iFixit.org article How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free tells an interesting story. The problem? An underfunded school needed computers for the classroom. Budget? $0. How One Teacher Built a Computer Lab for Free article tells how just one sixth-grade teacher got those computers at that budget. In 2007, Robert acquired 18 donated →
From cables to speakers to stands that prop up your phone, there are more cool accessories out there than you can shake a stick at—and they all seem grossly overpriced. Top 10 Cellphone Accessories You Don’t Need to Buy (Because You Can DIY Them for Cheap) article describes 10 cellphone accessories that are cheap and →
I bought Fuji HS20 camera few months ago (just some months before the model was discontinued). HS20 is a pretty good superzoom digital camera. It has a very long zoom lens and good macro properties. I have taken many of the photos posted recently to this blog using this camera. To take good macro photographs →
Is electronics heading to be less and less hackable? DIY site iFixit has been keeping tabs on the tech world whilst providing handy self-repair guides for popular electronics. Now the site maintainers have seen trend that electronics products seem to become intentionally harder and harder to fix in recent years. The New MacBook Pro: Unfixable, →
Surprisingly Simple Arduino Motion-Sensing Project Makes For Some Weekend Fun article tells that Matt Williamson built a tiny, Arduino-based motion sensor that will SMS you when something moves by your desk or into a room. It’s completely open source and the notifications system runs on your PC thanks to a simple Python script. Why is →
Have you ever wanted to find out how strong a magnet really was, or how the strength of the magnetic field varied as you changed the distance from the magnet. Devices used to measure the local magnetic field are called magnetometers or gaussmeters. There are commercially available meters for this, but they are usually a →
I bought USB Virtual 7.1 Channel External Sound Card Adapter to build a cheap PC based digital storage oscilloscope. Sound card based oscilloscope is not new to me, I have used it sometimes. There are many free oscilloscope software that you can use. For example “zeitnitz” is a very fine program! Using an external USB →
Given the schematic for a simple circuit, make it a real circuit with the base components, some conductive thread, and a 3D printer. No solder, no etching chemicals, no sending away for anything. 3D-Printed Circuit Boards, for solder-free printable electronics Instructable is to serve as the how-to guide for a 3D-printed electronic circuit library implemented →
EFFICIENT SOUND CARD BASED EXPERIMENTION AT DIFFERENT LEVELS OF NATURAL SCIENCE EDUCATION paper tells that sound cards can be turned into measurement tools, making science experimentation very efficient and cheap. Sound-card experimentation becomes really viable only if we demonstrate how to connect different sensors to the sound card and provide suitable open-source software to support →
Is your working desk clean or messy? Do you have a home laboratory and how messy it it? Computer History Museum honors Jim Williams and Bob Pease tells that some messy engineering working desks end up in Computer History Museum as exhibit. Both work of Bob Pease and Jim William have been a source of →