One of the most simple and cost effective ways to liven up your landscaping is through subtle illumination. Low voltage lighting is simple to install and offers many benefits including ambiance, safety and security. They can be used to illuminate a walkway or to lighten up your home's street address at night. Today's manufacturers are making low-voltage lighting products geared for the do-it-yourselfer, which makes purchasing and installation easier. These low-voltage kits come with a transfo...
By trial and error, I have found a good way to remove the door panel from a 2002 Ford Explorer (and other similar years).
The Funny Thing About Dying - A Story of Coping With Loss
Centerpoint Energy gives you electrical safety tips during Hurricane Season!
Normally the idea of messing with an electrical outlet makes me squirm, but Apartment Therapy's quick fix for a loose wall outlet means skipping out on a costly electrician bill. Not only is a wiggly wall outlet unsightly, but it can also be a fire hazard. The solution is simple:
What do these egg-carton lamps by American designer Victor Vetterlein have in common with Frankenstein's monster? More than you'd think! Both are green. Both have bolted necks. And both are assembled from materials most would be happy to let decompose.
Yes, plasma. The fourth state of matter. What's going on? The sparks result from an electrical discharge between the sides of the grape. If the flashes of light are not enough evidence, enjoy the 120Hz buzzing.
A pegboard for storage is an essential item in a workshop. Danny Lipford shows you how to install a pegboard in a workshop in this video tutorial.
There is nothing more annoying than a greedy roommate. It's absolutely infuriating to wake up and find the cookies your mother just made for you gone without a trace. Your favorite drink is empty and the homemade meal you worked so hard on the night before is nowhere to be found. This irked me so much that I made this shocking cookie jar. When a cookie burglar touches the side and the lid of the jar simultaneously, a small electric shock stops them in their tracks.
Welcome to Microwave Energy—the next part of my Making Electromagnetic Weapons series. For the Electromagnetic Pulse Generator, check out the last three articles (One, Two and Three).
Mike received a tiny medical pill-camera from a relative who had recently undergone treatment. The most surprising part apart from the utter grossness is that the camera transmits electrical signals straight through the human body to skin electrodes with no radio at all! Check out the video to see the camera and Mike's impressive mastery of the oscilloscope.
In this article, I'll show you how to create a simple yet accurate demonstration of the "rising ionized gas" principle. In other words, a transformer, two metal prongs and lots of evil laughter. Remember those large "towers" in the background of Frankenstein movies with a "lightning bolt" rising upwards every few seconds? That's called a Jacob's Ladder; one of the coolest awe-inspiring demonstrations of high voltage. Here's a video of the final product: Materials and Tools
These firework went off at Dogwood Dell in Richmond, VA. We watched them from Byrd Park, which is right beside the Dell. I though the lines of the explosion looked like lightning bolts or electrical charge off.
One of the creepiest musical instruments ever is undoubtedly the theremin, a device originating from the early 20s that emits eerie sounds with a just a wave of the hand. If you've seen the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know what I mean—freakishly creepy. Playing the theremin can be off-putting for some, since it's a relatively pricy gizmo, but a new geek gadget called the EaTheremin aims to make all of us professional, dinnertime theremists.
Set Lighting Technician's Handbook, Third Edition: Film Lighting Equipment, Practice, and Electrical Distribution by Harry Box
Everyone wants to know the optimal amount of time and energy for exercise. While estimates vary, Fit Relief helps you make maximize your workouts, whether you have 10 minutes or two hours.
Most new stereos come with an auxiliary port built in, but if you drive an older car, you're usually stuck with the radio or CD player, and we all know both of those options suck.
One of the biggest downsides to having so many gadgets is that you never seem to have enough outlets to power them all. Most of us have a power strip or two to solve this problem, but Instructables user dlewisa wanted something a little nicer looking, so he built this DIY desktop power outlet. For the housing, dlewisa put together a small wooden box using a nail gun and wood glue. He used a sander to round off the corners, then filled in the gaps with wood filler and painted it. You could als...
Remember the Power Pwn, the clever little hacking tool disguised as a power strip? It's great in theory, but with a $1,295 price tag, it definitely doesn't fit into most people's budgets.
This article will show you how to make a proportionally correct 1/187 (about) size Hubble Space Telescope. I tried to add as many details as possible, but it was hard at such a small size. It was really easy, but it did take a while to make.
Rockets are lots of fun when you are launching them. However, finding them can be an arduous if not maddening task. Fancy space rockets have lots of tracking equipment to make touchdowns as simple as pie. Today, we look at embedding LEDs into your hobby rocket for easy night flight fun!
Science-fiction writer Jules Verne predicted many scientific breakthroughs, including the moon landing, tasers, and nuclear submarines. In his 1874 book The Mysterious Island, Verne writes:
In this series on weaponized lasers, I'll be exploring the function, operation, strength and building instructions for three basic laser weapons; CO2, Diode, and Flashlamp. These laser types are just a few of many, selected because of their simplicity and basic construction (depending on your experience).
