cards, which vary in value as much as baseball or any other kind of collectible card. Now that his Friday nights are otherwise occupied, he decided to sell them off. But first, he had …read more

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Flood Fault Circuit Interrupter Could Save Lives

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What if you didn’t have to risk your life to disconnect the power during a catastrophic storm? That’s a question many people in Houston were asking themselves as they watched water from Hurricane Harvey and other storms surge through the streets, swell in the gutters, and flood their homes.

Among these Houstonians were engineering students [Jon] and [Cyrus Jyan]. They watched as homeowners fought to safely disconnect their homes from the power grid and said, it shouldn’t have to be this way. They designed the Flood Fault Circuit Interrupter to monitor target areas and disconnect the power automatically when a …read more

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Tiny Pinball Emulator is Hugely Impressive

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We were wondering what [Circuitbeard] has been up to lately. Turns out he’s been building a mini pinball cabinet to add to his arcade of self-built games.

[Circuitbeard] was forced to break out of his Raspi comfort zone this time. We’re glad he did because this is one impressive build. Finding the pinball emulation community lacking for Linux, he turned to the LattePanda, a tiny Windows 10 SBC with a built-in Arduino Leonardo. This was really the perfect board because he needed to support multiple displays with a minimum of fuss. That Leonardo comes in handy for converting button presses …read more

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Tiny Pinball Emulator is Hugely Impressive

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We were wondering what [Circuitbeard] has been up to lately. Turns out he’s been building a mini pinball cabinet to add to his arcade of self-built games.

[Circuitbeard] was forced to break out of his Raspi comfort zone this time. We’re glad he did because this is one impressive build. Finding the pinball emulation community lacking for Linux, he turned to the LattePanda, a tiny Windows 10 SBC with a built-in Arduino Leonardo. This was really the perfect board because he needed to support multiple displays with a minimum of fuss. That Leonardo comes in handy for converting button presses …read more

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ESP Cookbook Goes Beyond Chips and DIPs

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Are you putting ESP8266s in all your projects these days, whether they need one or not? We don’t blame you. These boards are cheap, tiny, oh and they have WiFi.

If you want to spend less time writing code and more time blinking RGB LEDs over Wi-Fi, then check out this ESP cookbook over on IO. [Turo Heikkinen] and team are writing a soup-to-nuts guide to these darlings of IoT. The cookbook leads off with pinouts and networking (of course) before moving into more intricate recipes involving popular sensors and displays.

This cookbook is funny, it’s helpful, and it’s really …read more

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Intra-Oral Device Detects Opoid Overdose

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As you may have heard, the U.S. is in the grips of an opoid epidemic. Overdose deaths from heroin, oxycontin, and fentanyl have quadrupled since 1999. The key to detecting opoid overdose before it’s too late is in monitoring respiration. Opoids in particular cause depressed respiration, which is slow and ineffective breathing that’s inadequate for the gas exchange that keeps us alive. Depressed respiration becomes fatal unless the patient is given nalaxone, an antidote that works by blocking opoid receptors in the brain.

[Curt White] is developing an intra-oral device to prevent opoid overdose via early detection. It tracks a …read more

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NeoPixel Game Rewards Button Mashing

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Who has the fastest thumbs at Maker Faire UK? That’s the question [wellsey1972] sought to answer when he created this simple game using little more than two NeoPixel rings, two chunky arcade buttons, and a Trinket.

The idea is simple: each button push lights up one NeoPixel. The first one to fill up their ring is the winner, and is treated to a ring of flashing green lights. The loser, of course, gets flashing red. Both controllers are hard-wired to a box containing a Trinket, a custom PCB with pull-up resistors, and two sets of solderless terminals. [wellsey1972] smartly re-purposed …read more

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The Metabolizer Turns Trash into Treasure

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The amount of stuff we humans throw away is too damn high, and a bunch of it harms the ecosystem. But what are you gonna do? [Sam Smith] thinks we can do better than shoving most of it in a landfill and waiting for it to break down. That’s why he’s building The Metabolizer. It’s a series of systems designed to turn household trash (including plastic!) into useful things like fuel, building materials, and 3D prints.

The idea is to mimic the metabolism of a living organism and design something that can break down garbage into both useful stuff and …read more

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Broken Screen Becomes Polarizing Art Lamp

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Got a broken laptop screen sitting around? If you haven’t already pilfered the LEDs and used the polarizing sheets for screen privacy filters, why not turn it into a unique table lamp? See if you can use more parts of the screen than [alexmaree-ross] did.

This is a simple idea with great-looking results, but the process is a bit fiddly. After all the layers are separated and the LEDs extracted, there’s still the matter of figuring out how they’re wired up. [alexmaree] tested them in pairs to see how they’re grouped together and ultimately powered them with a transformer from …read more

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