Valentine LED Chaser

The object of your desire will not be able to resist this heart shaped kitsch-o-tron, lovingly hand-crafted on perfboard with a CD4017B decade counter and 555 astable. But you probably can't go wrong with flowers and chocolates as well. Just to be on the safe side. Kits now available from Tindie!

$1 Lithium Coin Cell Charger

Got a buck? Make a charger for LiR2032 coin cells. It could hardly be cheaper or easier.

Magic Mote Thermostat and Wireless Temperature Sensor

A homemade thermostat up in the basement rafters controls the heating in my home. The smart bit is the radio frequency communication that connects it to a remote temperature sensor.

Pedal Powered Menorah

Exercise bike + magnets + LEDs = festival of light. Devised by T.J.Hunt with specialist engineering expertise from Rabbi Shena Potter Jaffee. Come along 3rd December to the Mayerson Jewish Center of Cincinnati. Pop a beer, grab a latke, and take a spin. Happy Hannukah! 

Relay Control Board on DP5031 PCB

Here's a breakout board for those Songle SRD series relays that are so cheap on Ebay. It fits nicely on the Dangerous Prototypes standard PCB size DP5031.

I2C LED Display From Hacked Voltmeter

LED voltmeters are a cheap source of 7 segment displays and can easily be repurposed. Using the I2C protocol, a master microcontroller such as an Arduino Uno can govern multiple displays with just 2 I/O pins.

3x Battery Teardown

So if you open up a 9 V battery, you find 6 thin 1.5 V cells inside. But what was inside that lantern battery, the rechargeable PP3, or the funny shaped lump on the back of my laptop? Confronted with dead metal in the recycling drawer, I tried to find uses for the contents.

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Old MacDonald Hacked A Farm

My kids have a plastic farm toy. It neighs, it baas, and frankly, it grates. But since I tricked it out with a microcontroller brain, at least it can play Simon.

Twirly Webcam

Reaching forward to adjust the webcam got old. Technology came to the rescue in the form of a webcam that pans around the room under the control of a paddle or foot pedal.

Hacked Whammy Pedal

I bought a toy foot pedal for $10. I didn't know how to communicate with it, but for some reason that didn't bother me until I had it in my hands and was wondering what to do with it.

Quacking Oven Timer

The kitchen stove had no timer. Hannah had grown out of the waterfowl-themed slippers that she had been given. What came next? A schlock quack duck cook clock hack.

DIY Solder Flux From Pine Resin

My flux pen recently bit the dust. Fortunately the raw material was close at hand. Making solder flux from rosin is a snap — and a pine tree near my house was oozing big dollops of gum.

Automatic Flowerpot Smoker

Can't afford a Big Green Egg? You can build a ceramic smoker from a flowerpot in a matter of minutes — Alton Brown showed how on "Good Eats". Here I show how to add temperature control to your flowerpot smoker so that you can "set it and forget it". With automatic heating you can take the fiddling and guesswork out of using your smoker... and still have an excuse to hang out in the garden drinking beer.