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Left my power supply at work, so I had to build a new one
13 Jul | 10I meant to bring home my power supply this weekend, but I forgot and left it at work. It was the motivation I finally needed to build a new one. I had been thinking about it for a long time, but since the old one still works, there wasn't any real reason to do it. My old AT power supply My old power supply is a modifed AT power supply. It was easier to work with because of the way the power switch was wired. In fact, after removing the huge bundle of cables, the hole was the perfect...
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You people bring matches for Mikey?
25 Jun | 10I've seen lots of pages out there on making squibs or e-matches, but all of them used some method of making some chemical goop and then dipping your wires in it. I didn't want to mess with making goop, and I didn't want to mail order a bunch of chemicals that make the goop. So far this method that I'm using has worked very well for me, and the only "exotic" thing you need is the nichrome wire. What I'm using is 22-24 gauge solid pair wire, little tiny gold tubes,...
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Seven's Candy Cam: How it works
16 Dec | 08I'll be posting this in multiple parts because there's so much going on. If you haven't seen it, check out Seven's Candy Cam This all started out because I was ordering some electronic stuff and decided to order a couple of Arduino boards to see how they worked and what they could do. After I got them I was amazed with how simple they were to setup and started doing some searches of things other people had done with them. I stumbled onto a site where a guy had used a servo to...
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Torch Light
24 Jun | 07With the 4th of July coming up very quickly, I remembered I still needed to modify my mini-butane torch to include a flashlight of some kind. While the torch makes lighting a fuse quick and easy, finding the fuse in the dark was a bit of a problem. I grabbed one of those mini touch-lights from the dollar store which had 3 white LEDs in it. I gutted it for one of the LEDs and hooked it to a CR2032 battery (the kind that motherboards use). The LED lit up nice and bright! The next step was to...
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Put a scrolling LED display in your computer for less than $20
28 Apr | 06This is sort of an expansion & howto on my previous post of scroll a message on my cable box . I finally got around to building a new 8 digit display and mounting the whole thing in place of my floppy drive. The total cost for this project was less than $20. The most expensive parts were the 7 segment displays and the ICM7218 chip. I used 0.56" tall digits. It took 4 of the LED packages to get 8 characters. The width of all of them together was exactly the same as a floppy! First...
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