Author Archives: Kristina Panos

Review: LinkSprite Mini CNC

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It’s a great time to be a hobbyist. No matter how you feel about the Arduino/Raspberry Pi effect, the influx of general enthusiasm and demand it has created translates to better availability of components, a broader community, and loads of freely available knowledge. When people have access to knowledge and ideas, great things can happen. Tools that were once restricted to industrial use become open source, and the price of entry-level versions goes into a nosedive.

As we’ve seen over the last several years, the price of cheap 3D printers keeps falling while the bar of quality keeps rising. It’s …read more

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LED Tree Brings Gravity to Christmas

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Here’s a fun entry into our coin cell challenge. The power source is the actuating force in [Frank]’s blinky LED Christmas tree, which takes advantage of the physical structure of coin cells and our old pal gravity to roll out some holiday cheer. Talk about forward voltage!

We love the concept, and the circuit couldn’t be more simple. A coin cell is released at the top of the tree and rolls down a series of angled foam board railings covered with 1/4″ copper tape. As the coin cell travels, the negative terminal shimmies along the face of the tree, which …read more

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Bring Up a PCB with Fewer Headaches

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What’s the first thing you do when a new set of boards from the fab house hits the doorstep? Apply solder paste, populate the components, and stick it in the reflow oven? That’s one way to do it. But a lot of non-obvious things can go wrong at the fab house, like shorts and undrilled vias. One tiny mistake can mean hours of frustration and sanity questioning as you troubleshoot some problem that’s now buried under solder paste and 0603s.

Over on IO, [Bhavesh] tries to nip these problems in the bud with a comprehensive and explanatory guide to properly …read more

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Ocelot Arcade System Illustrates the Scope of Vector Graphics

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Who knows how far the Vectrex system, or vector graphics gaming in general could have gone if not for the crash of ’83? The console wars might have been completely different if not for this market saturation-based reset button.

[Matt Carr] doesn’t own a Vectrex, but he does have a Tektronix 465 oscilloscope. After an intense labor of love and documentation, he also has a shiny new vector graphics arcade system that he built himself. It’s based on a dsPIC33 and uses a dual-channel DAC to produce wire frame 3-D graphics and send X-Y coordinates to the ‘scope via phono …read more

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BrewBuddy is a Home Brewer’s Best Friend

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Whether coffee, tea, or beer is your jam, brewing is a delicate pas de deux of time and temperature. Proper brewing of any of these beverages can elevate the experience from average to amazing. With this in mind, [Marcelo] created a time and temperature tool to dial in his beer-brewing process.

BrewBuddy is a complex application-specific timer with an integrated thermometer. It lets him program time and temperature profiles for both the mashing process and the boiling process and store up to 10 steps for each. BrewBuddy doesn’t control the brewing temperature, but it does unify temperature-taking and time-marking into …read more

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Afroman Teaches Intro to Servos, Builds Laser Turret

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After a longish hiatus, we were pleased to see a new video from [Afroman], one of the most accessible and well-spoken teachers the internet has to offer. If you’re new to electronics, see the previous sentence and resolve to check out his excellent videos. The new one is all about servos, and it culminates in a simple build that provides a foundation for exploring robotics.

[Afroman] leaves no gear unturned in his tour de servo, which is embedded after the break. He explains the differences between open vs. closed loop motor systems, discusses the different sizes and types of servos …read more

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A Mini Stacker Arcade Cabinet

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For [LumoW], what started as a school project turned into a passion project. He and his team made a hardware implementation of an arcade game called Stacker. Never heard of it? It’s pretty fun, kind of like an inverse Tetris. You can play the flash version here and see their mini arcade version after the break.

The game is based around the Mojo FPGA which the class required, and it’s programmed entirely in bitwise operators. It uses WS2812 RGB LEDs to represent the individual tower building blocks, and these are mounted on plywood in a matrix and separated into cells …read more

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Touch-A-Sketch Gives an Old Toy a New Twist

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After nearly 60 years and a lot of stairs and squares, there is finally an easier way to draw on an Etch A Sketch®. For their final project in embedded microcontroller class, [Serena, Francis, and Alejandro] implemented a motor-driven solution that takes input from a touch screen.

Curves are a breeze to draw with a stylus instead of joysticks, but it’s still a 2-D plotter and must be treated as such. The Touch-A-Sketch system relies on the toy’s stylus starting in the lower left hand corner, so all masterpieces must begin at (0,0) on the knobs and the touch screen. …read more

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OpenBraille is an Impressive DIY Embosser

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In 2024, the Braille system will have been around for 200 years. What better way to mark the occasion than with an open source project devoted to making embossing equipment affordable for the visually impaired? This long overdue cause became the plight of [ccampos7], who couldn’t find a DIY embosser kit and set out to build one himself.

While other embossers forcibly punch the letters in one go, OpenBraille takes a more gradual approach to ensure a clean impression with a rolling motion. Paper is placed between a mechanical encoder with moving pins and a dimpled roller that provides resistance …read more

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Print a Sacrificial Magnet Square

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Here’s your quick and dirty hack for the day. Sometimes you just need something that will work for what you’re trying to do, and you don’t want to go through the motions of doing what’s prescribed. When this happens, it’s a cheap, disposable tool that fits the bill. No, we’re not talking about Harbor Freight—we mean those need-driven tools you make yourself that get the job done without fuss. If you’re really lucky, you can use them a couple of times before they break.

This is one of those tools. [Jake’s Workshop] wanted to be able to quickly tack a …read more

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