When doing astronomy observing at night preserving night vision is critical. This requires using the minimum amount of light that makes the sky charts readable. What is this minimum level depends on how dark are your surroundings, how much time you have spent in darkness, how well your eyes adapt for night vision, what type of charts are you using, what object are you observing, and so on. My old astronomy ...

Introduction The problem was this...at Redeeming Grace Church we were meeting in a public school prior to moving in to our permanent facility. Each Sunday morning we would bring in three large percolating coffee pots to brew regular, decaf, and hot water for the mid-service break time. Each pot drew 9 amps. Because the average 120VAC power receptacle "outlet" in the USA is protected by a 20-amp breaker, thr ...

Introduction On request I have built a microcontroller-based doorbell system which is being used in an industrial environment. This is the basic function: When you push the bell-button, a horn will sound for about 10 seconds. At the same time a light, which keeps burning until someone pushes a reset-button, will be activated. The system has a lot of features: There are 2 different lamp outputs: these can be ...

This Instructable will take you on my journey to replace my old Netflix/Vudu Bluray player with a PC based entertainment station for my LCD projector. I wanted to be able to access and control Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Crackle, NBC, ABC, and the Weather Channel using only a simple remote control. Along the way, I'll give you the full details you need to replicate this project, but at the same time I'm going t ...

About a year ago I started on a project to make a temperature controlled nightlight. I was inspired by seeing these lovely LED lamps styled as mushrooms growing out of pieces of wood. Those mushrooms were made out of glass, which was somewhat beyond my skills. However I then saw some had used translucent sculpey to make mushroom nightlights on instructables. So with that discovery it seemed like it would be ...

24 Channel USB Connected LED Controller, upto 1A per Channel This device is designed to be a versatile high-current LED controller, with the ability to sink or/and source currents up to 1A per channel with dissipation of up to 2.5w per channel. The various jumpers and transistor placement allow the device to control many different types of LED configurations with LED voltages of up to 36v. Easily controls 5 ...

The goal of this project is to create a device that is capable of outputing VGA signals to a CRT monitor inorder to display figures, text and characters. Timing is a core essential in this project. If the signal is off by even 1 microsecond, the signal synchronization with the CRT display will be lost and forced to resync. This will be done using a Microchip PIC microcontroller at 4 MHz clock speed. The pro ...

MikroEleketronika demonstrates how to build a simple home alarm system that has the capability of sending SMS to a predefined cell phone number when intrusion is detected. This project is based on StartUSB for PIC board, a small development board for PIC18F2550, which is preprogrammed with an USB bootloder so that no additional programmer is required to load the firmware. The SMS portion uses a SmartGM862 B ...

All remote controlled projects from this site can be controlled with remote controls which use the RC5 protocol, like the TV-remotes from Philips. When all buttons from such a remote are in use then you could make a remote control by yourself. Your own build remote control with only one button or maybe you want to build a remote with more then hundred buttons. It is possible, however, you need the PIC Basic ...

This project is an update to the original RGB LED PWM Driver.  The new version allows the use of either 5mm LEDs or the square bodied Superflux / Piranah style LEDs.  The circuit now uses bipolar transistors rather than MOSFETs which make it more suitable for novice constructors and for the first time this project is available as a kit with all parts required to assemble the PCB including the superflux LEDs ...