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Gadget Freak 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.
A quick roundup of the most popular posts in November, with ultra-bright LED bicycle lights leading the way. LEDs prove their
popularity with an 'extreme' torch made up of 500 LEDs in second place...
Thanks to Design News for this Gadget Freak, featuring a very unique beer can disposal unit.
A 1hp centrifugal blower supplies the vacuum and high velocity flow to send the can through 50 ft of 3½ inch tubing from Ed's patio to the crusher in his garage in under one second.
A PIC microcontroller operates the whole system from the time he opens the hatch to the time the little chunk of compressed aluminum is ejected from the machine.
If you also had a Beer Launching Fridge to hand (which made a guest appearance on the David Letterman Show, btw) you would have a full catch-drink-and-throw system on your hands!...
You can read the build instructions, where he begins:
Time for a new Gadget Freak competition, and in the run up to Christmas this would make a great present for a young would-be engineer: Cool Stuff Exploded, Dorling Kindersley, previously featured on this blog.
Think of it as a younger-person's teardown analysis, definitely one for budding Gadget Freaks or people who like to delve inside devices.
Impressive it is, I must say, with very lavish illustrations. I like for example the Look Inside of a Freeplay radio, and solar cells, KEF Muon speakers, Breitling watches and cordless drills also get the DK treatment. Check out the Look Inside and Introduction sections.
Correctly answer this question for a chance of winning:
One from the Circuit Design Idea department, with a twist. While it doesn't include a circuit diagram, it puts the old warhorse of Excel to good use....
Microsoft's Excel helps engineers with calculus and graphics to solve problems. But engineers often have to perform bitwise operations, too. Figure 1 shows the bitwise operations' tables. The bitwise functions work for decimal values. If you need to use hexadecimal or binary values, you must use the Dec2Bin and Dec2Hex functions to convert all the decimal values for the desired format.
Thank you to all who have taken part, we have now had more than 550 entries.
The prize is one of Tech air's Sports Series bags. There are four to choose from (S0501, S0502, S0701 and S0702), and the choice of the exact model will be up to the winner (for the undecided, you can see a video overview).
If you've designed and built a gadget that features electronics as a core component and meets our criteria below, we'd like to feature it here on these pages!
Just email us at Gadget Freak with details on your gadget including:
A description of the gadget and explanation of the basic working principles
Detailed build instructions
Circuit schematic
Complete parts list
Feel free to provide links to related websites. And Gadget Freak judges may show unrestrained favouritism to those submissions accompanied by images and video.
If we decided to feature your gadget in Electronics Weekly magazine, as the monthly highlight, we'll ask for a photograph of your gadget and you'll pocket a cool £250.
A quick roundup of the most popular posts in October, with the Tech Air competition leading the way (it's still open, btw, closing Friday 14 November). The SumbleUpon.com website proves its popularity, too, by powering an old favourite - Arduino Audio DAC Options - back into favour...
As the last glimpses of autumn sunshine begin to fade into the long dark nights of winter, those athletic gadget freak readers who avidly insist on cycling to work everyday are presented with a potentially dangerous problem.
When using a vehicle as fundamentally fragile as a bicycle it is incredibly important to both be seen and be able to see when travelling home at 6pm on a dark windy night sometime in late November.
Although bike lights are by no means a new invention and have been used successfully for years, the rapid evolution in LED design means increasingly more powerful and more durable lights can be manufactured.
Enter three bike light hobbyists from Australia who have taken particular advantage of this recent surge in LED design to create their own ultra-bright and ultra-durable light, dubbed the Min-T.
As the title suggests, it is a circuit for a digitally programmable amplifier that offers autozeroing.
The Design Idea begins:
The current trend in advanced instrumentation amps is to use no external resistors. In these amplifiers, a gain-control word, comprising a binary-coded one, sets the voltage gain. Several integer gains within one to 1000 are currently available; however, this range does not yet include a gain of three.
This neat little circuit provides 8 LEDs directly driven from the PIC along with a single mode control switch. The firmware described drives the LEDs with a 5 bit PWM signal providing each of the 8 LED channels with four levels of intensity; off, dim, mid, bright.
A number of sequences are programmed into the firmware to provide some interesting visual effects and chase sequences, including the classic effect seen on the car in the Knight Rider TV series.
Peter says that the design is deliberately simple with each LED being directly driven from a PIC I/O pin. This and the inclusion of an in-circuit programming header (ICSP) make the circuit ideal for teaching/learning introductory PIC assembly language programming.
However, he writes, if you just want a cool LED chaser without having to write any code, a ready written LED chaser program with fully commented source code and programmer ready HEX files is provided at the bottom of this page.
The circuit has been constructed on a PCB but can easily be built on strip-board, or a solderless breadboard.
Thank you to all who have taken part, but keep the entries coming. The closing date for the compo is Friday 14 November.
The prize is one of Tech air's Sports Series bags. There are four to choose from (S0501, S0502, S0701 and S0702), and the choice of the exact model will be up to the winner (for the undecided, you can see a video overview).
Here's one for a Friday afternoon - a homemade 500 LED 'extreme flashlight', or torch, as we would say.
As well as its operation, the video covers the build process for this device with 50 watt power consumption at full power.
See also: Electronics Weekly's roundup of content related to LEDs, with a special focus on both white LEDs and coloured LEDs:
With the black cloud of global warming threatening the planet, people are finally starting to seriously go green. But where is the global interest in green projects? It isn't like they can't be exciting, as new methods of harnessing energy are at the forefront of modern technology. What I am going to share with you here is not hopelessly high tech, but a very manageable project for anyone with the interest and patience.
Solar powered trikes have become very popular across the pond, and a wide variety can be purchased as kits and also as readily made vehicles. This one is designed to be built by hand, by anyone, in any suitable garage or garden shed!
The construction plan, provided at www.instructables.com, details the use of three Q-cell brand mono-crystalline solar panels pushing 21.8 volts peak at around 1.2 amps.
For those looking for circuit inspiration, here's a Design Idea freshly uploaded to the site - Alarm monitors rotational speed of DC motor (click on the circuit diagram to expand it).
It covers monitoring the rotating speed of a DC fan motor, sounding an alarm and powering down if the motor stalls.
The Design Idea begins:
You can use the circuit in Figure 1 to monitor the rotating speed of a dc fan motor and sound an alarm if the motor stalls. One potential application of the circuit is monitoring the CPU-fan speed in a PC in which overheating the CPU can ruin the whole system.
Specifically, the prize is one of Tech air's Sports Series bags. There are four to choose from (S0501, S0502, S0701 and S0702), and the choice of the exact model will be up to the winner (for the undecided, you can see a video overview).
Correctly answer this question for a chance of winning:
This friends could be the future... and it comes from 2003! A friend told me last week about plans he had seen for an entire computer confined to five pen-shaped objects. With mobile phone functionality, too.
At first I didn't believe him. I could see how most of the computer would work like this, flash memory can be confined to brilliantly small spaces and there are devices on the market at the moment that can project a virtual keyboard onto a work surface. However what about the CPU and the monitor, how could they fit into something the size of an ordinary pen?
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A quick roundup of the most popular posts in November, with ultra-bright LED bicycle lights leading the way. LEDs prove their
popularity with an 'extreme' torch made up of 500 LEDs in second place...
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