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Sponsored by Digi-Key Gadget Master features cool, homemade electronic gadgets proudly brought to us--by you!
Complete with build instructions for the design engineer who likes the silly side of inventing things and enjoys building stuff in his and her spare time, these gadgets range from highly silly and impractical to extraordinarily inspirational for your own engineering design work.
Sometimes the best way to take a step forward is to take a step back in time. So Andrew Smith designed a fully-functional toy oscilloscope, made out of parts he found in his junk box, such as the EF91, EF80 and EF184 valves. Using a DC-DC converter to power the old (but still working) 7cm CRT he discovered in his loft, Andrew housed it in the same wooden box as the rest of the circuitry. The whole system runs from a single regulated 12.6V DC supply, which can be derived from a "wall-wart" PSU. Doc Brown would be proud.
An accurate PC thermometer you need all year round
Award-winning designer Alberto Ricci Bitti designed this simple microcontroller-free DS1621 PC thermometer that requires no calibration. It's so cheap and simple because all you need is the sensor IC, a voltage regulator and a handful of diodes and resistors. It can be plugged into any free serial port and the temperature is shown on the Windows taskbar. Lucky for us, Alberto's friends all asked for a PC thermometer of their very own, so he decided to release the build instructions into the wild. A cheap and simple PC thermometer? Now that's hot. Or should we say cool?
Now he's got the power to cut lightning down to size
People have always been fascinated by the fury of the heavens. Electronics prodigy Richard Hodgkinson created a lightning distance timer so he would no longer have to manually calculate the approach or retreat of a thunderstorm. He recycled a 70 KHz crystal from an old device for the oscillator. "Let there be light," he declared as two HP 45MGC670 surface mount LEDs were attached to allow him to see measurements in the dark. And his project wouldn't be complete without two 1.5V AA cells which are the heart of his timer. Now his creation is alive, all he needs is a wicked thunderstorm.
Here's a great project, recommended to Gadget Master by our own indomitable device-builder, EW's Technology Editor Steve Bush. It's the Hotbox temperature logger.
Whether its monitoring the temperature for home brewing beer, making marmalade or even checking to whether the sea water is warm enough to swim in, this logger could be the solution. No calibration required, says its inventor.
According to the website, the logger probes measure temperatures from -55°C to +125°C (-67°F to +257°F). No calibration
Check out this inventive use of an MCU and stepper motor by one Alan Parekh.
This great looking gear clock tells the time in a unique way. A PIC 16F628A microcontroller with an external 20MHz crystal oscillator times a stepper gear, which drives a minute display, which also drives an hour display...
Testing is a crucial part of the development cycle, as any gadget master will have suffered, and here's a cool iPhone app to help the process, when you find yourself turning to use a PicoScope.
What is Gadget Master about, if not the creative reuse of existing components? Thanks to Bernard Green, of Syemon Electronic Solutions, for sending in his ingenious self-built solution to a problem.
He writes that he had a need to generate a single cycle of a very low frequency near sine wave, which was to be used to test software that measured the parameters of a waveform generated by a sensor.
Several ideas occurred to him - using digital devices and a digital to analogue convertor - but these needed analogue filters with some big capacitors, which were absent from his 'junk box'. Then he had a brainwave...
Poorly-made green laser pointers can damage your eyesight, and mighty US tech lab NIST has devised a home table top experiment to help separate the dangerous from good.
Very much in the Blue Peter mould, it requires two plastic cups, a CD, and a webcam...
Here's a very interesting project, with a very worthy motive behind it, reports Technabob. Some engineers at Libelium, a wireless sensor network company, decided to help the people of Japan, around Fukushima, determine levels of radiation for themselves.
The results was an Arduino-based device that would detect Alpha, Beta and Gamma radiation, apparently integrating any Geiger Tube which works in the range 400V - 1000V. (It seems that getting the brass tube, which helps serve as the radiation detector, is the most expensive part, but these are available).
I don't know if you follow the Engineer in Wonderland series on Electro-ramblings, but when Alice gets into the workshop the content is worth sharing - consider Alice an uber-Gadget Master!
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Poorly-made green laser pointers can damage your eyesight, and mighty US tech lab NIST has devised a 
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