DIY Live

Residency Match

Greg Lipscomb — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:58:16 +0000

Well, I found out that I matched for Residency in Neurology. What a relief. I am also in the process of getting a house. Yeah, it is true that the fourth year of medical school is much easier than the earlier years, but there is stress, and time consuming things of another kind. Just thought I would give a quick update.

I have started a 20 gallon Long salt water reef aquarium. It has been a blast so far. I will write an article telling how to do it soon. There is a fairly steep learning curve involved in starting a reef aquarium.

Sound Seeking Robot

Greg Lipscomb — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 15:00:45 +0000

I have done several posts from the Cornell University electrical engineering senior design site. Here is a robot that follows sound. It sounds like a really cool project. It apparently has three microphones, and a microprocessor detects which microphone is receiving the strongest signal. It will then turn the robot to the microphone that hears the noise the most.

” The PeanutBot robot consists of three microphone circuits, three servo motors, an MCU and a PC. The three microphones were used to triangulate the angle of the source relative to the robot. The audio source plays a continuous stream of pulses. Pulses were chosen over a continuous tone because, instead of detecting phase difference in the audio signal, our system detects the arrival time of the signal at a certain amplitude at each microphone. The robot is designed to be autonomous and is, therefore, not synchronized with the pulse generator. As a result, the time of flight of each impulse is not available and the robot is unable to quantify the distance to the source. Instead, the robot advances by a small predetermined distance and listens for the signal again. To find the sound source, the robot listens for the arrival of an impulse on any of the three microphones. Once an impulse has been detected at one of the microphones, the robot records the microphone data at 10 microsecond intervals for 10 milliseconds. Using this data, the arrival time of the impulse at e! ach microphone is calculated and the direction of the source is obtained. Once the angle of the source has been identified, the robot rotates and pursues the source for a short period, and then promptly resumes triangulation of the signal to repeat the process.”

Check out this cool robot here.

This article was found from DIY Live’s friend Alan over at Hacked Gadgets

Update

Greg Lipscomb — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 00:02:54 +0000

Things have been kind of crazy here lately, and finally I have gotten some breathing room. I passed step 2 of my boards, and have realized how much I miss writing for DIY Live. I have not forgotten about it. I have plans of writing some here very soon.

I decided to do Neurology, and am hoping to stay here at my school. My wife and I are even looking for a house. I am sick of living in an apartment. Anyway, maybe I have not lost all of my readers, and in time to come, I can do some cool stuff again.

Greg

Step 2 of Boards

Greg Lipscomb — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 20:25:27 +0000

Well, I have been extremely busy lately. I have had my step 2 of my boards to study for, so I have not been updating. I am taking the 9 hour test on Thursday. I then go to an Anesthesiology rotation away from my school, so I may not be updating much for the next month either. Eventually life will be easier.

Greg

DIY Audio Spy Laser

Greg Lipscomb — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 14:00:24 +0000

Alen from hackedgadgets.com wrote about this laser listener device. A microphone is simply a diaphragm that vibrates with sound waves. The theory behind this device is that when people are talking in a room, the window will vibrate. If you shine a laser on the window, it will bounce off with the same vibrations. Using a cadmium sulfide photo voltaic cell connected to a stereo plugin, the laser can be converted to sound recordings. View this cool DIY project here.

LCD Giveaway Contest

Greg Lipscomb — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 14:00:52 +0000

John over at hackersbench.com has gotten his hands on a bunch of small lcd screens off of ebay. Trouble is that he has no idea how to use them. He can not find any data on the devices. He decided to host a contest. If anyone can send him the data that he needs to get one of these screens to work, he will send 6 of them to that person.

Here are the rules for the contest:

1) To win the controller half of this deal, the documentation that you send MUST include all of the internal registers, initialization and set-up commands, timing, and voltage levels. You’re no dummy, it has to include everything I need to know to make one of these things work.

2) The controller half will be considered ‘won’ after I successfully get a display to work using your information. That should only take a couple of days.

