After walking off and forgetting about my soldering iron enough times, I decided I needed to get some kind of timer that would automatically shut it off. I did a lot of searching thinking that something like this should already exist, but I couldn't find anything. I found power strips and little timers where you could set the time of day to turn on and off, but nothing with a simple wind up count down timer. Having seen wind up timers installed in bathrooms I checked the hardware store...

From the same post on Reddit as the other one I found out about these IBoard Arduino compatibles . They were the same price as the previous two that I got, $29, but these are a little bigger and have more built-ins. In addition to the Ethernet port and XBee ports, they also include a MicroSD slot. These boards are about the same size as a real Arduino, a little larger than the XBoard. They are 3.3v based which I'm not sure yet how difficult will be to work with. They also have used up all...

The other day I was thinking about making a wooden case to store my Atari 2600 and all the accessories in. I don't know if I will actually do it, but right now it is packed in a cardboard box and a couple of shopping bags and it's kind of a mess. Besides trying to figure out how I would organize it best, I was thinking that on the outside of the case it would be neat to carve a design into it that would represent what was inside. My thought was that I should carve a representation of a...

This is my Tektronix 453 oscilloscope being used as a miniature vector monitor for Atari Tempest. It took a bit of fiddling to figure out what settings I needed to put on the scope to make this work so I took a picture so I could easily reference it. There's supposed to be a Z input which would control the brightness but I couldn't get it to work. Either because my probe was flaky or because the levels from the board didn't match what the 'scope was expecting.

Thanks to a post on Reddit I found out about these Arduino compatible boards with built-in Ethernet. They are called the XBoard V2 and they are made by DFRobot. These boards are 5V based which in theory will make it easier to interface with them than a 3.3V based board. They are very tiny! I was expecting a board the same size as the original Arduino which is already pretty small. (The arcade tokens in the picture are just there for scale, they are the size of a US quarter, 24mm.) I've...