DIY

Inside LED bulb

TESS, a Taiwanese manufacturing company, recently introduced a 7W LED bulb that, at 560 lumens, can serve as a replacement for a typical 500-lumen, 40W incandescent bulb. Tear-down: inside a 7W LED light bulb article shows you what is inside that lamp. This LED lamp bulb holds seven 1W LED packages (a package of multiple

DIY projectors

There are many plans for DIY video projectors on the net: Easy DIY iPod projector, $6 Ipod Nano Projector, DIY iPod Video Projector – Requires no Power or Disassembly of the iPod, Super Sleek iPod or Other Device Video Projector and Make an iPod Video Projector. This is a good opportunity to build a simple

April Fools Pranks and Gadgets

April Fools Day is not too far away. It is celebrated in most parts of the world people either hate it or love it, but they just can’t ignore it. Top 100 April Fools Pranks and Gadgets gives you a lot of ideas for preparing for all the wonderful pranks and that that cool gadgets

Electrolytic capacitor failures

The most common reasons that modern digital electronics devices fail seem to be a bad electrolytic capacitors. Bad electrolytic capacitors cause frequent failures of switch mode power supplies. It seems power supplies are often the weakest link in many modern electronics devices. Since there is tremendous price pressure on PC’s and other consumer electronics devices,

Walk and Code

Here is an interesting idea how you can walk and code at the same time. I just saw this at 8th light Walk and Code blog posting. The idea comes from WalkStation, an adjustable height desk with a treadmill underneath. The solution presented on the blog is cheaper is more DIY model based on treadmill

LackRack

This is a really neat trick I just read about. LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shininess solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Its low-cost and perfect fit are great for mounting up to 8 U of 19″ hardware, such as switches (see below), or perhaps other 19″ gear. Featuring the LACK (side table) from Ikea,

Extremely simple stepper driver circuit

The normal way to drive a stepper motor is to use switched-dc voltages to energize the stepper motor coils one by one after each other. But a stepper motor will run off ac lines if you introduce a 90° phase shift between the voltages applied to the motor’s two windings. The extremely simple circuit in