My favorite local museum the Science and Discovery Center of Northwest Florida had broken exhibit that was collecting dust. They asked if I could fix it, and never one to back down from a challenge I set out to bring the Laser Spirograph back to life. What follows is how I fixed it and added options for new features!

The Sparkfun MP3 Player Shield for Arduino is a inexpensive and easy way to add MP3 playback capability to your Arduino project. But it was lacking an easy to use Arduino Library to go along, so I fixed that. Introducing the SFEMP3Shield library just for this shield. Now playing an MP3 files is as easy as MP3player.playTrack(5); and all the work is done behind the scenes.

It seems my blog has been a big enough success that Newark recently approached me asking if I’d be interested in reviewing products. I agreed and here we are; my first product review. I chose to review something I have had my eye on for a while. Until now, I’ve always used tweezers to place SMD chips on circuit boards for soldering. I’ve been wondering if the vacuum pickup tools would make the job easier and quicker. Since I did not test multiple vacuum tools, I am writing this review as a comparison to using tweezers.

In my little town known for Spring Break, there is a little museum called the Science and Discovery Center of Northwest Florida. I grew up in museums and love teaching kids science, so of course I am on a first name basis with everyone at the Center. In fact I have started volunteering to make improvements and repair exhibits. They don’t have a big budget, in fact they only have 2-3 full time staff so any improvements or repairs has to be done on the cheap. This is how I added some much needed ambiance to two of the exhibit rooms without breaking the bank. I’ve documented what I did here so other non-profit museums can replicate the design.

I have two loves. The first is my geeky fiancée, the second is my 2004 Volkswagon Passat TDI. Recently the headlights on my Passat have been yellowing and physically breaking down and it was time for new ones. Instead of buying OEM parts, I decided to pay a little more for an aftermarket brand with fancy LED ‘eyelids’ and HID low-beams. I can’t resist things with pretty LEDs on them. But when I installed them I discovered they didn’t quite work they way I wanted…

A coworker of mine is soon retiring and moving to South Florida. Her new house has a screened in front porch and side gates for back yard access. The gates can’t be kept locked as the meter readers need access and her front porch is open. She came to me wanting to build a system that would alert her to anyone walking onto her porch or past her side gates and I was more then happy to help. In the process I figured out how to configure Xbees to use API mode and act like remote I/O modules, and have a tutorial to show you how to do it as well.

This is the story about an electronics geek and how he proposed to the girl of his dreams; who also happens to be a geek. I try to keep my blog about projects and not about my personal life, but in this case I’ll make an exception. This is pretty big after-all.

Like most real engineers and at-home hackers, I find myself in situations where no existing Eagle Library has the part I need, so I have to design an Eagle Part for the device. My library is starting to grow, so I figure it’s time to post it for anyone else that needs it. Most parts are tested, the few that aren’t say so in the description. Please drop me a note if a part is wrong or if the library came in handy for you.

A friend of mine is working on his own custom Arduino powered LCD backpack and asked me to look at his design.  I noticed it had a header for the all to familiar FTDI board to program the Arduino and a separate header for power and data connection. Both headers had the ATMega’s UART pins broken out. The problem with this design is it then requires the user to disconnect whatever they have connected to the second set of UART pins whenever they want to attach the FTDI board to upload a new sketch. With a few more passive parts, he could eliminate that need. This is a quick tutorial for beginners looking to roll their own Ardunio boards and may have missed this very easy and time saving design trick.

Who needs an amplifier when you’ve got a million volts to work with?

Introducing Tesla Hero, an RGB LED adorned Guitar Hero Controller interfaced with a Dual Resonant Solid State Tesla Coil (DRSSTC).  That’s right, Guitar Hero on a Tesla Coil. It was only a matter of time.