This is my entry for the 555 Contest recently started by Jeri Ellsworth and Chris Gammell. It is a camera timer (aka. intervalometer) for taking time lapse videos with my DSLR. It is a very simple circuit designed around a 555 timer IC. It has indicator LEDs, a relay to control the camera, and a potentiometer which allows me to set the photo interval between 15 seconds down to around 1 second.
Many treadmills have a way of folding up to save space, but often, as is the case with mine, the latch is very simple and not enough to keep little hands from unlatching it. The base is also very heavy, so if it were to fall on anyone, it could cause serious injury. This is how I child proofed my treadmill using a padlock and a few parts from the hardware store.
Build your own HDTV TV Antenna to cut the cord from your cable provider and save $1000 a year. This DIY antenna is very easy to build with just a few basic tools and a few supplies available from the hardware store.
After being disappointed with the current channel offerings and ever increasing price of our local cable provider, we recently decided to disconnect our cable TV service and go for over the air broadcasts as well as the many online services available now. I built this DB4 antenna, also called a bowtie antenna, to increase the rang of signals I could pick up over the basic rabbit ears antenna.
Have you ever had a cassette tape adapter that quit working all of a sudden and just keeps getting ejected from your tape deck? Here is an easy and virtually free way to fix your cassette tape adapter and get you back to listening to your iPod, iPhone, or whatever mp3 player you use it for.
This is a story of how I was able to fix a broken and long forgotten LCD monitor. This is a cheap CTX monitor, but I’ve seen this method work on other brands of monitors and I think it is a pretty common problem.
This is just a quick post about a fermentation / brewing stand I built. It’s made from materials I had laying around so it really didn’t cost anything except for a little time.
After building a mash tun and running my first batch of beer through it, I realized very quickly that trying to stir the mash with a kitchen spoon is not an easy task. There are many types of paddles available to buy online, but in the spirit of homebrew DIY and not wanting to spend much money, I decided to make my own.
Here is how I converted a cooler (ice chest) into a mash tun (MLT?). For those of you new to home brewing, a mash tun is used for converting starches in the grain to sugar which later is turned into alcohol by the yeast. You mix the crushed grain (mostly barley) with warm water, hold it at a specific temperature for a while (that’s where the insulated cooler comes in) then drain the liquid (wort) out leaving the grain behind. Then you proceed to boiling the wort while adding hops and other additions (the rest of the brewing process).
While cleaning up my computer room I ran across an old cell phone that had quit working. It got wet a few years ago on a camping trip when my tent leaked during a rain storm. I tried all the tricks like leaving it in the oven with just the pilot light to help dry it out, but even after a few weeks it still wouldn’t work so I gave up on it. Well, just for fun, I stuck the battery in and it powered right up and said “insert sim card”. I tried plugging in the sim card from my current cell, but since I’ve since changed from T-mobile to AT&T I just got a message about the phone being locked and wanted me to enter an unlock code. So, this started my journey to see if I could unlock it without spending any money.