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[Bill Porter] continues finding ways to help out at the local museum. This time he’s plying his skills to fix a twenty-year-old exhibit that has been broken for some time. It’s a laser spirograph which had some parts way past their life expectancy. He started by removing all of the electronics from the cabinet for [...]

Tags:  exhibit spirograph laser bill-porter local-museum hacks  

Believe it or not, the local Children’s Museum staff was happy that [Bill Porter] left this mess of wires and equipment in one of their offices. It makes up an ambient sound system for a couple of their exhibits. A movie without sound just doesn’t fully entertain, and the same can be said for these [...]

Tags:  children museum sound bill-porter museum-exhibits museum-staff digital audio hacks  

The headlight enclosures on [Bill Porter's] 2004 Passat had yellowed with age and were not outputting the kind of light they should. He decided to replace them with some aftermarket modules that also incorporated LED strips. When they arrived he was surprised at how easy there were to drop into place. But when testing he [...]

Tags:  fixing headlight aftermarket bill-porter headlight-assembly control-scheme transportation hacks  

[Bill Porter] is helping a friend out by designing a simple security system for her home. It relies on Xbee modules to alert a base station when doors are opened, or a pressure mat is stepped on. The door sensors are quite simple, and you’re probably already familiar with them. One part mounts to the [...]

Tags:  xbee someone home bill-porter security-system sensors arduino hacks  

While you will often see hacks on this site that feature high voltage, fire, and metal, that doesn’t mean that hackers, makers, and electronics geeks don’t have a soft side. In fact, we find the opposite to be true the vast majority of the time. Take for instance [Bill Porter]. You may have seen his [...]

Tags:  pcb marriage proposal bill-porter marriage-proposal pcb-design lifehacks  

[Bill Porter] has a tip for designing circuits that have multiple connections to a single microcontroller UART. This stemmed from a review of a friend’s circuit design that used the UART in the project, but also called for an FTDI chip in order to reprogram via USB and a bootloader. Unlike the schematic above, the [...]

Tags:  design uart circuit bill-porter bootloader ftdi-chip arduino hacks  

[Bill Porter] and his friend [Dan Flisek] work together to put on a science-related educational stage show called “Science Brothers”, in which the pair try to convince school children that their field of expertise is the cooler science. While the two are competitive on stage, the main goal of the program is to get kids [...]

Tags:  science stage million dan-flisek bill-porter guitar-rocks main-goal arduino hacks  

When [Bill Porter] works on a project, he says that he typically writes his own NMEA standard communications protocols to fit the job at hand. While it makes things easy to troubleshoot, he admits that his custom protocols are wasteful of both processor time and bandwidth. Binary communications on the other hand are more efficient, [...]

Tags:  arduino library hand bill-porter custom-protocols communications-protocols hacks  

It seems that there has been some shenanigans happening with the OSHW logo voting page as some are using scripts to game the system for their favorite design. Why? Who knows…  How? Well one of the advocates of OSHW [Bill Porter] set about figuring that out, and things should be patched up now, though that [...]

Tags:  thing oshw trying bill-porter favorite-design shenanigans misc hacks  

If you want happy fish you’re going to need to do regular aquarium maintenance. Part of this is exchanging a portion of the tank’s water on a regular basis. [Bill Porter] came up with a water exchanger that means less manual labor, but makes the process just a bit more complicated. So, what he would [...]

Tags:  exchanger aquarium water bill-porter aquarium-water aquarium-maintenance happy-fish home hacks  

This Christmas [Bill Porter] decided to show his parents that those college dollars were well spent. He upgraded the custom lighthouse light which he originally designed in high school for their garden fountain. He even went so far as to craft some retail-worthy packaging for the gift. We think it’s a wonderful design, on a [...]

Tags:  led lighthouse simulator bill-porter custom-lighthouse lighthouse-light college-dollars hacks  

[Bill Porter] has joined in the pursuit of an inexpensive yet effective way to monitor his power usage. He calls his project the Not So Tiny Power Meter, and shared both his successes and follies involved in seeing it through to implementation. There are problems; sizing issues with enclosures and his PCB, issues with noise [...]

Tags:  clamp power sensor bill-porter tiny-power power-meter green hacks  

You can make your own lithium-ion batteries if you have a source for individual cells and a control board to match your desired voltage levels. [Bill Porter] put together a quick tutorial where he makes a 14.4V 2.2 AH battery for about $10. He picked up a set of cable-modem backup batteries (used to make [...]

Tags:  board source control bill-porter lithium-ion-batteries backup-batteries ah-battery misc hacks