Learn how to use shift registers as Dave explains his LED oscilloscope project at NYC Resistor’s bi-weekly Microcontroller Study Group.

UPDATE:

We’ve all gotten excited about this project, and Dave has agreed to open up his code and document everything, but needs a little help creating the schematics, etc. Zach ‘Hoeken’ Smith of RepRap will be giving a demo on Eagle at the next NYCResistor Microcontroller Study Group meeting so we can create the schematic, and get started documenting this whole project from start to finish!

Soon after that, we’re looking to create a kit for this project to make it easy for people to duplicate it at home. It’s a great project for learning audio processing, breadboarding using arduino, shift registers, and how to make and use an LED matrix. That, and it’s just cool. I want one of these for my desk.

Looking for some good sensors for a project? Try the SensorWiki. It’s a great collection of different sensors. From Inclinometers, Rotary potentiometers, Force-sensitive resistors (FSR) and other kinds of ‘ometers’.

Wired has a great post about Ann Smith, an artist who, as wired says; ‘transforms electronics and appliances destined for the dump into nifty gadgety animals’. Check out the post to see some of the pieces as stop motion animation. It doesn’t look like these are actual working, moving bots, but I’m sure with a little technical prowess, they could be. Either way they are very creative.

I have an idea I want to try out involving sintering (melting) powdered plastic with a laser as an alternative to extruding plastic from a nozzle.  To do this, I need some sort of plastic, ideally ABS plastic that is powdered and will absorb the laser light.  I’m guessing it will be an IR laser, but I figure black plastic would be a good bet for this.

Any ideas?

I saw this over at Hack-a-Day and while this is nothing new, its still worth blogging about. This is a great example of how hacking every day things to create new useful things is cool. Expecially if you make something that cost $300 for $20.

“Speakers and microphones are physically similar – usually mics are much smaller to allow decent high frequency response. In this case, [Nathan] wanted something to pick up kick drums or bass guitars, without the cost of a commercial version like the subkick. It’s build around a dual coil 12-inch subwoofer. The passive circuit design allows the coils in the speaker to be configured for differing impedance, phase and isolation.” Link