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!

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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.

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If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider sending in a donation or disabling any ad-block plugin on my site. Proceeds go to my various education outreach efforts, towards repairing museum exhibits, or to my beer fund.

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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…

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If you found this post interesting or helpful, please consider sending in a donation or disabling any ad-block plugin on my site. Proceeds go to my various education outreach efforts, towards repairing museum exhibits, or to my beer fund.

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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.

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.

The following is a teaser for my current project inspired by Chris Marion’s Fire Hero. It will be controlled via an Arduino running my PS2 Controller Library much like Chris did, but my approach for the color flaming is radically different. This was the very first flame test to verify proof of concept, but it still needs fine tuning; as you will see in the video.

Nothing means more to someone then a gift that took more time to make than money to buy. This is an example of such a gift. Set your way-back-when machines to 2002. Getting ready to finish high school, I had built up some hacker level of electronic knowledge. My parents; both nautical people; have a large lighthouse fountain in their backyard. My mother’s only wish for Christmas that year was for me to build something that would illuminate the lighthouse as if it were a functioning beacon. I obliged, with a circuit consisting of a 555 timer and a 4017 decade counter.  It resulted in a simple device that did the job.

The Kill A Watt is an awesome product; it measures volts, amps and power factor of an individual appliance which can be used to calculate power, cost to run, etc. It’s also quite hackable. But I wanted something that would give me the same data for my whole apartment. After some Googling, the best I could find was this project from picobay, but I didn’t want to invest in an expensive network IO platform. There were also some off-the-shelf solutions, but they too were expensive and limited. Well, time to design my own solution then.

It’s the time again and I bring you an update to my ever aging ‘Mad Scientist’ Halloween costume. What started out as a college budget built led labcoat with just a clock and 4017 decade counter has evolved to include now two Arduino micro controllers. One runs the individual LED rows you see running random patterns. The second runs the scrolling marquee hanging off my chest. Everything is run off a 14.4V Li-Ion battery pack that I custom built.  Even the LED Marquee is custom built.

I’ve set out designing what I’d like to call ShiftTrix, a Arduino powered Marquee. The idea is this, low cost LED matrix driver boards that are easy to work with at (hopefully) around $10 a board including the LED matrix itself.  A similar serial driven LED matrix can go for $35 per 8×8 matrix. That can add up fast if you want to chain more then one together for a large display. Instead, my design is 1/3 the price, and can easily be chained together to create larger displays.