3) To win the connector half, the seller must be in North America (The USA or Canada), have a low or no minimum order, and be willing to sell the connectors 5 or 6 at a time.

4) The winners will be determined by the time/date received as indicated by my email software.

5) If the winners are in the U.S. or Canada, I’ll pay the postage. Otherwise, you’ll have to cover the shipping charges.

Here is the information that he has on the device:

* Plenty of folks sell this display on eBay, but I can’t find a single project using them.
* The display is a 128X128, 65,536 color, TFT display with a white LED backlight.
* It was used on the Nokia 6230 cell phone but NOT the 6230i.
* The Nokia part number is 4850339
* The display was manufactured by Sharp Electronics, and their part number is LS015B8UA02C
* The display connector has 24 pins and from the Nokia 6230 service manual they are:
o 8 data lines
o 1 data clock
o 1 ready
o 1 write
o 1 reset
o 1 TearingEffect (whateverthehell that is)
o 2 LED lines
o and 9 various power and ground lines.

Email your results to John at: 6230LCD (at) hackersbench.com

100 DIY sites

Greg Lipscomb — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:33:27 +0000

Here is a link that was sent to me from a post of 100 DIY sites. It contains do-it-yourself projects from multiple genres. Go see this list here.

Do you yearn for self-sufficiency? Is your time and talent larger than your bank account? Then the following sites will appeal to you, as we’ve gathered some of the best and some of the most eclectic do-it-yourself sites and tutorials on the Web for your convenience. The first category contains general DIY network sites that help you learn about any project under the sun. From there, you can learn more about anything from how to raise goats to how to wire your house for sound. In between, you can revel in the fact that you save money when you tackle parenting and herbal remedies on your own.

Craftbits

Greg Lipscomb — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:00:44 +0000

Well, we have all seen USB flash drives stuffed in various objects. I think I am going to stuff one in my sock and do a write up on it. Nonetheless here is a USB flash drive stuffed in a PEZ dispenser from Katie over at craftbits.com

Well, if that doesn’t do much for you, maybe you will like this retro iPod. There was so much potential for this project. Sadly the insides were gutted, and the ipod was simply put into the case. Oh well, maybe another day. You could use the amplifier of the speaker, and actually listen to the ipod. Now lets figure out a way to change the song by changing the tuner.

DIY Spy Ear reverse engineering

Greg Lipscomb — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 18:02:14 +0000

Here is a project that I have often thought of. I hope we have all seen those amplifier spy toys for like a dollar. I have often thought of grabbing one, and using the circuit to make something cool. It would probably work as a headphones amplifier. You could even stick it into an altoids can. I am not sure if it would power a larger speaker, but I bet you could push it a little. It would have to be modified, and I have not researched it. It seems that this device is using a filter to just pick up conversation ranges and filter out background noise. Some capacitors could be changed to make it HIFI. It would not be ideal but would work.

Now this Instructable actually does a little more than just use this circuit. He actually reverse engineers this project. It is a fairly simple circuit. All you really have to do to reverse engineer something is to make a list of the parts on the circuit board, and then follow all of the traces and see where they connect.

There are several ways of doing this. On a simple one or two layer board, you could simply visually follow the traces. You could also use a multimeter to find the connections. In this article, he actually takes a picture of the front and back. He then goes to photoshop and pulls of the traces on the back of the board. He flips it around, and places it on top of the front of the board. He then visually drew a circuit.

You can see the final circuit below. Article via Make

DIY Altoids Robot

Greg Lipscomb — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 14:00:38 +0000

David Fowler from uchobby.com has designed a simple robot for the beginner DIYer. This robot uses no microcontroller and no difficult circuits. This simple robot will avoid obstacles and simply uses 2 switches, 2 motors, and an altoids can. It is a great weekend experiment for somebody that wants to get their hands wet in DIY electronics.

This tutorial will show you how to make a very simple robot that will avoid obstacles on the ground. It uses no microcontrollers, no servos, and there is no need to program. The simple design make its an ideal project for those wanting to tryout robotics and also makes a great weekend project. After building one you can probably make a second one in less than 10 minutes.