Electrical engineer Greg Leyh and company are currently creating a pair of 118-foot Tesla coils! The largest coil built to date is an 18-story tower constructed back in 1903 by Tesla himself, but Leyh has decided to not only recreate the huge coil, but double it in size. The project goes by the name of "Lightning on Demand" and is currently being constructed on an 81-acre plot in the Nevada desert. Once it's finished, the pair of coils will output 10 million volt acres 100 yards long—the size...
Nikola Tesla In my opinion, one of the most neglected inventors of all time. The names Edison and Marconi come to mind as familiar, but Tesla? Most think of a car. Few know that Tesla is responsible for alternating current, florescent lights, radar, remote control, generators that preform efficiently, the spark plug, and many others. The U.S Supreme Court declared in 1943 that Tesla, not Marconi, was the true inventor of the radio.
Microsoft has had a pretty bad wrap with their Xbox 360 gaming console. Right from the start, the console has suffered a multitude of different hardware failures and design flaws. These problems cause the parts to get too hot and become faulty. I'm sure everyone who's had an Xbox 360 has gotten at least one Red Ring of Death or E74 error.
As a show of support for the global effort in saving the earth RI Chemical Corporation encourages it's employees to join the upcoming event this saturday March 26.
Engineer-turned-artist Jim Campbell's recent installation "Scattered Light" converts New York City's Madison Square Park into a ghostly world of light bulb pixels. Campbell dangled 2,000 floating LED light bulbs programmed to display shadowy human silhouettes passing by.
As Halloween is creeping closer, it's just about time for the last-ditch, cheap and easy costumes. But cheap and easy doesn't necessarily have to mean shoddy. Jason Lau's Stormtrooper helmet is clever, resourceful and possesses an endearing DIY spirit that store bought costumes seriously lack.
PopSci breaks down how basic functions of R/C work. Once you've mastered it, the sky is the limit. You can remote control anything. Well, almost anything.
What do you get when you mix water-filled bowls with electrical wiring and human hands? The answer may shock you. Artists Ion Furjanic & Isaac Souweine write, "Electric Tea 1.0 is the first in a series of works that put sound where it doesn't belong. [It] uses porcelain bowls, metal orbs, speaker wire, water, and the conductive power of the human body to create a water based musical controller."
Yep, just what the headline says. Believe it or not, NTT DoCoMo has showed off "a set of prototype in-ear headphones that can detect and measures changes in the body's electrical state when your eyes move." Forget voice activation, eye gesture recognition is the thing of the future. Image.
Weekend fun. Foolproof. An ingenious melange of idiocy, electrical currents, arts and crafts.
The Stun-Gun In this article, I'll show you how to make a small, weaponized highlighter. Before I get into how to built this device, let me warn you. This device is harmful! When used, it can cause burns and/or serious muscle spasms. The voltage is potentially deadly! DO NOT attempt to build this device unless you are experienced with safety, electronics, soldering, and understand circuit schematics.
Computer viruses are terrifying. They are undetectable, dangerous, and operate constantly right under your nose. For the average computer user, there are only a few repair options. You could buy expensive antivirus software that causes more problems than it fixes, you can wipe your hard drive clean and lose all of your important data, or if all else fails—just switch to Linux.
In this article, I'll be showing you how to make a cool visual representation of sound using an old cathode ray tube (CRT) television, a stereo, and a sound source. You'll also need a pair of wire cutters, and a few screwdrivers. To properly understand this project, it's a good idea to learn a little bit about how CRT TVs work. Check out this article on how they work.
Nikola Tesla. He was the man behind some of the greatest inventions of all time, including radio and alternating current. But perhaps his most visually fascinating invention is the Tesla coil. While maintaining a low current, it can produce dangerous high frequencies and voltages that can well exceed 1,000,000 volts, discharging it in the form of electrical arcs very similar to lightning.
Beauty is a fine line between art and science for Pe Lang, a Swiss sculptor living and working in both Berlin and Zurich. The autodidact artist specializes in graceful, hand-built kinetic sculptures made of magnetic, electrical and mechanical devices, all of which are elegant and completely mesmerizing. "Positioning Systems - Falling Objects" is one of his newest contraptions, which feels like a mix of home waterfall fountains, mechanical metronomes and a busy manufacturing plant.
The Telegraph reports that a team of researchers lead by Dr. Sang-Woo Kim of the Institute of Nanotechnology at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul have developed a method for converting the energy from sound into electricity. They've applied the research to the charging of mobile phones, and while you don't have to yell with all the emotion and fear exhibited above by Drew Barrymore in Scream, it sounds like the more energy the better. Dr. Sang-Woo Kim says:
Tired of getting calluses from incessantly strumming along to 'No Woman No Cry'? Just hook up to the brain-music system and use your brain power to play a tune instead. I'm not talking—humming along in your head. The machine, created by composer and computer-music specialist Eduardo Miranda of the University of Plymouth, UK, is composed of electrodes taped directly onto your skull that pick up tiny electrical impulses from neurons in your brain and translates them into musical rhythms on a co...
