[Rob Spanton’s] house is equipped with a rather cheap oven, which was discovered while his roommate tried using it to bake part of a wedding cake. If someone took a shower during the baking process, a large portion of unit’s gas pressure was diverted to the boiler, causing the oven to shut off completely. This …
Bang-banging your way to a perfect cake
Reading NAND flash with an Arduino
[HC] took a gander around the Googles and saw a number of people trying to read NAND flash chips with an Arduino. It’s an interesting problem; at 16 Megahertz, [HC] is looking at about 60 nanoseconds per instruction cycle, and flash chips normally operate around 20 ns. He got the build working, and was able …
Milling ice molds for craft cocktails
Want some fancy ice for your next cocktail party? You can try to find spherical ice-cube trays but you won’t get the kind of results seen here. It turns out the trick to this isn’t how you freeze the water, it’s how you melt the ice. [Brendan O'Connor] started this project after seeing an ice …
Exposing some fake electronics with too-good-to-be-true prices
[Giorgos Lazaridis] needed an AC adaptor for his Canon PowerShot camera. He hit eBay and was excited to find this branded adaptor for just five bucks! It works and, even though it would sometimes reboot his camera if the cord was twisted around in the jack, he was satisfied that it did what it was …
Line-follower is an homage to [Homer]; plans to infringe copyrights
The Chief Knock-a-Homer robot is [Psycho Freaky's] shout out to The Simpsons. The robot design appeared in an episode where [Homer] built [Bart] a fighting robot. Since he’s not robot builder, [Homer] actually climbed inside the shell and dished out sweet vengeance while suffering some severe injuries at the same time. But [Psycho] has the skills necessary to make this …
Power protection circuit tutorial
Building your first circuit is empowering, but make sure it’s not too empowering. [Jon] sent in a great tutorial of power protection circuits to make sure you don’t release the mystical blue smoke that make electronics work. There’s an in-depth tutorial of the classic series diode that’s the simplest of all power protection circuits. There’s not much to …
Backplane and mainboard for a 6502 computer
[Quinn Dunki] has been busy through the holidays giving her 6502 processor-based computer a place to live. The most recent part of the project (which she calls Veronica) involved designing and etching a mainboard for the device. In the picture above it’s the vertical board which is right at home in the backplane [Quinn] also …
Easy camera tracking with a quadrocopter
[DJ Sures] has been pulling all-nighters lately to get his AR Drone Parrot build off the ground. Now that it’s up and flying around, he managed to get it to follow objects around the room using on board cameras. For the build, [DJ Sures] used the AR Drone ’flying video game’ quadrocopter. This toy has two on …
Securing your Keurig with RFID
[Andrew Robinson] and his co-workers are lucky enough to have a Keurig coffee maker in their office, though they have a hard time keeping track of who owes what to the community coffee fund. Since K-Cups are more expensive than bulk coffee, [Andrew] decided that they needed a better way to log everyone’s drinking habits …
